N00747:146
Spiritual desertions discovered and remedied. Being the substance of divers sermons preached for the…
Spiritual desertions discovered and remedied. Being the substance of divers sermons preached for the help of dark souls, labouring under divine withdrawings. / By Samuel Willard, teacher of a church in Boston. ; [Four lines from Isaiah]
printed by B. Green for Michael Perry and Benjamin Eliot, 1699
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
1. It discourageth him from all use of means: Those very Duties and Ordinances, which were heretofore his delight, are now his terror, and he is afraid of them. What should he pray ⟨p. 68⟩for? God will not hear him: Why should he read the word? he reads nothing there but his own doom, and every thing in it speaks evil against him: Why should he go to the House of God, to attend upon the Ordinances there dispensed? he shall but increase his guilt, and lay in the more against himself, when every Prayer and Sermon will rise up […] judgment to condemn him: he […] not approach to the Lords Table, lest he should there a new Seal up his own Damnation.
1. It discourageth him from all use of means: Those very Duties and Ordinances, which were heretofore his delight, are now his terrour, and he is afraid of them. What should he pray ⟨p. 68⟩for? God will not hear him: Why should he read the word? he reads nothing there but his own doom, and every thing in it speaks evil against him: Why should he go to the House of God, to attend upon the Ordinances there dispensed? he shall but encrease his guilt, and lay in the more against himself, when every Prayer and Sermon will rise up 〈…〉 judgment to condemn him: he 〈…〉 not approach to the Lords Table, lest he should there a new Seal up his own Damnation.
2. It makes him to put away all counsel and comfort, and snatch at all terrors and affrightments. David saith in, Psal. 77.2. In the day of my trouble, my soul refused to be comforted. Let Godly friends apply to him the encouragements of the Gospel, and lay open before him the mercy and pity of God, he puts it away from him, and concludes that this doth not belong to him: the promises are none of his, but the threatenings, and he reads his own doom in them.