The saints everlasting rest

5. Moreover, it will much increase the torment of the damned, that their memories will be as large and strong as their understandings and affections. Were their loss never so great, and their sense of it never so passionate, yet if they could but lose the use of their memory, those passions would die, and that loss, being forgotten, would little trouble them. But as they cannot lay by their life and being, so neither can they lay aside any part of that being. Understanding, conscience, affections, memory, must all live to torment them, which should have helped to their happiness. And as by these they should have fed upon the love of GOD, and drawn forth perpetually the joys of his presence; so by these must they now feed upon the wrath of GOD, and draw forth continually the pains of his absence.

And yet these men would never be brought to consider; but in the latter days (saith the LORD) they shall perfectly consider it: when they are ensnared in the work of their own hands: when GOD hath arrested them, and judgment is passed upon them, and vengeance is poured out upon them to the full, then they cannot choose but consider it whether they will or no. Now they have no leisure to consider, nor any room in their memories for the things of another life. But then they shall have leisure enough, they shall be where they have nothing else to do; their memories shall have no other employment, it shall be engraven upon the tables of their hearts. GOD would have had the doctrine of their eternal state to have been ⟨p. 97⟩written on the posts of their doors, on their houses, on their hands, and on their hearts: and seeing they rejected this counsel of the LORD, therefore shall it be written always before them in the place of their thraldom, that which way soever they look, they may still behold it.