The saints everlasting rest

Doubtless neither court, nor country, towns or cities, shops or fields, treasuries, libraries, solitariness, society, studies, or pulpits, can afford any such thing as this rest. If you could enquire of the dead of all generations, or if you could ask the living through all dominions, they would all tell you, here is no rest; and all mankind may say, All our days are sorrow, and our labour is grief, and our hearts take no rest, Eccles. ii. 23.

If other men's experience move you not, do but take a view of your own: can you remember the estate that did fully satisfy you? Or if you could, will it prove a lasting state? For my own part, I have run through several states of life, and though I never had the necessities which might occasion discontent. yet did I never find a settlement for my soul; and I believe we may all say of our rest, as Paul of our hopes, If it were in this life only, we were of all men most miserable. If then either scripture, or reason, or the ⟨p. 272⟩experience of ourselves, and all the world will satisfy us, we may see there is no resting here. And yet how guilty are the generality of us of this sin! How many halts and stops do we make, before we will make the Lord our rest! How must GOD even drive us, and fire us out of every condition, lest we should sit down and rest there! If he give us prosperity, riches, or honour, we do in our hearts dance before them, as the Israelites before their calf, and say, Th•se are thy gods, and conclude it is good being here. If he embitter all these to us by crosses, how do we strive to have the cross removed, and are restless till our condition be sweetened to us, that we may sit down again and rest where we were? If the Lord, seeing our perverseness, shall now proceed in the cure, and take the creature quite away, then how do we labour, and care, and cry, and pray, that GOD would restore it, that we may make it our rest again! And while we are deprived of its enjoyment, and have not our former idol, yet rather than come to GOD, we delight ourselves in our hopes of recovering our former state; and as long as there is the least likelihood of obtaining it, we make those very hopes our rest: if the poor by labouring all their days, have but hopes of a fuller estate when they are old (though an hundred to one they die before they have obtained it) yet do they rest themselves on those expectations. Or if GOD doth take away both present enjoyments, and all hopes of recovering them, how do we search about from creature to creature, to find out something to supply the room, and to settle upon instead thereof! Yea, if we can find no supply, but are sure we shall live in poverty, in sickness, in disgrace, while we are on earth, yet will we rather settle in this misery, and make a rest of a wretched being, than we will leave all and come to GOD.