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The saints everlasting rest
The saints everlasting rest: or, A treatise of the blessed state of the saints in their enjoyment of God in glory: extracted from the works of Mr. Richard Baxter, by John Wesley, M.A. late fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford.
Philadelphia: printed by Prichard & Hall, 1790
Part 3 › Chapter 8: Some Advantages and Helps, for raising the Soul by Meditation.
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.
When thou walkest forth in the evening, look upon the stars, in what number they bespangle the firmament: if in the day time, look up to the glorious sun; view the wide-expanded heavens, and say to thyself, what glory is in the least of yonder stars! What a vast, what a resplendent body hath yonder moon, and every planet! What an inconceivable glory hath the sun! Why, all this is nothing to the glory of heaven. Yonder sun must there be laid aside as useless; for it would not be seen for the brightness of GOD. I shall live above all yonder glory: yonder ⟨p. 361⟩sun is but darkness to the lustre of my Father's house; I shall be as glorious as that sun myself.
So think of the rest of the creatures. This whole earth is but my Father's footstool; this thunder is nothing to his dreadful voice; these winds are nothing to the breath of his mouth: so much wisdom and power as appear in these; so much, and far more greatness, and goodness, and delight, shall I enjoy in the actual fruition of GOD. Surely, if the rain which rains, and the sun which shines on the just and unjust, be so wonderful, the sun then which must shine on none but saints and angels, must needs be wonderful and ravishing in glory.
6. Compare the things which thou shalt enjoy above, with the excellency of those admirable works of Providence, which GOD doth exercise in the church, and in the world. What glorious things hath the LORD wrought! And yet we shall see more glorious than these. Would it not be an astonishing sight, to see the sea stand […] a wall on the right hand, and on the left, and the people of Israel pass safely through, and Pharaoh and his people swallowed up? If we had seen the rock to gush forth streams, or manna or quails rained down from heaven, or the earth open and swallow up the wicked; would not all these have been wondrous, glorious sights? But we shall see far greater things than these. And as our sights shall be more wonderful, so also they shall be more sweet: there shall be no blood or wrath intermingled; we shall not then cry out as David, who shall stand before this holy Lord God? Would it not have been an astonishing sight to have seen the sun stand still in the firmament? Why, we shall see when there shall be no sun to shine at all; we shall behold for-ever a sun of more incomparable brightness. Were it not a brave life, if we might still live among wonders and miracles; and