Human nature in its fourfold state ... In several practical discourses

Consider, I pray you, (1.) How uneasy it is to lie one whole night or a soft bed, in perfect health, when one very fain would have sleep, but cannot get it; sleep being departed from him How often will one in that case wish for rest! How full of tossings to and fro! But ah! how dreadful must it then be to lie in sorrow, wrapped up in scorching flames through long eternity, in ⟨p. 344⟩that place where they have no rest day nor night! (2.) How terrib•• would it be to live under violent pains of the colic or gravel, for forty or sixty years together, without any intermission! Yet that is but a very small thing in comparison of eternal separation from God, the worm that never d•e•, and the fire that is never quenched. (3.) Eternity is an awful thought; O long, long, endless eternity! But will not every moment, in eternity of woe, seem a month, and every hour a year, in that most wretched and desperate condition? Hence ever and ever, as it were a double eternity. The sick man in the night, tossing to and fro on his bed, says, it will never be day, complains that his pain ever continues, never, never abates. Are these petty time-eternities, which men form to themselves, in their own imaginations, so very grievous? Alas! then how grievous, how utterly unsupportable must real eternity of woe, and all manner of miseries be! LASTLY, There will be space enough there, to reflect on all the ills of one's heart and life, which one cannot get time to think of now; and to see that all that was said of the impenitent sinner's hazard, was true, and that the half was not told. There will be space enough in eternity to think on delayed repentance, to rue one's follies, when it is too late; and in a state past remedy, to speak forth their fruitless wishes: O that I had never been born! That the womb had been my grave, and I had never seen the sun! O that I had taken warning in time, and fled from his wrath, while the door of mercy was standing open to me! O that I had never heard the gospel, that I had lived in some corner of the world, where a Saviour and the great salvation were not once named! But all in vain. What is done cannot be undone; the opportunity is lost, and can never be retrieved; time is gone, and cannot be recalled. Wherefore improve time, while you have it, and do not wilfully ruin yourselves, by stopping your ear to the gospel-call.