The Saint's Everlasting Rest: A Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in Their Enjoyment of God in HeavenBaxter, Richard
Religion
The Saint's Everlasting Rest: A Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in Their Enjoyment of God in Heaven
Baxter, Richard
Devotional literature
§ 11. (4.) Then will their affections likewise be more lively, and no
longer stupified. A hard heart now makes heaven and hell seem but
trifles. We have shewed them everlasting glory and misery, and they are
as men asleep; our words are as stones cast against a wall, which fly
back in our faces: we talk of terrible things, but it is to dead men; we
search their wounds, but they never feel us; we speak to rocks, rather
than to men; the earth will as soon tremble as they. But when these dead
souls are revived, what passionate sensibility! what working affections!
what pangs of horror! what depth of sorrow will there then be! How
violently will they fly in their own faces! How will they rage against
their former madness! The lamentations of the most affectionate wife for
the loss of her husband, or of the tenderest mother for the loss of her
children, will be nothing to theirs for the loss of heaven. O the
self-accusing and self-tormenting fury of those forlorn creatures! How
will they even tear their own hearts, and be God's executioners upon
themselves! As themselves were the only meritorious cause of their
sufferings, so themselves will be the chief executioners. Even Satan, as
he was not so great a cause of their sinning as themselves, he will not
be so great an instrument of their torment. How happy would they think
themselves then, if they were turned into rocks, or any thing that had
neither passion nor sense! How happy, if they could then feel, as
lightly as they were wont to hear! if they could sleep out the time of
execution, as they did the time of the sermons, that warned them of it!
But their stupidity is gone; it will not be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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