The saints everlasting rest, or, A treatise of the blessed state of the saints in their enjoyment of God in glory wherein is shewed its excellency and certainty, the misery of those that lose it, the way to attain it, and assurance of it, and how to live in the continual delightful forecasts of it and now published by Richard Baxter ...

SECT. V.* 1.1

5. MOreover, it will much increase the torment of the dam∣ned▪ in that their Memories will be as large and strong as their Understandings and Affections; which will cause those vio∣lent Passions to be still working: 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 dye, and that loss being forgotten, would little trouble them. But as they cannot lay by their life and beeing, though then they would account an∣nihilation a singular mercy; so neither can they lay aside any part of that beeing: 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 dolours of his absence. Therefore never think, that when I say the hardness of their hearts, and their blindness, dulness, and forgetfulness shall be removed, that therefore they are more holy or more happy then before: No, but Morally more vile, and hereby far more miserable. O how many hundred times did God by his Messengers here call upon them, Sinners, consider whether you are going: Do but make a stand a while, and think where your way will end; what is the offered Glory that you so carelesly reject? will not this be bitter∣ness in the end?

And yet these men would never be brought to consider. But in the later days (saith the Lord) they shall perfectly consider it;* 1.2 when they are ensnared in the work of their own hands; when God hath Arrested them, and Judgment is past upon them, and Vengeance is poured out upon them to the full, then they cannot chuse but consider it, whether they will or no. Now they have no leasure to consider, nor any room in their Memories for the things of another life: Ah, but then they shall have leasure enough, they shall be where they have nothing else to do but consider it; their Memories shall have no other imployment to hinder them; it shall even be engraven upon the Tables of their Hearts.* 1.3 God would have had the Doctrine of their eternal State to have been written on the posts of their doors, on their houses, on their hands, and on their hearts; He would have had them minde it, and mention it, as they rise and lye down, as they sit at home, and as they walk abroad, that so it might have gone well with them at their latter end: 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.

Among others, I will briefly lay down here some of those Con∣siderations which will thus feed the anguish of these damned wretches.

Notes

• * 1.1

  §. 5.
• * 1.2

  Jer 23 20. Psal. 9.16.
• * 1.3

  Deut. 6 9.