A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

AFFLICTED CONSCIENCES. 343of God a woful spiritual dereliction was a fit introductionand immediate preparative to the effusion of such a suddentorrent of strange exultations and ravishment of spirit upontheir sad and heavy hearts. Conceive the point ihen thus :The Lord sometimes even in tenderness and love to hisown dear children, whom he designs for extraordinarysufferings, may purposely possess them with such a paradiseof divine pleasures as a counter-comfort to the extremity oftheir pains; that, besides their own private refreshing andsupport, their courageous insensibility and victorious patitncethereupon may bring a great deal of terror to theirtormentors, glory to their merciful Master, credit unto thecause, and confusion to the enemies of grace. And thatthere may be an addition of more heart and life to suchjoyful elevations of spirit, and that he may make the excellencyof that spiritual joy proportionable to the exquisitenessof their tortures and trouble, he may in his unsearchablewisdom make way thereunto by a spiritual desertion, as hedid in the fore-named glorious martyr, hobert Glover. Forwant of the sense of the comforts of godliness for a season,doth make our souls a thousand times more sensible of theirsweetness upon their reinfusion.Eighthly. Thus may the Lord sometimes deal with hisbest and dearest children, even by withdrawing the lightof his countenance, leave them for a while to these inwardconflicts and confusions of spirit, that thereby they may befitted and informed with a holy experimental skill to speakfeelingly and fully to the hearts of their Christian brethren,who may afterwards be tempted and troubled as they havebeen. For God is wont at all times in his church, so graciousis he, purposely to raise up and single out some specialmen, whom he instructs and enables in the school of spiritualexperience and afflictions of soul, with extraordinarydexterity and art to comfort and recover other mourners inZion, in their distresses of conscience, stronger temptations,spiritual desertions, decays of grace, relapses, eclipsesof God's face and favour, want of former comfortable feelings;in case of horrible thoughts and hideous injections,darkness of their own spirits, and such other soul vexations.And such a blessed physician, who is able to speak experimentallyto a dejected sorrowful heart, out of practice andsense in his own soul, is far more worth, both for a truesearch and discovery, and sound recovery and cure of awounded conscience, than a hundred mere speculativedivines. Such a one is that one of a thousand spoken of byJob, who can wisely and seasonably declare unto his soulsickpatient the secret tracks and hidden depths of God's