January 2, 2014

Samuel Willard (1640–1707) on the Conscience of the Damned Remembering the Day of Grace

(1.) The Soul shall be tormented with a never dying worm. And this contains in it all the spiritual plagues which shall then seize upon it; and is mainly contained in those terrible agonies, and horrors of conscience which will then fill the soul. Some sinners, and at some times, have terrible gripings of this in this world: though for the most part sinners now rock their consciences asleep, or get them benummed or seared: and yet this worm is all the while insensibly, though continually growing out of the filth and corruption which they lie wallowing in: but then it shall be quick and active, and fearfully torment them; when it shall look back, and put them in remembrance of all the sins that ever they committed, with all the awful aggravations of them: shall remind them of all the mercy and goodness of God which they abused; of a day of grace they once enjoyed; of all the calls, and counsels, and warnings that God had been giving them; of all the patience of God, and strivings of his Holy Spirit, and fair probabilities they were in of Salvation; of all the offers of grace which they despised, and inward motions which they quenched; and so of the righteousness of their own condemnation: and then look forward, and see nothing before it, but those fearful miseries which it suffers, and from whence it must never expect release: what horrors, what despair, must needs be hereby produced? The girds, and stings, and reverberations of such a conscience must needs be a torment inexpressible.
Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity in Two Hundred and Fifty Expository Lectures on the Assemby's Shorter Catechism (Boston in New-England: Printed by B. Green and S. Kneeland for B. Eliot and D. Henchmand, and Sold at their Shops, 1726), 240–241. See also the first point under Use 1 on p. 249. Edward Pearse has similar language concerning "fair probabilities of salvation."

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