COMPILER'S PREFACE. upon your soul were in reading his invaluable book of the Saints' Everlasting Rest." In the life of the Rev. Matthew Henry, we have the following character given us of Robert Warburton, Esq. of Grange, the son of the eminently religious Judge Warburton, and the father of Mr. MatthewHenry's second wife. " He was a - gentleman that greatly affected retirement and privacy, especially in the latter part of his life ; the Bible, and Mr. Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest, used to lie dailybefore him on the table in his parlor ; he spent the greatest part of his time in reading and prayer." In the life of that honorable and most religious knight, Sir Nathaniel Barnardiston, we are told that " he was constant in secret prayer and reading the Scriptures; afterward he read other choice authors; but not long before his death he took a singular delight to read Mr. Baxter's Saints' EverlastingRest, and preparations thereunto ; which was esteemed a gracious event of Divine Providence, sending it as a guide to bring him more speedily and directly to that rest." Besides persons of eminence, to whom this book has been precious and profitable, we have an instance, in the Rev. James Janeway's Token for Children, of a little boy, whose piety was so discovered and promoted by reading it, as the most delightful book to him, next the Bible, that the thoughts of everlasting rest seemed, even while he continued in health, to swallow up all other thoughts; and he lived in a constant preparation for it, and looked more like one that was ripe for glory, than an inhabitant of this lower world. And when he was in the sickness of which he died before he was twelve years old, he said, "I pray, let me have Mr. Baxter's book, that I may read a little more of eternity, before I go into it." Nor is it less observable, that Mr. Baxter himself, taking notice, in a paper found in'his study after his death, what numbers of persons were converted by reading his Call to the Unconverted, accounts of which he had received by letter every week, expressly adds, "This little book, the Call to the Unconverted, God hath blessed with unex- pected success, beyond all that I have written, except the Saints' Rest." With an evident reference to this book, and even during the life of the author, the pious Mr. Flavel affectionately says, " Mr. Baxter is almost in heaven living in the daily views and cheerful expectation of the saints' everlasting rest with God ; and is left for a little while among us, as a great example of the life of faith." And Mr. Baxter himself says, in his preface to his Treatise of Self -Denial, " I must say, that, of all the books which I have written, I peruse none so often for the use of my own soul in its daily work, as my Life of Faith, this of Self- Denial, and the last part of the Saints' Rest." On the whole, it is not
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