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SERM.

XVII.

an Uneafinefs now to have our Defires difappointed or delayed, what must it be in a feparate State, where probably there must be a continual Longing without Power of Enjoyment. Let our fpiritual Part therefore have always our chief and principal Care : Since it is this muft endure, when the Body is gone, and in this only we must live and fubfift, till the Resurrection fhall restore us our Bodies again.

Thus far my present Text conducts me : The positive State which we shall hereafter be in, with the Rewards and Punishments that fhall be affigned us at laft, fhall be the Subject of another Discourse.

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SER

SERMON XVIII.

No perfect Rewards or Punishments before the Day of Judgment.

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HEBR. xi. 39, 40.

These all having obtained a good Report through Faith, received not the Promife: God having provided fome better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

TH

XVIII.

HAT the Soul exifts in a separate S ER M. State, whilst parted from the Body, and whilst the Body lies in a State of Infenfibility, mouldering, and rotting, and diffolving in the Grave; was the Subject intended, and, I hope, also proved, in my last Discourse. And that the fame Part of us, whilft thus feparate, lives and thinks, and remembers and reflects, follows of Course from the fame Arguments that prove it to exist; it being of

the

XVIII.

SER M. the Effence of Spirits, fo long as they exist, to perform fuch Operations.

But now to what Degree this Life is extended; what Sort of Happiness or Mifery it is, that Souls divested of their Bodies, are in; or lastly where they are kept or remain, till they shall be reunited to their Bodies again; are Questions that have not been spoken to yet, but to which the Order of the Subject I am upon, now properly leads me.

And here (if you are content to be determined by the Doctors of the Church of Rome) all these Questions fhall be peremptorily anfwered and determined for you foon. For fay but where the Righteous fhall be received, or the Wicked fhall be sent after the Judgment of the last great Day; and there. they will tell you their Souls are beforehand, and there fhall continue till that Day comes. Say again what Happiness and Felicity shall then be for ever affigned to the one, and what Miseries and Torments the other fhall then

be eternally doomed to; and the very fame they will tell you again they enjoy or suffer in the Time intervening. In fhort the Account which the Romanists give, is that the Souls of the good are already in Heaven, and that the Souls of the wicked are already in Hell.

XVIII.

Hell. Those indeed who depart this Life in SERM. a middle state, charged only with some light Offences, which they nominate venial, i. e. pardonable Sins, or elfe obnoxious to fome temporal Penalty for groffer Sins, which yet have been forgiven them by the Power of the Church, as to their eternal Guilt or Pain; Thefe, I fay, they remit for a certain Time to be purified in a middle Place invented by themselves, and well-known by the Name of Purgatory: Where they doom them to Torments not inferior to thofe of the Damned except in Duration, and where they confine them till freed and delivered by the Prayers of the Church. But even these, as soon as delivered, they immediately mount to the highest Heavens: To thofe very Heavens where they send the Souls of thofe who depart without any need of Purgation at all; and where both together (those I mean who paffed through Purgatory, and those who came the eafier Way) enjoy the utmost Degree of Blifs in the Prefence of God, that mere Souls without their Bodies are capable of: There being no Difference, as they represent, between the State they are in at prefent, and what they shall be in after the Day of folemn Judg

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SERM. Judgment, than what the Re-union of their Bodies to their Souls fhall then occafion.

XVIII.

This, though a fhort, is as fair and as plain, a Representation of what the Church of Rome advances with Relation to the Subject now before us, as I can poffibly give you. What End they ferve by it, or what other peculiar Doctrine of theirs it tends to support, I fhall take Occafion to mention in the Sequel. But first I must tell you that this is a Notion which the Scriptures and Primitive Fathers of the Church know nothing of: It being the constant Doctrine both of one and the other, that neither Good nor Bad are perfectly happy or miserable at prefent; neither of them now in the Place or State they shall be in hereafter; but that the Place and Condition of each of them, after the Resurrection and Day of Judgment shall be past, will be very different from what it was, or is, or fhall be at any time before.

So that to discourse fatisfactorily and regularly upon the State of departed or feparate Souls, you fee, I have a double Task to perform; viz. firft to remove the falfe Notions concerning the State, which the Mifreprefentations of the Church of Rome first introduced; but which are still retained by many

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who

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