Encouragement

If Satan fume and roar against you, whether it be against your bodies by persecution, or inward in your conscience by a spiritual battle, do not be discouraged, as though you were less acceptable in God’s presence, or that Satan might at any time prevail against you. No! Your temptations and storms that arise so suddenly argue and witness that the seed that is sown has fallen on good ground, has begun to take root, and shall, by God’s grace, bring forth fruit abundantly in due season and convenient time. That is what Satan fears; and therefore thus he rages (and shall rage) against you, thinking that if he can repulse you now suddenly in the beginning, that then you will be at all times an easy prey, never able to resist his assaults. But as my hope is good, so shall my prayer be, that you may be so strengthened, that the world and Satan himself may understand and perceive, that God fights your battle.

Whenever you are occupied in the matter of your salvation, setting aside all curious speculations of God’s unsearchable majesty, all cogitations of works, of traditions, of philosophy, indeed and of God’s law too, run straight to the manger, and embrace this infant, and the Virgin’s little babe in your arms, and behold him as he was born, sucking, growing up, conversant among men, teaching, dying, rising again, ascending up above all the heavens, and having power above all things. By this means you will be able to shake off all terrors and errors, like as the sun drives away the clouds.

Those that have had a sweet communion with God, when they have lost it, do count every day ten thousand till they have recovered it again; and when Christ leaves his spouse, he forsakes her not altogether, but leaves something on the heart that makes her to long after him. He absents himself that he may enlarge the desires of the soul, and after the soul has him again, it will not let him go. He comes for our good, and leaves us for our good. We should therefore judge rightly of our estates, and not think we are forsaken of God when we are in a desertion.