Part

I now proceed to the third thing proposed: to remove the pleas and excuses for immoderate grief. It is natural to people, yes to good people, to justify their excesses, or at least minimize them, by pleading for their passions, as if they lacked not cause and reason enough to excuse them. If these be fully answered and the soul once convicted and left without an apology for its sin, it is then in a fair way for its cure — which is the last thing designed in this treatise.

My present work therefore is to satisfy those objections and answer those reasons commonly pleaded in this case to justify excessive grief for lost relations. And though I shall carry it in that line of relation to which the text directs, it is equally applicable to all others.