Use 2

USE II.

This tells us how sore a judgment of God it is upon a degenerate people, when he takes such away from them. Well might that King let fall such a doleful lamentation as he did, over the bed of a dying Prophet (2 Kings 13:14): My Father! my Father! the chariots of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. The death of pious ministers, in a time of sore calamity, when God is contending with his people in grievous judgments, carries a great deal of the revelation of God's displeasure in it, and is therefore an ill omen to such a people, and if it be not laid to heart, it bodes so much the more awfully. Read how the Prophet comments upon it (Isaiah 57:1, 2): these are they who are to put into the breach and make it up; and if they fall there, it says, that God will be held back no longer by their prayers, but the gap shall stand open, that mischiefs and miseries may come in as a flood. What shall we then say of the late awful stroke of God's hand, in the decease of that aged and faithful servant of Christ, the renowned Eliot? He died late enough for himself, but too soon for us; whose faith and prayers were singularly serviceable for the interest of this poor people; and eminently observable it is, that God so ordered it in his Providence that lest he should go away unlamented, the unhappy tidings of our sore loss and calamity at Falmouth, were brought the very day of his incineration, to put us into mourning, and add solemnity to his obsequies; and I believe New England has not many such gap-men to lose. I could not but, upon so [illegible] an occasion, drop this interest tear upon his tombstone.