Throughout, his was a moderating influence in politics, the Church, and theology.  His best known pastorate, one of extraordinary success, was at Kidderminster, between his twenty-sixth and forty-fifth years, and there, in an interlude of ill-health of more than customary severity—­for all his life he was ailing—­he wrote, anticipatory of death, “The Saints Everlasting Rest.”  The book, which was dedicated to his “dearly beloved friends the inhabitants of the Borrough and Forreign of Kederminster,” was published in 1650 and had an immediate and almost unparallelled success.  Twenty thousand copies were sold in the year after publication, and various editions are now in circulation.  The saintliness of this broad-minded divine’s character emerges unsullied from an age of contentious bigotry.

I.—­THE NATURE OF REST

    “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.” 
      —­Heb. iv, 9.

It was not only our interest in God and actual fruition of Him which was lost in Adam’s covenant-breaking fall, but all spiritual knowledge of Him, and true disposition towards such a felicity.  Man hath now a heart too suitable to his low estate—­a low state, and a low spirit.  And when the Son of God comes with tenders of a spiritual and eternal happiness and glory, He finds not faith in man to believe it; but, as the poor man would not believe that any one man had such a sum as a hundred pounds—­it was so far above what he possessed—­so no man will hardly now believe that there is such a happiness as once he had, much less as Christ hath now procured.

The Apostle bestows most of his epistle against this distemper, and clearly and largely proves that the rest of Sabbaths and Canaan should teach men to look for further rest, which indeed is their happiness.  What more welcome to men under personal afflictions, tiring duty, successions of sufferings, than rest?  What more welcome news to men under public calamities, unpleasing employment, plundering losses, sad tidings, than this of rest?

Now let us see what this rest is.  Though the sense of the text includes in the word “rest” all that ease and safety which a soul hath with Christ in this life—­the rest of grace—­yet because it chiefly intends the rest of eternal glory I shall confine my discourse to this last.

Rest is the end and perfection of motion.  The saints’ rest, here in question, is the most happy estate of a Christian having obtained the end of his course.

May we show what this rest containeth.  Alas! how little know I of that whereof I am about to speak.  Shall I speak before I know?  If I stay till I clearly know I shall not come again to speak.  Therefore will I speak that little which I do know of it rather than be wholly silent.