The Saints' Everlasting Rest - Richard Baxter

comfort. it was God's command to Joshua, "This book of the law shall not
depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that
thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein." As
digestion turns food into chyle and blood for vigorous health, so meditation
turns the truths received and remembered into warm affection, firm
resolution, and holy conversation.
This meditation is the acting of all the powers of the soul. It is the work
of the living, and not of the dead. It is a work the most spiritual and sublime,
and therefore not to be well performed by a heart that is merely carnal and
earthly. Men must necessarily have some relation to heaven before they can
familiarly converse there. I suppose them to be such as have a title to rest,
when I persuade them to rejoice in the meditations of rest. And supposing
thee to be a Christian, I am now exhorting thee to be an active Christian. And
it is the work of the soul I am setting thee to, for bodily exercise here
profiteth little. And it must have all the powers of the soul to distinguish it
from the common meditation of students; for the understanding is not the
whole soul, and therefore cannot do the whole work. As in the body, the
stomach must turn the food into chyle and prepare for the liver, the liver and
spleen turn it into blood and prepare for the heart and brain; so in the soul,
the understanding must take in truths, and prepare them for the will, and that
for the affections. Christ and heaven have various excellencies, and therefore
God hath formed the soul with different powers for apprehending these
excellencies. What the better had we been for odoriferous flowers, if we had
no smell? or what good would language or music have done us, if we could
not hear? or what pleasure should we have found in meats and drinks,
without the sense of taste? So what good could all the glory of heaven have
done us, or what pleasure should we have had in the perfection of God
himself, if we had been without the affections of love and joy? And what
strength or sweetness canst thou possibly receive by thy meditations on
eternity, while thou dost not exercise those affections of the soul by which
thou must be sensible of this sweetness and strength? It is the mistake of
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