1The first of two edited extracts from the preface to the little book, A Welcome to the Plague. It was reprinted in 1833, along with other writings by Shaw, John Flavel and Richard Cecil, in a volume with the title, The Mourner’s Companion; it contains an Introductory Essay by Robert Gordon.
2Shaw was a Puritan minister who lost two children and a sister in the Great Plague of London in 1665. He wrote the book as a result of the spiritual benefit he derived through this difficult providence. He records, for instance, that God reconciled his heart to the disease, gave him “a most powerful . . . sense of the plague of a carnal heart, self-will and inordinate love” of created things, and kept up a sense of God’s love through all his troubles. “Would to God”, he writes, “I might be never worse than when I was shut up of the plague!
The next thing I will record is how difficult I found it to maintain a right humble and a right cheerful frame at the same time. How often and how long I laboured under this difficulty! That sense of sin, which was called in to promote tenderness of heart, being overmuch indulged, was ready at length to destroy that generosity and cheerfulness of soul which it was so much my duty and interest to maintain. On the other hand, the sense of divine wisdom, grace and love in Christ Jesus, being called in to keep up the soul from sinking, was ready to bear it up so high that it almost forgot that it was in the waters. Beware, Christians, and watch diligently lest godly sorrow settle into an ungodly despondency and inconsolable heaviness, so that the soul is not able to bear up under its own burden; and that a holy cheerfulness and serenity do not evaporate into an unholy frothiness and forgetfulness of your infirmities, the soul not being able to manage its own spirits and emotions.
I know you would willingly understand something of the frame of my heart with respect to my departure out of this world. I shall say no more as to this matter, except to acquaint you with one eminent experience relating thereto. My mind or fancy or appetite (I know not well what to call it) was sometimes inducing in me some desires to live yet longer. I began a contest with this temptation and, when I had fairly and calmly debated the ground of such an inclination, after many pretences, it came to this: I would fain persuade myself I was not yet holy enough.
I immediately consented to this, knowing that this was a certain truth, but that I should desire to prolong my days upon earth was a fallacious inference. I thought I pleased myself for a while, while I could say that I desired only to live to be better; but, after a time, I apprehended a fallacy in this pretence – for the way to be perfected in holiness is not living, but indeed dying. Christians, if your souls are indeed sincerely and powerfully moved towards perfect holiness, then do not sing so much with David, “Spare me, that I may recover,” as with good old Simeon, who after seeing God in the flesh, desired to go out of the flesh, that he might see Him more fully and beatifically: “Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart”. I cannot enlarge upon this observation. I suppose I have hinted enough to show that those pretences of many men – they would fain live to be more fit to die – are, for the most part, but a kind of mockery and self-deceit.
I do solemnly and sincerely profess, before God and angels and men, that I was never so much as inclined to think hard things of God or His good and holy ways, because of how He dealt with me. But I did then constantly and freely proclaim to all who came to visit me that sin, particularly self-will and earthly love, is the worst of plagues; and holiness is the only happiness of man; yes, afflicted holiness is infinitely to be preferred before prosperous wickedness.