The Complete Works

of

Thomas Brooks

Edited, with Memoir,

By The Rev. Alexander Balloch Grosart,

liverpool

Vol. V

containing:

the golden key to open hidden treasures;

paradise opened;

and

a word in season

Edinburgh: James Nichol

london: james nisbet and co. dublin: g. herbert

m.dccc.lxvii.

Contents

I. The Golden Key to Open Hidden Treasures

The Epistle Dedicatory

Serious and Weighty Questions Clearly and Satisfactorily Answered

1. What are the special remedies, means, or helps against cherishing or keeping up of any special or peculiar sin, either in heart or life, against the Lord, or against the light and conviction of a man’s own conscience?

2. What is that faith that gives a man an interest in Christ, and in all those blessed benefits and favours that come by Christ? or whether that person that experiences the following particulars, may not safely, groundedly, and comfortably conclude that his faith is a true, justifying, saving faith, the faith of God’s elect, and such a faith as clearly evidences a gracious estate, and will certainly bring the soul to heaven?

3. Whether in the great day of the Lord, the day of general judgment, or in the particular judgment that will pass upon every soul immediately after death, which is the stating of the soul in an eternal estate or condition, either of happiness or misery; whether the sins of the saints, the follies and vanities of believers, the infirmities and enormities of sincere Christians, shall be brought into the judgment of discussion and discovery, or no? Whether the Lord will either in the great day of account, or in a man’s particular day of account or judgment, publicly manifest, proclaim, and make mention of the sins of his people, or no?

Pleas in answer to the third question

II. Paradise Opened

The Epistle Dedicatory

Pleas continued from ‘The Golden Key,’

III. A Word in Season

A general Epistle to all suffering saints

Some words of counsel to a dear friend

The signal presence of God with his people

the

Golden Key

to

Open Hidden Treasures

note

The ‘Golden Key’ forms Part I. of, spiritually, the richest and most nurturing of Brooks’s larger treatises. Part II. follows in this volume. The title-page of the former will be found below.* It is interesting to compare Brooks’s ‘Golden Key’ with the earlier work of Francis Dillingham, entitled ‘A Golden Keye opening the Locke to eternall Happiness: containing seven most sweete and comfortable directions to a Christian life,’ 1609, 12mo.—G.

GOLDEN KEY

to open

Hidden Treasures,

or

Several great Points, that refer to the Saints present blessedness, and their future happiness, with the resolution of several important questions.

Here you have also

The Active and Passive Obedience of Christ vindicated and improved, against men of corrupt minds, &c. Who boldly, in Pulpit and Press, contend against those glorious Truths of the Gospel.

You have farther

Eleven serious singular Pleas, that all sincere Christians may safely and groundedly make, to those ten Scriptures ...