A Lifting Up for the Downcast

First preached and later published in the seventeenth century, A Lifting Up for the Downcast is William Bridge's enduring pastoral answer to the discouraged Christian soul — a patient, sermon-by-sermon exposition of Psalm 42:11, in which the psalmist turns and reasons with his own dejected heart: 'Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God.'

Bridge takes up, in turn, nearly every ground on which a believer's heart grows heavy — great sin, weak grace, failure in duty, lack of assurance, temptation, spiritual desertion, affliction, feeling unserviceable, and hard outward condition — and shows, case by case, that none of it gives just cause for despair, before closing with a sustained sermon on faith in Jesus Christ as the one remedy for every discouragement.

This edition has been carefully modernized in essentially-literal style — archaic pronouns, verbs, and obsolete vocabulary updated, long sentences loosened for the ear — while Bridge's own Scripture quotations and theological vocabulary are left exactly as he wrote them. The front matter and the first two sermons are free to read; the rest of the book is part of the Silva Island membership library.