LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BAXTER.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1839.] THIS publication reminds us of an oversight in omitting to notice the collection of the works of Richard Baxter, edited in the year 1830, by Mr. Orme. It was, in legal phrase, a demand for judgment, in the appeal of the great nonconformist to the ultimate tribunal of posterity, from the censures of his own age, on himself and his writings. We think that the decision was substantially right, and that, on the whole, it must be affirmed. Right it was, beyond all doubt, in so far as it assigned to him an elevated rank amongst those, who, taking the spiritual improvement of mankind for their province, have found there at once the motive and the reward for labours beneath which, unless sustained by that holy impulse, the utmost powers of our frail nature must have prematurely fainted. Such, from his tenth to his sixteenth year were the teachers of the most voluminous theological writer in the English language. Of that period of his life, the only incidents which can now be ascertained are that his love of apples was inordinate, and that on the subject of robbing orchards, he held, in practice at least, the doctrines handed down amongst schoolboys by an unbroken tradition. Almost as barren is the only extant record of the three remaining years of his pupilage. They were spent at the endowed school at Wroxeter, which he quitted at the age of nineteen, destitute of all mathematical and physical scienceignorant of Hebrew-a mere smatterer in Greek, and possessed of as much Latin as enabled him in after life to use it with reckless facility. Yet a mind so prolific, and which About the time when the high-born guests yielded such early fruits, could not advance to of Whitehall were celebrating the nuptial manhood without much well-dressed culture. revels of Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, The Bible which lay on his father's table, and the visiters of low degree were defraying formed the whole of the good man's library, the cost by the purchase of titles and monopo- and would have been ill-exchanged for the lies, there was living at the pleasant village treasures of the Vatican. He had been no of Eton Constantine, between Wrekin Hill stranger to the cares, nor indeed to the disor and the Severn, a substantial yeoman, incu- ders of life; and, as his strength declined, it rious alike about the politics of the empire was his delight to inculcate on his inquisitive and the wants of the exchequer. Yet was he boy the lessons which inspired wisdom teaches not without his vexations. On the green be- most persuasively, when illustrated by dearfore his door, a Maypole, hung with garlands, bought experience, and enforced by parental allured the retiring congregation to dance out love. For the mental infirmities of the son no the Sunday afternoon to the sound of fife and better discipline could have been found. A tabret, while he, intent on the study of the pyrrhonist of nature's making, his threescore sacred volume, was greeted with no better years and ten might have been exhausted in a names than puritan, precisian, and hypocrite. fruitless struggle to adjudicate between anta If he bent his steps to the parish church, vene- gonist theories, if his mind had not thus been rable as it was, and picturesque, in contempt subjugated to the supreme authority of Holy of all styles and orders of architecture, his Writ, by an influence coeval with the first case was not much mended. The aged and dawn of reason, and associated indissolubly purblind incumbent executed his weekly task with his earliest and most enduring affections. with the aid of strange associates. One of It is neither the wise nor the good by whom them laid aside the flail, and another the thim- the patrimony of opinion is most lightly reble, to mount the reading-desk. To these suc-garded. Such is the condition of our exist ceeded "the excellentest stage-player in all the country, and a good gamester, and a good fellow." This worthy having received holy orders, forged the like for a neighbour's son, who, on the strength of that title officiated in the pulpit and at the altar. Next in this goodly list came an attorney's clerk, who had "tippled himself in so great poverty," that he had no other way to live but by assuming the pastoral care of the flock at Eton Constantine. Time out of mind, the curate had been ex officio the depositary of the secular, as well as of the sacred literature of the parish; and to these learned persons our yeoman was therefore fain to commit the education of his only son and namesake, Richard Baxter. *The Practical Works of Richard Barter, with a Preface, giving some Account of the Author, and of this edition of his Practical Works; and an Essay on his Genius, Works, and Times. 4 vols. 8vo. London, 1838. ence, that beyond the precincts of abstract science, we must take much for granted, if we would make any advance in knowledge, or live to any useful end. Our hereditary prepossessions must not only precede our acquired judgments, but must conduct us to them. To begin by questioning every thing, is to end by answering nothing; and a premature revolt from human authority is but an incipient rebellion against conscience, reason, and truth. Launched into the ocean of speculative inquiry, without the anchorage of parental instruc tion and filial reverence, Baxter would have been drawn by his constitutional tendencies into that skeptical philosophy, through the long annals of which no single name is to be found to which the gratitude of mankind has been yielded, or is justly due. He had much in common with the most eminent doctors of that school-the animal frame characterized by sluggish appetites, languid passions, and great nervous energy; the intellectual nature distinguished by subtlety to seize distinctions more than by wit to detect analogies; by the power to dive, instead of the faculty to soar; by skill to analyze subjective truths, rather than by ability to combine them with each other and with objective realities. But what was wanting in his sensitive, and deficient in his intellectual structure, was balanced and corrected by the spiritual elevation of his mind. If not enamoured of the beautiful, nor conversant with the ideal, nor able to grasp the comprehensive and the abstract, he enjoyed that clear mental vision which attends on moral purity-the rectitude of judgment which rewards the subjection of the will to the reason the loftiness of thought awakened by habitual communion with the source of lightand the earnest stability of purpose inseparable from the predominance of the social above the selfish affections. Skepticism and devotion were the conflicting elements of his internal life; but the radiance from above gradually dispersed the vapours from beneath, and, through a half a century of pain and strife, and agitation, he enjoyed that settled tranquillity which no efforts merely intellectual can attain, nor any speculative doubts destroy,the peace, of which it is said, that it passes understanding. Baxter was born in 1615, and consequently attained his early manhood amidst events ominous of approaching revolutions. Deep and latent as are the ultimate causes of the continued existence of Episcopacy in England, nothing can be less recondite than the human agency employed in working out that result. Nursed by the Tudors, adopted by the Stuarts, and wedded in her youth to a powerful aristocracy, the Anglican church retains the indelible stamp of these early alliances. To the great, the learned, and the worldly wise, it has for three centuries afforded a resting-place and a refuge. But a long interval had elapsed before the national temples and hierarchy were consecrated to the nobler end of enlightening the ignorant, and administering comfort to the poor. Rich beyond all Protestant rivalry in sacred literature, the Church of England, from the days of Parker to those of Laud, had scarcely produced any one considerable work of popular instruction. The pastoral care which Burnett depicted, in the reign of William and Mary, was at that time a vision which, though since nobly fulfilled, no past experience had realized. Till a much later time, the alphabet was among the mysteries which the English church concealed from her catechumens. There is no parallel in the annals of any other Protestant State, of so wonderful a concentration, and so imperfect a diffusion of learning and genius, of piety and zeal. The reigns of Whitgift, Bancroft, and Laud, were unmolested by cares so rude as those of evangelizing the artisans and peasantry. Jewel and Bull, Hall and Donne, Hooker and Taylor, lived and wrote for their peers, and for future ages, but not for the commonalty of their own. Yet was not Christianity bereft in England of her distinctive and glorious privilege. It was still the religion of the poor. Amidst persecution, contempt, and penury, the Puritans had toiled and suffered, and had, not rarely, died in their service. Thus in every city, and almost in every village, they who had eyes to see, and ears to hear, might, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, perceive the harbingers of the coming tempest. Thoughtful and resolute men had transferred the allegiance of the heart from their legitimate, to their chosen leaders; while, unconscious of their danger, the ruling were straining the bonds of authority, in exact proportion to the decrease of their number and their strength. It was when the future pastors of New England were training men to a generous contempt of all sublunary interest for conscience' sake, that Laud, not content to be terrible to the founders of Connecticut and New England, braved an enmity far more to be dreaded than theirs. With a view to the ends to which his life was devoted, his truth and courage would have been well exchanged for the wily and time-serving genius of Williams. Supported by Heylin, Cosins, Montague, and many others, who adopted or exaggerated his own opinions, he precipitated the temporary overthrow of a church, in har mony with the character, and strong in the affections of the people; upheld by a long line of illustrious names; connected with the whole aristocracy of the realm; and enthusiastically defended by the sovereign. Baxter's theological studies were commenced during these tumults, and were insensibly biassed by them. The ecclesiastical polity had reconciled him to Episcopal ordination; but as he read, and listened, and observed his attachment to the established ritual and discipline progressively declined. He be gan by rejecting the practice of indiscriminate communion. He was dissatisfied with the compulsory subscription to articles, and the baptismal cross. "Deeper thoughts on the point of Episcopacy" were suggested to him by the et cetera oath; and these reflections soon rendered him an irreconcilable adversary to the "English diocesan frame." He distributed the sacred elements to those who would not kneel to receive them, and religiously abjured the surplice. Thus ripe for spiritual censures, and prepared to endure them, he was rescued from the danger he had braved by the demon of civil strife. The Scots in the north, and the Parliament in the south, summoned Charles and Laud to more serious cares than those of enforcing conformity, and left Baxter free to enlarge and to propagate his discoveries. With liberty of speech and action, his mind was visited by a corresponding audacity of thought. Was there indeed a future life?Was the soul of man immortal?-Were the Scriptures true?-were the questions which now assaulted and perplexed him. They came, not as vexing and importunate suggestions but " under pretence of sober reason," and all the resources of his understanding were sum moned to resist the tempter. Self-deception was abhorrent from his nature. He feared the face of no speculative difficulty. Dark as were the shapes which crossed his path, they must be closely questioned; and gloomy as was the discoursed as earnestly, and even published as copiously as himself. After many an affair of posts, the hostile parties at length engaged in a pitched battle at Amersham in Buckinghamshire. "When the public talking-day came," says Baxter, “I took the reading pew, and Pitchford's cornet and troopers took the men begin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers set in; and I alone disputed against them from morning until almost night." Too old a campaigner to retire from the field in the presence of his enemy, "he staid it out till they first rose and went away." The honours of the day were, however, disputed. In the strange book published by Edwards, under his appropriate title of "Gangræna,” the fortunes of the field were chronicled; and there, as we are informed by Baxter himself, may be read "the abun dance of nonsense uttered on the occasion." abyss to which they led, it was to be unhesitat- against their confounding errors." The soldiers ingly explored. The result needs not to be stated. From a long and painful conflict he emerged victorious, but not without bearing to the grave some scars to mark the severity of the struggle. No man was ever blessed with more profound convictions; but so vast and elaborate was the basis of argumentation on which they rested, that to re-examine the tex-gallery. There did the leader of the Chesham ture, and ascertain the coherence of the materials of which it was wrought, formed the still recurring labour of his whole future life. While the recluse is engulfed in the vortices of metaphysics, the victims of passion are still urged forward in their wild career of guilt and misery. From the transcendental labyrinths through which Baxter was winding his solitary and painful way, the war recalled him to the stern realities of life. In the immediate vicinity of the earlier military operations, Coventry had become a city of refuge to him, and to a large body of his clerical brethren. They believed, in the simplicity of their hearts, that Essex, Waller, and Cromwell, were fighting the battles of Charles, and that their real object was to rescue the king from the thraldom of the malignants, and the church from the tyranny of the prelatists. "We kept," says Baxter, speaking of himself and his associates, "to our old principles, and thought all others had done so too, except a very few inconsiderable persons. We were unfeignedly for king and Parliament. We believed that the war was only to save the Parliament and kingdom from the papists and delinquents, and to remove the dividers, that the king might again return to his Parliament, and that no changes might be made in religion, but by the laws which had his free consent. We took the true happiness of king and people, church and state, to be our end, and so we understood the covenant, engaging both against papists and schismatics; and when the Court News-Book told the world of the swarms of Anabaptists in our armies, we thought it had been a mere lie, because it was not so with us." Ontology and scholastic divinity have their charms, and never did man confess them more than Richard Baxter. But the pulse must beat languidly indeed, when the superior fascination of the "tented field" is not acknowledged; nor should it derogate from the reverence which attends his name, to admit that he felt and indulged this universal excitement. Slipping away from Durandus, Bradwardine, Suarez, and Ariminensis, he visited Edgehill and Naseby while the parliamentary armies still occupied the ground on which they had fought. He found the conquerors armed cap-a-pie for spiritual, as well as carnal combats; and to convert the troops from their theological errors, was the duty which, he was assured, had been committed to him by Providence. Becoming accordingly chaplain to Whalley's regiment, he witnessed in that capacity many a skirmish, and was present at the sieges of Bristol, Sherborne, and Worcester. Rupert and Goring proved less stubborn antagonists than the seekers and levellers of the lieutenant-general's camp; and Baxter was "still employed in preaching, conferring, and still disputing Cromwell regarded these polemics with illdisguised aversion, and probably with secret contempt. He had given Baxter but a cold welcome to the army. "He would not dispute with me at all," is a fact related by the good man with evident surprise; "but he would in good discourse very fluently pour out himself in the extolling of free grace, which was savoury to those that had right principles, though he had some misunderstanding of free grace himself. He was a man of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory, but not well seen in the principles of his religion; of a sanguine complexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much; but natu rally, also, so far from humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin." The protector had surrendered his powerful mind to the reli gious fashions of his times, and never found the leisure or the inclination for deep inquiry into a subject on which it was enough for his purposes to excel in fluent and savoury discourse. Among those purposes, to obtain the approbation of his own conscience was not the least sincere. His devotion was ardent, and his piety genuine. But the alliance be tween habits of criminal self-indulgence, and a certain kind of theopathy, is but too ordinary a phenomenon. That at each step of his progress, Cromwell should have been deceived and sustained by some sophistry, is the less wonderful, since even now, in retracing his course, it is difficult to ascertain the point at which he first quitted the straight path of duty, or to discover what escape was at length open to him from the web in which he had become involved. There have been many worse, and few greater men. Yet to vindicate his name from the condemnation which rests upon it, would be to confound the distinctions of good and evil as he did, without the apology of being tempted as he was. Baxter was too profound a moralist to be dazzled by the triumph of bad men, however specious their virtues; or to affect any complacency towards a bad cause, though indebted to it for the only period of serenity which it ever was his lot to enjoy. He had ministered to the forces of the parliamentary general, but fend against his passion, and thus four or five hours were spent." abhorred the regicide and usurper. In his zeal for the ancient constitution, he had meditated a scheme for detaching his own regi- During this singular dialogue, Lambert fell ment, and ultimately all the generals of the asleep, an indecorum which, in the court of army, from their leader. They were first to an hereditary monarch, would have been fatal be undermined by a course of logic, and then to the prospects of the transgressor. But the blown up by the eloquence of the preacher. drowsiness of his old comrade was more toleThis profound device in the science of theolo-rable to Cromwell than the pertinacity of his gical engineering would have been counter- former chaplain, against whom he a second worked by the lieutenant-general, had he de- time directed the artillery of his logic. On this tected it, by methods somewhat less subtle, occasion almost all the privy council were but certainly not less effective. A fortunate present; liberty of conscience being the thesis, illness defeated the formidable conspiracy, and Baxter the respondent, and Cromwell assuming restored the projector to his pastoral duties to himself the double office of opponent and and to peace. Even then, his voice was pub-moderator. "After another slow, tedious speech licly raised against "the treason, rebellion, of his, I told him," says the auto-biographer, perfidiousness, and hypocrisy" of Cromwell, who probably never heard, and certainly never heeded, the denunciations of his former chaplain. Baxter enjoyed the esteem which he would not repay. He was once invited by the protector to preach at court. Sermons in those days were very serious things-point-blank shots at the bosoms of the auditory; and Cromwell was not a man to escape or fear the heaviest pulpit ordnance which could be brought to bear on him. From the many vulnerable points of attack, the preacher selected the crying sin of encouraging sectaries. Not satisfied with the errors of his own days, the great captain had anticipated those of a later age, and had asserted in their utmost extent the dangerous principles of religious liberty. This latitudinarian doctrine may have been suggested by motives merely selfish; and Baxter, at least, could acknowledge no deeper wisdom in which such an innovation could have had its birth. St. Paul was, therefore, made to testify "against the sin committed by politicians, in maintaining divisions for their own ends, that they might fish in troubled waters." He who now occupied the throne of the Stuarts claimed one prerogative to which even they had never aspired. It was that of controverting the argumentation of the pulpit. His zeal for the conversion of his monitor appears to have been exceedingly ardent. Having summoned him to his presence, "he began by a long tedious speech to me," (the narrative is Baxter's) " of God's providence in the change of the government, and how God had owned it, and what great things had been done at home and abroad, in the peace with Spain and Holland, &c. When he had wearied us all with speaking thus slowly for about an hour, I told him it was too great a condescension to acquaint me so fully with all these matters, which were above me; but I told him that we took our ancient monarchy to be a blessing, and not an evil to the land; and humbly craved his patience that I might ask him how England had ever forfeited that blessing, and unto whom that forfeiture was made. Upon that question he was awakened into some passion, and then told me that it was no forfeiture, but God had changed it as pleased him; and then he let fly at the Parliament which thwarted him, and especially by name at four or five of those members who were my chief acquaintances, whom I presumed to de "a little of my judgment, and when two of his company had spun out a great deal more of the time in such like tedious, but more ignorant speeches, I told him, that if he would be at the labour to read it, I could tell him more of my mind in writing two sheets than in that way of speaking many days. He received the paper afterwards, but I scarcely believe that he ever read it. I saw that what he learnt must be from himself, being more disposed to speak many hours than hear one, and little heeding what another said when he had spoken himself." Whatever may have been the faults, or whatever the motives of the protector, there can be no doubt that under his sway England witnessed a diffusion, till then unknown, of the purest influence of genuine religious principles. The popular historians of that period, from various motives, have disguised or misrepresented the fact; and they who derive their views on this subject from Clarendon or from Hudibras, mistake a caricature for a genuine portrait. To this result, no single man contributed more largely than Baxter himself, by his writings and his pastoral labours. His residence at Kidderminster during the whole of the protectorate was the sabbath of his life; the interval in which his mind enjoyed the only repose of which it was capable, in labours of love, prompted by a willing heart, and unimpeded by a contentious world. Good Protestants hold, that the supreme Head of the Church reserves to himself alone to meditate and to reign, as his incommunicable attributes; and that to teach and to minister are the only offices he has delegated to the pastors of his flock. Wisdom to scale the heights of contemplation, love to explore the depths of wretchedness-a science and a servitude inseparably combined;—the one investigating the relations between man and his Creator, the other busied in the cares of a selfdenying philanthropy—such, at least in theory, are the endowments of that sacred institution, which, first established by the fishermen of Galilee, has been ever since maintained throughout the Christian commonwealth. A priesthood, of which all the members should be animated with this spirit, may be expected when angels shall resume their visits to our earth, and not till then. Human agency, even when employed to distribute the best gifts of Providence to man, must still bear the impress of human guilt and frailty. But if there F be one object in this fallen world, to which the eye, jaded by its pageantries and its gloom, continually turns with renovated hope, it is to an alliance, such as that which bound together Richard Baxter and the people among whom he dwelt. He, a poor man, rich beyond the dreams of avarice in mental resources, consecrating alike his poverty and his wealth to their service; ever present to guide, to soothe, to encourage, and, when necessary, to rebuke; shrinking from no aspect of misery, however repulsive, nor from the most loathsome forms of guilt which he might hope to reclaim;-the instructer, at once, and the physician, the almoner and the friend, of his congregation. They, repaying his labours of love with untutored reverence; awed by his reproofs, and rejoicing in his smile; taught by him to discharge the most abject duties, and to endure the most pressing evils of life, as a daily tribute to their Divine benefactor; incurious of the novelties of their controversial age, but meekly thronging the altar from which he dispensed the symbols of their mystical union with each other and their common Head; and, at the close of their obscure, monotonous, but tranquil course, listening to the same parental voice, then subdued to the gentlest tones of sympathy, and telling of bright hopes and of a glorious reward. Little was there in common between Kidderminster and the "sweet smiling" Auburn. Still less alike were the "village preacher," who "ran his godly race," after the fancy of Oliver Goldsmith, and the "painful preacher," whose emaciated form, gaunt visage, and Geneva bands, attested the severity of his studies, and testified against prelatic ascendency. Deeper yet the contrast between the delicate hues and fine touches of the portrait drawn from airy imagination, and Baxter's catalogue of his weekly catechizings, fasts, and conferences: of his Wednesday meetings and Thursday disputations; and of the thirty helps by which he was enabled to quicken into spiritual life the inert mass of a rude and vicious population. But, truth against fiction, all the world over, in the rivalry for genuine pathos and real sublimity. Ever new and charming, after ten thousand repetitions, the plaintive, playful, melodious poetry bears a comparison to the homely tale of the curate of Kidderminster, like that of the tapestried lists of a tournament with the well-fought field of Roncesvalles. Too prolix for quotation, and perhaps too sacred for our immediate purpose, it records one of those moral conquests which bear their testimony to the existence in the human heart of faculties, which, even when most oppressed by ignorance, or benumbed by guilt, may yet be roused to their noblest exercise, and disciplined for their ultimate perfection. Eventful tidings disturbed these apostolical labours, and but too soon proved how precarious was the tenure of that religious liberty which Baxter at once enjoyed and condemned. With the protectorate it commenced and ended. The death of Oliver, the abdication of Richard, the revival of the Long Parliament, the reappearance of the ejected members, the assembling of a new House of Commons under the auspices of Monk, and the restoration of the Stuarts, progressively endangered, and at length subverted the edifice of ecclesiastical freedom, which the same strong hand had founded and sustained. Yet the issue for awhile seemed doubtful. The sectarians overrated their own strength, and the Episcopalians exaggerated their own weakness. Infallible and impeccable, the Church of Rome is a Tadmor in the wilderness, miraculously erect and beautiful in the midst of an otherwise universal ruin. The Church of England, liable to err, but always judging right, capable of misconduct, but never acting wrong, is a still more stupendous exception to the weakness and depravity which in all other human institutions signalizes our common nature. But for this wellestablished truth, a hardy skepticism might have ventured to arraign her as an habitual alarmist. If she is "in danger" at this moment, she has been so from her cradle. Puritans and Presbyterians, Arminians, and Calvinists, Independents and Methodists, had for three centuries threatened her existence, when at last the matricidal hands of the metropolitan of all England, and of the prelate of England's metropolis, were in our own days irreverently laid on her prebendal stalls. One, "whose bosom's lord sits lightly on his throne," in the presence of all other forms of peril, has on this last fearful omen lost his accustomed fortitude; though even the impending overthrow of the church he adorns, finds his wit as brilliant, and his gayety as indestructible as of yore. What wonder, then, if the canons expectant of St. Pauls, at the Court of Breda, surveyed from that Pisgah the fair land of promise with faint misgivings, that the sons of Anak, who occupied the strongholds, should continue to enjoy the milk and honey of their Palestine? Thousands of intrusive incumbents, on whose heads no episcopal hand had been laid, and whose purity no surplice had ever symbolized, possessed the parsonages and pulpits of either episcopal province. A population had grown up unbaptized with the sign of the cross, and instructed to repeat the longer and shorter catechisms of the Westminster divines. Thirty thousand armed Covenanters yielded to Monk and his officers a dubious submission. Cudworth and Lightfoot at Cambridge, Wilkins and Wallis at Oxford, occupied and adorned the chairs of the ejected loyalists. The divine right of episcopacy might yet be controverted by Baxter, Howe, and Owen; and Smectymnus might awaken from his repose in the persons of Marshall, Calamy, and Spurstow. Little marvel, that their eternal charter inspired a less exulting faith than of old in the bishops who had assembled at Breda; that Hyde and Southampton temporized; or that Charles, impatient of the Protestant heresy in all its forms, and of Christianity itself in all its precepts, lent his royal name to an experiment of which deceit was the basis, and persecution the result. Liberty of conscience, and a concurrence in any act of Parliament, which, on mature deliberation, should be offered for securing it, were solemnly promised by the king, while yet uncertain of the temper of the commons he was |