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 subjecti truths, rather than by ability to combine em 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. still the religion of the poor. Amidst persecu tion, 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 autho rity, 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 harmony 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. 66 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. Baxter was born in 1615, and consequently attained his early manhood amidst events Baxter's theological studies were com ominous of approaching revolutions, Deep menced during these tumults, and were insenand latent as are the ultimate causes of the sibly biassed by them. The ecclesiastical continued existence of Episcopacy in England, polity had reconciled him to Episcopal ordinothing can be less recondite than the human nation; but as he read, and listened, and obagency employed in working out that result. served his attachment to the established ritual Nursed by the Tudors, adopted by the Stuarts, and discipline progressively declined. He be and wedded in her youth to a powerful aris-gan by rejecting the practice of indiscriminate tocracy, 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 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 ine face of no speculative difficulty. Dark as were the shapes which crossed his path, they must be closely questioned; and gloomy as was the of posts, the hostile parties at length engaged in a pitched battle at Amersham in Bucking hamshire. "When the public talking-day came," says Baxter, "I took the reading pew, and Pitchford's cornet and troopers took the gallery. There did the leader of the Chesham 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 abundance 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 discoursed as earnestly, and even published stated. From a long and painful conflict he as copiously as himself. After many an affair 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 texture, 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 naturally, also, so far from humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin." The protector had surrendered his powerful mind to the religious 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 During this singular dialogue, Lambert fell asleep, an indecorum which, in the court of an hereditary monarch, would have been fatal to the prospects of the transgressor. But the drowsiness of his old comrade was more tole abhorred the regicide and usurper. In his | fend against his passion, and thus four or five zeal for the ancient constitution, he had medi- hours were spent." tated a scheme for detaching his own regiment, and ultimately all the generals of the army, from their leader. They were first to be undermined by a course of logic,.and then blown up by the eloquence of the preacher. This profound device in the science of theolo-rable to Cromwell than the pertinacity of his gical engineering would have been counterworked by the lieutenant-general, had he detected it; by methods somewhat less subtle, but certainly not less effective. A fortunate illness defeated the formidable conspiracy, and restored the projector to his pastoral duties and to peace. Even then, his voice was publicly raised against "the treason, rebellion, 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 former chaplain, against whom he a second time directed the artillery of his logic. On this occasion almost all the privy council were present; liberty of conscience being the thesis, Baxter the respondent, and Cromwell assuming to himself the double office of opponent and moderator. "After another slow, tedious speech of his, I told him," says the auto-biographer, "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 learn 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 incommunica ble 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 inves tigating 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 im press of human guilt and frailty. But if there 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. of Monk, and the restoration of the Stuarts, progressively endangered, and at length sub verted 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. Puri 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. tans 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 irreve rently 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. 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 Liberty of conscience, and a concurrence in death of Oliver, the abdication of Richard, the any act of Parliament, which, on mature delirevival of the Long Parliament, the reappear-beration, should be offered for securing it, were ance of the ejected members, the assembling solemnly promised by the king, while yet unof a new House of Commons under the auspices certain of the temper of the commons he was direct breach of the royal word, was so glaringly the object of the court, that wilful blindness only could fail to penetrate the transparent veil of "The declaration" framed by Clarendon with all the astuteness of his profession, and accepted by the Presbyterians, with the eager. ness of expiring hope. Baxter was not so deceived. In common with the other heads of his party, he judged the faith of Charles an inadequate security, and refused the proffered mitre of Hereford as an insidious bribe. about to meet. Ten Presbyterian ministers were added to the list of royal chaplains; and, for once a martyr to the public good, Charles submitted himself to the penalty of assisting at four of their sermons. That with which Baxter greeted him, could not have been recited by the most rapid voice in less than two hours. It is a solemn contrast of the sensual and the spiritual life, without one courtly phrase to relieve his censure of the vices of the great. More soothing sounds were daily falling on the royal ear. The surplice and There were abundant reasons for this distrus: the Book of Common Prayer had reappeared Thanks for his gracious purposes in favour of at the worship of the Lords and Commons. the nonconformists had been presented to the Heads and fellows of colleges enjoyed a resto-head of the church by the House of Commons, ration scarcely less triumphant than that of who immediately afterwards, at the instance their sovereign. Long dormant statutes, arising of his majesty's secretary of state, rejected from their slumbers, menaced the noncon- the very measure which had kindled their formists; and the truth was revealed to the gratitude. Three months had scarcely passed delighted hierarchy, that the Church of Eng- since the declaration had issued, when an order land was still enthroned in the affections of in council proclaimed the illegality of all relithe English people-the very type of their na- gious meetings held without the walls of the tional character-the reflection of their calm parochial churches. The Book of Common good sense of their reverence for hoar autho- Prayer and the Statute-book were daily cerity-of their fastidious distaste for whatever is menting their alliance, the one enlarged by a scenic, impassioned, and self-assuming-of supplication for "grace carefully and studiously their deliberate preference for solid reason, to imitate the example of the blessed saint and even when somewhat dull, to mere rhetoric, martyr" who had now attained the honours of however animated-of their love for those canonization; the other requiring the officers grave observances and ancient forms which of all corporate and port towns "to take the conduct the mind to self-communion, and lay sacrament of the Lord's Supper;" and to swear open to the heart its long accumulated trea"that it is not lawful, upon any pretence whatsure of hidden, though profound emotions. soever, to take arms against the king," or Happy if the confidence in her own strength against "those commissioned by him." excited by this discovery, had been blended either with the forgiveness and the love which the Gospel teaches; or with the toleration inculcated by human philosophy; or with the prudence which should be derived from a long course of suffering! Twenty-eight disgraceful years had been blotted from the annals of the Anglican church, and perhaps from the secular history of England. The time was yet unripe for avowed retaliation, but wrongs and indignities such as those which the Episcopalians had suffered, were neither to be pardoned nor unavenged. Invited by the king to prepare a scheme of future church government, Baxter and his friends, taking Usher's "Reduction of Episcopacy" as their basis, presented to Charles and the prelates a scheme of ecclesiastical reform. "As to Archbishop Usher's model of government," replied the bishops, "we decline it as not consistent with his other learned discourses on the original of Episcopacy and of metropolitans, nor with the king's supremacy in causes ecclesiastical." "Had you read Gerson, Bucer, Parker, Baynes, Salmasius, Blondel, &c.," rejoined Baxter, "you would have seen just reason given for our dissent from the ecclesiastical hierarchy as established in England. You would easily grant that diocesses are too great, if you had ever conscionably tried the task which Dr. Hammond describeth as the bishop's work, or had ever believed Ignatius' and others' ancient descriptions of a bishop's church." Whither this war of words was tending, no bystander could doubt. To maintain the splendour and the powers of Episcopacy, to yield nothing, and yet to avoid the appearance of a Amidst these parliamentary thunders were opened the conferences of the Savoy, which were to reduce to a definite meaning the declarations of Breda and of Whitehall. It was the scene of Baxter's triumph and defeat-the triumph of his promptitude, subtlety, and boundless resource-the defeat of the last hope he was permitted to indulge, of peace to himself or to the church of which he was then the brightest ornament. The tactics of popular assemblies form a system of licensed deceit; and their conventional morality tolerates the avowal of the skill by which the antagonist party has been overreached, and even an open exultation in the success of such contrivances. To embarrass the Presbyterians by the course of the discussion, to invent plausible pretexts for delay, and to guide the controversy to an impotent, if not a ludicrous close, were the scarcely concealed objects of the Episcopalians. Opposed to these by the feebler party were the contrivances by which weakness usually seeks to evade the difficulties it cannot stem, and the captiousness which few can restrain when overborne by the superior force of numbers or of authority. Whoever has seen a Parliament, may easily imagine a synod. Baxter was the leader of an unpopular opposition,-the Charles Fox of the Savoy, of which Morley was the William Pitt, and Gunning the Henry Dundas. To review the Book of Common Prayer, and " to advise and consult upon the same, and the several objections and exceptions which shall be raised against the same," was the task assigned by Charles to twelve bishops, nine doctors of divinity, and twenty-one Presbyterian divines |