RICHARD BAXTER: THE INDUSTRIOUS INVALID.

THE birthplace of Richard Baxter was Eaton-Constantine, a village near the foot of the Wrekin, in Shropshire, and not far from the Severn. Here his father had a small estate, deeply involved in debt, and here the most famous of the Nonconformists was born on the morning of the Lord's day, November 12, 1615, during the time of public worship.

They were of two

In one of his controversial works Baxter has given a vivid picture of the moral and spiritual condition of his native district. "The people were of two sorts. The generality seemed to mind nothing seriously but the body and the world; they went to church, and would answer the parson in responds, and thence go to dinner, and then to play. They never prayed in their families, but some of them going to bed would say over the Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and some of them the 'Hail Mary.' All the year long not a serious word of holy things, or the life to come, that I could hear of, proceeded from them. They read not the Scripture, nor any good book or catechism. Few of them could read, or had a Bible. ranks. The greater part were good husbands, as they called them, and savoured of nothing but their business or interest in the world: the rest were drunkards; most were swearers, but not equally. Both sorts seemed utter strangers to any more of religion than I have named, and loved not to hear any serious talk of God, or duty, or sin, or the gospel, or judgment, or the life to come; but some more hated it than others. The other sort were such as had their consciences awakened to some regard of God and their everlasting state; and, according to the various measures of their understanding, did speak and live as serious in the Christian faith, and would

much inquire what was duty, and what was sin, and how to please God, and to make sure of salvation. They read the Scripture, and such books as 'The Practice of Piety,' and Dent's 'Plain Man's Pathway,' and 'Dod on the Commandments.' They used to pray in their families, and alone; some on the book, and some without. They would not swear, nor

curse, nor take God's name lightly. They feared all known sin. They would go to the next parish church to hear a sermon when they had none at their own; would read the Scripture on the Lord's day when others were playing. These were, where I lived, about the number of two or three families in twenty, and these by the rest were called Puritans, and derided as hypocrites and precisians, that would take on them to be holy. Yet not one of them ever scrupled conformity to bishops, liturgy, or ceremonies; and it was godly conformable ministers that they went from home to hear." *

The neighbourhood was all that Queen Elizabeth or King James could have wished; or, if it exceeded her Majesty's allowance, "two preachers enough for one county," in complying with her kinsman's Book of Sports, it shewed an excess of loyalty. The May-pole was erected beside a great tree near the dwelling of Baxter's father, and as soon as the reader had rushed through the morning prayer, the congregation turned out to the village-green, and the dancing began. With intermissions at meal-time, it continued till dusk, and pious householders, like the elder Baxter, trying to instruct their families, were sadly disturbed by the pipe and the tabor, and the shouts of unhallowed revelry. And if any seriousness lingered in the place, it could hardly be ascribed to the clergy. In Eaton-Constantine the incumbent was nearly eighty years of age, and never preached. He could repeat the prayers by heart, and got one year a day-labourer, and another year a tailor to read the lessons. His successors in the church and

* "The True History of Councils, enlarged and defended," pp. 90, 91.

66 THE GOOD OLD TIMES.”

363

the school were an actor, who left the stage for the pulpit, an attorney's clerk, who had sotted himself into such poverty that he was obliged to take orders for a maintenance, and similar characters, "who read common prayer on Sunday and holy days, and tippled on the week days, and whipped the boys when they were drunk, so that we changed them very oft."

Amidst these adverse influences Baxter spent his childhood. Often on the Lord's day, as he heard the merry music, he sighed with a secret impatience to join the pastime, and, in despite of better knowledge, he often robbed orchards, told lies, and gambled with his play-fellows for little sums of money. But on the whole his conscience was tender. His father's solemn exhortations, and the reading of the Bible, helped to restrain him from evil; and an earthquake, which happened when he was ten years of age, impressed his mind with “awful thoughts of the dreadful God." But it was not till he was about fifteen that these impressions deepened and grew definite. With some other boys he had been stealing apples, and, whilst his mind was in a state of more than ordinary disquiet, he read a very awakening book, called Bunny's "Resolution." Its earnest appeals brightened to his apprehension many truths with which he had before been familiar; and they so brought home to his thoughts the folly of sinning, and the misery of the wicked, and the weight of things eternal, that for many a day he moved about carrying a world of anxiety and foreboding within. The little book had shut him up in a valley of trouble, but as yet there had opened in his Achor no door of hope. Bunny, like his Romish original, Parsons, dwelt little on the love of God, and the work of Christ. But in the midst of these gloomy days there came to the door a poor pedlar selling books. His stock chiefly consisted of ballads, but he had one good book, "The Bruised Reed," by Dr Richard Sibbs. The elder Baxter

bought it, and to his son it proved an opportune evangelist.. In the pages of this wise, gentle, and richly Scriptural theolo gian, he began to see the grace of God, and his own obligations to the Friend of sinners; and the perusal of one of Perkins's works, lent him by a servant, helped to extend his. views and establish his faith. "And thus,” as he tells us, "without any means but books, was God pleased to resolve. me for Himself." Nor is it wonderful that, as he elsewhere remarks, "the use that God made of books above ministers to the benefit of my soul, made me somewhat excessively in love. with good books, so that I thought I had never enow, but. scraped up as great a treasure of them as I could.”

He soon resolved to become a minister, but in his father's straitened circumstances, it was a very desultory and unsatisfactory education that he was able to command. The university was beyond his attainment. He had no turn for mathematics;. he never became an adept in Greek or Hebrew; but he learned. enough of Latin to read the schoolmen and the Western fathers;, and, like other theologians, he could write in it with fearful. facility. But his favourite studies were logic and metaphysics. His subtile genius revelled in distinctions and definitions, and,, as he "could never endure confusion," he welcomed a science of which the professed object was method. To a public teacher precision in the use of terms is an invaluable habit, and perhaps this was the greatest advantage which Baxter derived. from his study of Aquinas, Durandus, and Occam. The masters in the art of reasoning are few. The intellectual elevation which commands a wide horizon, and which takes into account exceptional cases and remote results, is rarer than. the inferential faculty which is adroit in deducing conclusions from conceded premises, and very much rarer than the lynxeyed acumen which observes and improves the weak points of an adversary. Baxter was constitutionally a disputant, and was destined to spend half-a-century in controversial campaigns

as is usual with all combatants, constantly deploring the necessity of warfare, but as uniformly crying, Ha, ha! to the sound of the trumpet; and he brought into the field a wonderful amount of wariness, agility, and persistency; an extensive knowledge of polemical tactics, and an enormous artillery-train of theological erudition and scholastic appliances; but although he won some battles, and silenced many an adversary, he established few positions, and effected no permanent conquests. There were no lists which he scrupled to enter, nor was there any champion so doughty as not to taste at some period or other the point of his spear; but, owing to some defect of judgment or mental discipline, his victories were singularly barren. He now and then took a prisoner, but he hardly ever made a convert; and, although his life was spent in clearing up other people's "confusion," it has not been his lot, like Edwards and Butler, to leave new light on any dark subject; or, like Chillingworth and Horsley, to make an end of any controverted matter.

But, although his own instincts and the temptations of the time soon hurried Baxter into the wordy war, it was with no polemical purposes that he entered the ministry. Nor is it as a theological pamphleteer that posterity has agreed to revere and cherish his memory. Perhaps no man ever began to preach with feelings of deeper solemnity and intenser earnestness than those with which, at the age of twenty-three, he first ascended the pulpit-a solemnity and earnestness which knew no intermission nor abatement till the latest hour of life, and which, in the midst of that most serious of all our centuries, have left his name pre-eminent, like Giotto's Campanile,

"A silent finger pointing to heaven."

Of this abiding earnestness the source assuredly was God's own Spirit keeping his mind in continual contact with the great realities; but, subordinate to and coincident with this