66 Then lifting up his eyes to heaven, he said, "I am not concerned to answer such stuff, but am ready to produce my writings, in confutation of all this; and my life and conversation are known to many in this nation." The judge entered the court with his face | I'll not hurt you. But these things will surely flaming, "he snorted and squeaked, blew his be understood one day; what fools one sort of nose and clenched his hands, and lifted up his | Protestants are made, to prosecute the other." eyes, mimicking their manner, and running on furiously, as he said they used to pray." The ermined buffoon extorted a smile from the nonconformists themselves. Pollexfen, the leading counsel for the defence, gave into the humour, and attempted to gain attention for The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and his argument by a jest. "My lord," he said, but for the resistance of the other judges, Jef"some will think it a hard measure to stop fries would have added whipping through the these men's mouths, and not to let them speak city to the sentence of imprisonment. It was through their noses." "Pollexfen," said Jef- to continue until the prisoner should have paid fries, "I know you well. You are the patron five hundred marks. Baxter was at that time of the faction; this is an old rogue who has in his 70th year. A childless widower, groanpoisoned the world, with his Kidderminster ing under the agonies of bodily pain, and redoctrine. He encouraged all the women to duced by former persecutions to sell all that bring their bodkins and thimbles, to carry on he possessed; he entered the King's Bench the war against their king, of ever-blessed prison in utter poverty, and remained there for memory. An old schismatical knave-a hypo- nearly two years, hopeless of any other abode critical villain." "My lord," replied the coun- on earth. But the hope of a mansion of etersel, "Mr. Baxter's loyal and peaceable spirit, nal peace and love raised him beyond the King Charles would have rewarded with a reach of human tyranny. He possessed his bishopric, when he came in, if he would have soul in patience. Wise and good men resorted conformed." Ay," said the judge, "we know to his prison, and brought back greetings to that; but what ailed the old blockhead, the his distant friends, and maxims of piety and unthankful villain, that he would not conform? prudence. Happy in the review of a wellIs he wiser or better than other men? He hath spent life, and still happier in the prospect of been, ever since, the spring of the faction. I its early close, his spirit enjoyed a calm for am sure he hath poisoned the world with his which his enemies might have well exchanged linsey-woolsey doctrine, a conceited-stubborn, their mitres and their thrones. His pen, the fanatical dog." After one counsel, and an- faithful companion of his troubles, as of his other, had been overborne by the fury of Jef- joys, still plied the Herculean tasks which fries, Baxter himself took up the argument. habit had rendered not merely easy, but de"My lord," he said, "I have been so moderate lightful to him; and what mattered the gloomy with respect to the Church of England, that I walls or the obscene riot of jail, while he have incurred the censure of many of the dis- was free to wander from early dawn to nightsenters on that account." "Baxter for bishops," fall over the sublime heights of devotion, or exclaimed the judge, "is a merry conceit in- through the interminable, but to him not pathdeed. Turn to it, turn to it!" On this one of less wilderness of psychology? There pain the counsel turned to a passage in the libel, and mortal sickness were unheeded, and his which stated, that " great respect is due to long-lost wife forgotten, or remembered only those truly called bishops amongst us. "Ay," that he might rejoice in their approaching resaid Jeffries, "this is your Presbyterian cant, union. The altered policy of the court restored truly called to be bishops; that is of himself him for awhile to the questionable advantage and such rascals, called the bishops of Kidder- of bodily freedom. "At this time," says the minster, and other such places. The bishops younger Calamy, "he talked about another set apart by such factious-snivelling Presby- world like one that had been there, and was terians as himself; a Kidderminster bishop he come as an express from thence to make a means, according to the saying of a late learned report concerning it." But age, sickness, and author, every parish shall maintain a tythe-pig persecution had done their work. His matemetropolitan." Baxter offering to speak again, rial frame gave way to the pressure of disease, Jeffries exploded in the following apostrophe: though, in the language of one of his last asso"Richard! Richard! dost thou think here to ciates, "his soul abode rational, strong in faith poison the court? Richard, thou art an old and hope," That his dying hours were agifellow-an old knave; thou hast written books tated by the doubts which had clouded his enough to load a cart, every one as full of se- earlier days, has been often but erroneously dition, I might say treason, as an egg is full of asserted. With manly truth, he rejected, as meat. Hadst thou been whipped out of thy affectation, the wish for death to which some writing trade forty years ago, it had been pretend. He assumed no stoical indifference happy. I know that thou hast a mighty party, to pain, and indulged in no unhallowed famiand I see a great many of the brotherhood in liarity on those awful subjects which occupy corners, waiting to see what will become of the thoughts of him whose eye is closing on their mighty don, and a doctor of your party sublunary things, and is directed to an instant at your elbow; but I will crush you all. Come, eternity. In profound lowliness, with a settled what do you say for yourself, you old knave-reliance on the Divine Mercy, repeating at frecome, speak up; what doth he say? I am not afraid of him, or of all the snivelling calves you have got about you,"-alluding to some persons who were in tears at this scene. Your lordship need not," said Baxter, "for quent intervals the prayer of the Redeemer, on whom his hopes reposed, and breathing out benedictions on those who encircled his dying bed, he passed away from a life of almost unequalled toil and suffering, to a new condition of existence, where he doubted not to enjoy | though forbearing despotism. It was an age that perfect conformity of the human to the Divine will, to which, during his three-score years and ten, it had been his ceaseless labour to attain. The record of the solitary, rather than of the social hours of a man of letters, must form the staple of his biography, yet he must be a strenuous reader, who should be able, from his own knowledge, to prepare such a record of the fruits of Richard Baxter's solitude. After a familiarity of many years with his writings, it must be avowed, that of the one hundred and sixty-eight volumes comprised in the catalogue of his printed works, there are some which we have never seen, and many with which we can boast but a very slight acquaintance. These, however, are such as (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Hallam) have ceased to belong to men, and have become the property of moths. From the recesses of the library in Red Cross street, they lower in the sullen majority of the folio page, over the pigmies of this duodecimo generation; the expressive, though neglected monuments of occurrences, which can never lose their place, or their interest, in the history of theological literature. The English Reformation produced no Luther, Calvin, Zuingle, or Knox-no man who imparted to the national mind the impress of his own character, or the heritage of his religious creed. Our reformers, Cranmer scarcely excepted, were statesmen rather than divines. Neither he, nor those more properly called the martyrs of the Church of England, ever attempted the stirring appeals to mankind at large, which awakened the echoes of the presses and the pulpits of Germany, Switzerland, and France. From the papal to the royal supremacy-from the legatine to the archiepiscopal power-from the Roman missal to the Anglican liturgy, the transition was easy, and, in many respects, not very perceptible. An ambidexter controversialist, the English church warred at once with the errors of Rome and of Geneva; until relenting towards her first antagonist, she turned the whole power of her arms against her domestic and more dreaded enemy. To the resources of piety, genius, and learning, were added less legitimate weapons; and the Puritans underwent confiscation, imprisonment, exile, compulsory silence, every thing, in short, except conviction. When the civil wars unloosed their tongues and gave freedom to their pens, they found themselves without any established standard of religious belief: every question debatable; and every teacher conscience-bound to take his share in the debate. Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Seekers, Familists, Behmenists, and Quakers, were agreed only in cementing a firm alliance against their common enemies, the prelatists and papists. Those foes subdued, they turned against each other, some contending for supremacy, and some for toleration, but all for what they severally regarded or professed to regard as truth. Nor were theirs the polemics of the schools or the cloister. The war of religious opinion was accompanied by the roar of Cromwell's artillery-by the fall of ancient dynasties, and the growth of a military, of deep earnestness. Frivolous and luxurious men had for awhile retreated to make way for impassioned and high-wrought spirits;-the interpreters at once of the ancient revelations and of the present judgments of Heaven, the monitors of an ungodly world, and the comforters of those who bent beneath the weight of national and domestic calamities. Such were that memorable race of authors to whom is given collectively the name of the Puritan divines; and such, above all the rest, was Richard Baxter. Intellectual efforts of such severity as his, relieved by not so much as one passing smile: public services of such extent, interrupted by no one recorded relaxation; thoughts so sleeplessly intent on those awful subjects, in the presence of which all earthly interests are annihilated, might seem a weight too vast for human endurance; as assuredly it forms an example which few would have the power, and fewer still the will, to imitate. His seventy-five years unbroken by any transient glance at gayety: his one hundred and sixtyeight volumes, where the fancy never disports herself; a mortal man absorbed in the solemn realities, and absolutely independent of all the illusions of life, appears like a fiction, and a dull one too. Yet it is an exact, and not an uninviting truth. Never was the alliance of soul and body formed on terms of greater inequality than in Baxter's person. It was like the compact in the fable, where all the spoils and honours fall to the giant's share, while the poor dwarf puts up with all the danger and the blows. The mournful list of his chronic diseases renders almost miraculous the mental vigour which bore him through exertions resembling those of a disembodied spirit. But his ailments were such as, without affecting his nervous energy, gave repose to his animal appetites, and quenched the thirst for all the emoluments and honours of this sublunary state. Death, though delaying to strike, stood continually before him, ever quickening his attention to that awful presence, by approaching the victim under some new or varied aspect of disease. Under this influence he wrote, and spoke, and acted—a dying man, conversant with the living in all their pursuits, but taking no share in their worldly hopes and fugitive emotions. Every returning day was welcomed and improved, as though it were to be his last. Each sermon might be a farewell admonition to his auditory. The sheets which lay before him were rapidly filled with the first suggestions of his mind in the first words which offered; for to-morrow's sun might find him unable to complete the momentous task. All the graces and the negligences of composition were alike unheeded, for how labour as an artist when the voice of human applause might in a few short hours become inaudible! In Baxter, the characteristics of his age, and of his associates, were thus height ened by the peculiarities of his own physical and mental constitution. Their earnestness passed in him into a profound solemnity; their diligence into an unrelaxing intensity of employment; their disinterestedness into a fixed disdain of the objects for which other men con of Perseverance," on "Saving Faith," on "Justifying Righteousness," and on "Universal Redemption." Next in order is a folio of seven hundred pages, entitled "Catholic Theology," plain, pure, peaceable, unfolding and resolving all the controversies of the schoolmen, the papists and the Protestants. This was eclipsed by a still more ponderous folio in Latin, entitled, "Methodus Theologæ Christianæ," composed, to quote his own words. "in my retirement at Totteridge, in a troublesome, smoky, suffocating room, in the midst of daily pains of sciatica, and many worse." After laying down the nature of Deity, and all things in general, he discloses all the relations, eternal and historical, between God and man, with all the abstract truths, and all the moral obligations deducible from them;-detecting the universal presence of the trinity, not in the Divine Being only, but in all things psychological and material which flow from the great fountain of life. With an "End of Doctrinal Controversies," a title, he observes, not intended as a prognostic, but as didactical and correctiveterminated his efforts to close up the mighty questions which touch on man's highest hopes and interests. He had thrown upon them such an incredible multitude and variety of cross lights, as effectually to dazzle any intellectual vision less aquiline than his own. tend. Even the episode of his marriage is in | four and five hundred pages of "Disputations" harmony with the rest. He renounced the came to the succour of the "Confession." property with which it would have encumbered Then appeared four treatises on the "Doctrine him, and stipulated for the absolute command of his precarious and inestimable time. Had this singular concentration of thought and purpose befallen a man of quick sympathies, it would have overborne his spirits, if it had not impaired his reason. But Baxter was naturally stern. Had it overtaken a man of vivid imagination, it would have engendered a troop of fantastic and extravagant day-dreams. But to Baxter's natural vision all objects presented themselves with a hard outline, colourless, with no surrounding atmosphere. Had it been united to a cold and selfish heart, the result would have been a life of ascetic fanaticism. But his was an enlarged, though a calm philanthropy. His mind, though never averted from the remembrance of his own and of others' eternal doom, was still her own sovereign; diligently examining the foundations and determining the limits of belief; methodizing her opinions with painful accuracy, and expanding them into all their theoretical or practical results, as patiently as ever analyst explored the depths of the differential calculus. Still every thing was to the purpose. "I have looked," he says, "over Hutton, Vives, Erasmus, Scaliger, Salmasius, Cassaubon, and many other critical grammarians, and all Gruter's critical volumes. I have read almost all the physics and metaphysics I could hear of. I have wasted much of my time among loads of historians, chronologers, and antiquaries. I despise none of their learning-all truth is useful. Mathematics, which I have least of, I find a pretty and manlike sport; but if I have no other kind of knowledge than these, what were my understanding worth? What a dreaming dotard should I be? I have higher thoughts of the schoolmen than Erasmus and our other grammarians had. I much value the method and sobriety of Aquinas, the subtlety of Scotus and Ockum, the plainness of Durandus, the solidity of Ariminensis, the profundity of Bradwardine, the excellent acuteness of many of their followers; of Aureolus, Capreolus, Bannes, Alvarez, Zumel, &c.; of Mayro, Lychetus, Trombeta, Faber, Meurisse, Rada, &c.; of Ruiz, Pennattes, Saurez, Vasquez, &c.; of Hurtado, of Albertinus, of Lud à Dola, and many others. But how loath should I be to take such sauce for my food, and such recreations for my business. The jingling of too much and false philosophy among them often drowns the noise of Aaron's bells. I feel myself much better in Herbert's temple." Within the precincts of that temple, and to the melody of those bells, he accordingly proceeded to erect the vast monument of his theological works. Their basis was laid in a series of "aphorisms on justification"-an attempt to fix the sense of the sacred volume on those topics which constitute the essential peculiarities of the Christian system. The assaults with which the aphorisms had been encountered were repelled by his "Apology," a large volume in quarto. The "Apology" was, within a few months, re-enforced by another quarto, entitled his "Confession of Faith." Between His next enterprise was to win mankind to religious concord. A progeny of twelve books, most of them of considerable volume, attest his zeal to this arduous cause. Blessed, we are told, are the peacemakers; but the benediction is unaccompanied with the promise of tranquillity. He found, indeed, a patron in "His highness, Richard Lord Protector," whose rule he acknowledged as lawful, though he had denied the authority of his father. Addressing that wise and amiable man, "I observe," he says, "that the nation generally rejoice in your peaceable entrance upon the government. Many are persuaded that you have been strangely kept from participating in any of our late bloody contentions, that God might make you the healer of our breaches, and employ you in that temple work which David himself might not be honoured with, though it was in his mind, because he shed blood abundantly, and made great wars." Stronger minds and less gentle hearts than that of Richard repelled with natural indignation counsels which rebuked all the contending parties. Amongst these was "one Malpas, an old scandalous minister," "and Edward Bagshawe, a young man who had written formerly against monarchy, and afterwards against Bishop Morley, and being of a resolute Roman spirit, was sent first to the Tower, and then lay in a horrid dungeon;" and who wrote a book "full of untruths, which the furious temerarious man did utter out of the rashness of his mind." In his dungeon, poor Bagshawe died, and Baxter closes the debate with tenderness and pathos. "While we wrangle here in the dark, we are dying, and passing to the world that will decide all our controversies, and the safest pas sage thither is by peaceable holiness." Dr. | the universal antagonist, the Quakers assailed Owen, one of the foremost in the first rank of divines of his age, had borne much; but these exhortations to concord he could not bear; and he taught his monitor, that he who undertakes | to reconcile enemies must be prepared for the loss of friends. It was on every account a desperate endeavour. Baxter was opposed to every sect, and belonged to none. He can be properly described only as a Baxterian-at once the founder and the single disciple of an eclectic school, within the portals of which he invited all men, but persuaded none, to take refuge from their mutual animosities. him with their tongues. Who could recognise, in the gentle and benevolent people who now bear that name, a trace of their ancestral character, of which Baxter has left the following singular record? "The Quakers in their shops, when I go along London streets, say, alas! poor man, thou art yet in darkness. They have often come to the congregation, when I had liberty to preach Christ's gospel, and cried out against me as a deceiver of the people. They have followed me home, crying out in the streets, the day of the Lord is coming, and thou shalt perish as a deceiver.' They Had Baxter been content merely to establish have stood in the market-place, and under my truth, and to decline the refutation of error, window, year after year, crying to the people, many might have listened to a voice so ear-take heed of your priests, they deceive your nest, and to counsels so profound. But, "while souls;' and if any one wore a lace or neat he spoke to them of peace, he made him ready clothing, they cried out to me, these are the for battle." Ten volumes, many of them full-fruits of your ministry." grown quartos, vindicated his secession from the Church of England. Five other batteries, equally well served, were successively opened against the Antinomians, the Quakers, the Baptists, the Millenarians, and the Grotians. The last, of whom Dodwell was the leader, typified, in the reign of Charles, the divines who flourish at Oxford in the reign of Victoria. Long it were, and not very profitable, to record the events of these theological campaigns. They brought into the field Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and Dodwell. The men of learning were aided by the men of wit. Under the nom de guerre of "Tilenus Junior," Womack, the bishop of St. David's, had incurred Baxter's censure for his "abusive, virulent accusations of the synod of Dort." To this attack appeared an answer, entitled, "The Examination of Tilenus before the Triers, in order to his intended settlement in the office of a public preacher in the commonwealth of Utopia." Among the jurors empannelled for the trial of Tilenus, are "Messrs. Absolute," "Fatality," "Preterition," "Narrow Grace, alias Stint Grace," "Take o' Trust," "Know Little," and "Dubious," the last the established sobriquet for Richard Baxter. But neither smile nor sigh could be extorted from the veteran polemic; nor, in truth, had he much right to be angry. If not with equal pleasantry, he had with at least equal freedom, invented appellations for his opponents;-designating Dodwell, or his system, as "Leviathan, absolute, destructive Prelacy, the son of Abaddon, Apollyon, and not of Jesus Christ." Statesmen joined in the affray. Morice, Charles's first secretary of state, contributed a treatise; and Lauderdale, who, with all his faults, was an accomplished scholar, and amidst all his inconsistencies, a stanch Presbyterian, accepted the dedication of one of Baxter's controversial pieces, and presented him with twenty guineas. The unvarying kindness to the persecuted nonconformist of one who was himself a relentless persecutor, is less strange than the fact, that the future courtier of Charles read, during his imprisonment at Windsor, the whole of Baxter's then published works, and, as their grateful author records, remembered them better than himself. While the pens of the wise, the witty, and the great, were thus employed against Against the divorce of divinity and politics, Baxter vehemently protested, as the putting asunder of things which a sacred ordinance had joined together. He therefore published a large volume, entitled "The Holy Commonwealth; a Plea for the cause of Monarchy, but as under God the Universal Monarch." Far better to have roused against himself all the quills which had ever bristled on all the " fretful porcupines" of theological strife. For, while vindicating the ancient government of England, he hazarded a distinct avowal of opinions, which, with their patrons, were to be proscribed with the return of the legitimate sovereign. He taught that the laws of England are above the king; that Parliament was his highest court, where his personal will and word were not sufficient authority. He vindicated the war against Charles, and explained the apostolical principle of obedience to the higher powers as extending to the senate as well as to the emperor. The royal power had been given "for the common good, and no cause could warrant the king to make the commonwealth the party which he should exercise hostility against." All this was published at the moment of the fall of Richard Cromwell. Amidst the multitude of answers which it provoked may be especially noticed those of Harrington, the author of the "Oceana,” and of Edward Pettit. "The former," says Baxter, "seemed in a Bethlehem rage, for, by way of scorn, he printed half a sheet of foolish jests, in such words as idiots or drunkards use, railing at ministers as a pack of fools and knaves, and, by his gibberish derision, persuading men that we deserve no other answer than such scorn and nonsense as beseemeth fools. With most insolent pride, he carried it as neither I nor any ministers understood at all what policy was; but prated against we knew not what, and had presumed to speak against other men's art which he was master of, and his knowledge, to such idiots as we, incomprehensible." Pettit placed Baxter in hell, where Bradshawe acts as president, and Hobbes and Neville strive in vain for the crown which he awards to the nonconformist for pre-eminence of evil and mischief on earth. "Let him come in," exclaims the new Rhadamanthus, "and be crowned with wreaths of serpents, and chaplets of adders. Let his tri- | umphant chariot be a pulpit drawn on the wheels of cannon by a brace of wolves in sheep's clothing. Let the ancient fathers of the Church, whom out of ignorance he has vilified; the reverend and learned prelates, whom out of pride and malice he has belied, abused, and persecuted; the most righteous king, whose murder he has justified-let them all be bound in chains to attend his infernal triumph to his 'Saint's Everlasting Rest;' then make room, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites, atheists, and politicians, for the greatest rebel on earth, and next to him that fell from heaven." Nor was this all. The "Holy Commonwealth" was amongst the books which the University of Oxford sentenced to the flames which had been less innocently kindled at the same place in a former generation, against the persons of men who had dared to proclaim unwelcome truths. Morley and many others branded it as treason; and the king was taught to regard the author as one of the most inveterate enemies of the royal authority. South joined in the universal clamour; and Baxter, in his autobiography, records, that when that great wit and author had been called to preach before the king, and a vast congregation drawn together by his high celebrity, he was compelled, after a quarter of an hour, to desist, and to retire from the pulpit exclaiming, "the Lord be merciful to our infirmities!" The sermon, which should have been recited, was afterwards published, and it appeared that the passage at which South's presence of mind had failed him, was an invective against the "Holy Commonwealth." After enduring for ten years the storm which his book had provoked, Baxter took the very singular course of publishing a revocation, desiring the world to consider it as non scriptum;-maintaining the while the general principles of his work, and "protesting against the judgment of posterity, and all others that were not of the same time and place, as to the mental censure either of the book or revocation, as being ignorant of the true reasons of them both." We, therefore, who, for the present, constitute the posterity, against whose rash judgment this protest was entered, should be wary in censuring what, it must be confessed, is not very intelligible, except, indeed, as it is not difficult to perceive, motives enough for retreating from an unprofitable strife, even though the retreat could not be very skilfully accomplished. Two volumes of Ecclesiastical History, the first a quarto of five hundred pages, the second a less voluminous vindication of its predecessor, attest the extent of Baxter's labours in this department of theological literature, and the stupendous compass of his reading. The authorities he enumerates, and from a diligent study of which his work is drawn, would form a considerable library. Such labours as those we have mentioned, might seem to have left no vacant space in a life otherwise so actively employed. But these books, and the vast mass of unpublished manuscripts, are not the most extensive, as they are incomparably the least valuable, of the produce of his solitary hours. With the exception of Grotius, Baxter is the first of that long series of writers who have undertaken to establish the truth of Christianity, by a systematic exhibition of the evidence and the arguments in favour of the divine origin of our faith. All homage to their cause, for we devoutly believe it to be the cause of truth! Be it acknowledged that their labours could not have been declined, without yielding a temporary and dangerous triumph to sophistry and presumptuous ignorance. Admit (as indeed it is scarcely possible to exaggerate) their boundless superiority to their antagonists in learning, in good faith, in sagacity, in range and depth of thought, and in whatever else was requisite in this momentous controversy;-concede, as for ourselves we delight to confess, that they have advanced their proofs to the utmost heights of probability which by such reasonings it is possible to scale; with these concessions may not inconsistently be combined some distaste for these inquiries, and some doubt of their real value. The sacred writers have none of the timidity of their modern apologists. They never sue for an assent to their doctrines, but authoritatively command the acceptance of them. They denounce unbelief as guilt, and insist on faith as a virtue of the highest order. In their Catholic invitations, the intellectual not less than the social distinctions of mankind are unheeded. Every student of their writings is aware of these facts; but the solution of them is less commonly observed. It is, we apprehend, that the apostolic authors assume the existence in all men of a spiritual discernment, enabling the mind, when unclouded by appetite or passion, to recognise and distinguish the Divine voice, whether uttered from within by the intimations of conscience, or speaking from without in the language of inspired oracles. They presuppose that vigour of understanding may consist with feebleness of reason; and that the power of discriminating between religious truths and error does not chiefly depend on the culture, or on the exercise of the mere argumentative faculty. The especial patrimony of the poor and illiterate-the gospel-has been the stay of countless millions who never framed a syllogism. Of the great multitudes whom no man can number, who before and since the birth of Grotius have lived in the peace, and died in the consolations of our faith, how incomparably few are they whose convictions have been derived from the study of works like his! Of the numbers who have addicted themselves to such studies, how small is the proportion of those who have brought to the task either learning, or leisure, or industry sufficient to enable them to form an independent judgment on the questions in debate! Called to the exercise of a judicial function for which he is but ill prepared-addressed by pleadings on an issue where his prepossessions are all but unalterable, bidden to examine evidences which he has most rarely the skill, the learning, or the leisure to verify, and pressed by arguments, sometimes overstrained, and sometimes fallacious-he who lays the foundations of his faith in such “ evidences” will but too com |