The picture drawn by a late English historian of the infamous Jeffreys in
his judicial robes, sitting in judgment upon the venerable Richard
Baxter, brought before him to answer to an indictment, setting; forth
that the said "Richardus Baxter, persona seditiosa et factiosa pravae
mentis, impiae, inquietae, turbulent disposition et conversation; falso
illicte, injuste nequit factiose seditiose, et irreligiose, fecit,
composuit, scripsit quendam falsum, seditiosum, libellosum, factiosum et
irreligiosum librum," is so remarkable that the attention of the most
careless reader is at once arrested. Who was that old man, wasted with
disease and ghastly with the pallor of imprisonment, upon whom the foul-
mouthed buffoon in ermine exhausted his vocabulary of abuse and ridicule?
Who was Richardus Baxter?
The author of works so elaborate and profound as to frighten by their
very titles and ponderous folios the modern ecclesiastical student from
their perusal, his hold upon the present generation is limited to a few
practical treatises, which, from their very nature, can never become
obsolete. The Call to the Unconverted and the Saints' Everlasting
Rest belong to no time or sect. They speak the universal language of
the wants and desires of the human soul. They take hold of the awful
verities of life and death, righteousness and judgment to come. Through
them the suffering and hunted minister of Kidderminster has spoken in
warning, entreaty, and rebuke, or in tones of tenderest love and pity, to
the hearts of the generations which have succeeded him. His
controversial works, his confessions of faith, his learned disputations,
and his profound doctrinal treatises are no longer read. Their author
himself, towards the close of his life, anticipated, in respect to these
favorite productions, the children of his early zeal, labor, and
suffering, the judgment of posterity. "I perceive," he says, "that most
of the doctrinal controversies among Protestants are far more about
equivocal words than matter. Experience since the year 1643 to this year
1675 hath loudly called me to repent of my own prejudices, sidings, and
censurings of causes and persons not understood, and of all the
miscarriages of my ministry and life which have been thereby caused; and
to make it my chief work to call men that are within my bearing to more
peaceable thoughts, affections, and practices."
Richard Baxter was born at the village of Eton Constantine, in 1615. He
received from officiating curates of the little church such literary
instruction as could be given by men who had left the farmer's flail, the
tailor's thimble, and the service of strolling stage-players, to perform
church drudgery under the parish incumbent, who was old and well-nigh
blind. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to a school at Wroxeter, where
he spent three years, to little purpose, so far as a scientific education
was concerned. His teacher left him to himself mainly, and following the
bent of his mind, even at that early period, he abandoned the exact
sciences for the perusal of such controversial and metaphysical writings
of the schoolmen as his master's library afforded. The smattering of
Latin which he acquired only served in after years to deform his
treatises with barbarous, ill-adapted, and erroneous citations. "As to
myself," said he, in his letter written in old age to Anthony Wood, who
had inquired whether he was an Oxonian graduate, "my faults are no
disgrace to a university, for I was of none; I have but little but what I
had out of books and inconsiderable help of country divines. Weakness
and pain helped me to study how to die; that set me a-studying how to
live; and that on studying the doctrine from which I must fetch my
motives and comforts; beginning with necessities, I proceeded by degrees,
and am now going to see that for which I have lived and studied."
Of the first essays of the young theologian as a preacher of the
Established Church, his early sufferings from that complication of
diseases with which his whole life was tormented, of the still keener
afflictions of a mind whose entire outlook upon life and nature was
discolored and darkened by its disordered bodily medium, and of the
struggles between his Puritan temperament and his reverence for Episcopal
formulas, much might be profitably said, did the limits we have assigned
ourselves admit. Nor can we do more than briefly allude to the religious
doubts and difficulties which darkened and troubled his mind at an early
period.
He tells us at length in his Life how he struggled with these spiritual
infirmities and temptations. The future life, the immortality of the
soul, and the truth of the Scriptures were by turns questioned. "I
never," says he in a letter to Dr. More, inserted in the Sadducisimus
Triumphatus, "had so much ado to overcome a temptation as that to the
opinion of Averroes, that, as extinguished candles go all out in an
illuminated air, so separated souls go all into one common anima mundi,
and lose their individuation." With these and similar "temptations"
Baxter struggled long, earnestly, and in the end triumphantly. His
faith, when once established, remained unshaken to the last; and although
always solemn, reverential, and deeply serious, he was never the subject
of religious melancholy, or of that mournful depression of soul which
arises from despair of an interest in the mercy and paternal love of our
common Father.
The Great Revolution found him settled as a minister in Kidderminster,
under the sanction of a drunken vicar, who, yielding to the clamor of his
more sober parishioners, and his fear of their appeal to the Long
Parliament, then busy in its task of abating church nuisances, had agreed
to give him sixty pounds per year, in the place of a poor tippling
curate, notorious as a common railer and pothouse encumbrance.
As might have been expected, the sharp contrast which the earnest,
devotional spirit and painful strictness of Baxter presented to the
irreverent license and careless good humor of his predecessor by no means
commended him to the favor of a large class of his parishioners. Sabbath
merry-makers missed the rubicund face and maudlin jollity of their old
vicar; the ignorant and vicious disliked the new preacher's rigid
morality; the better informed revolted at his harsh doctrines, austere
life, and grave manner. Intense earnestness characterized all his
efforts. Contrasting human nature with the Infinite Purity and Holiness,
he was oppressed with the sense of the loathsomeness and deformity of
sin, and afflicted by the misery of his fellow-creatures separated from
the divine harmony. He tells us that at this period he preached the
terrors of the Law and the necessity of repentance, rather than the joys
and consolations of the Gospel, upon which he so loved to dwell in his
last years. He seems to have felt a necessity laid upon him to startle
men from false hope and security, and to call for holiness of life and
conformity to the divine will as the only ground of safety. Powerful and
impressive as are the appeals and expostulations contained in his written
works, they probably convey but a faint idea of the force and earnestness
of those which he poured forth from his pulpit. As he advanced in years,
these appeals were less frequently addressed to the fears of his
auditors, for he had learned to value a calm and consistent life of
practical goodness beyond any passionate exhibition of terrors, fervors,
and transports. Having witnessed, in an age of remarkable enthusiasm and
spiritual awakening, the ill effects of passional excitements and
religious melancholy, he endeavored to present cheerful views of
Christian life and duty, and made it a special object to repress morbid
imaginations and heal diseased consciences. Thus it came to pass that no
man of his day was more often applied to for counsel and relief by
persons laboring under mental depression than himself. He has left
behind him a very curious and not uninstructive discourse, which he
entitled The Cure of Melancholy, by Faith and Physick, in which he shows
a great degree of skill in his morbid mental anatomy. He had studied
medicine to some extent for the benefit of the poor of his parish, and
knew something of the intimate relations and sympathy of the body and
mind; he therefore did not hesitate to ascribe many of the spiritual
complaints of his applicants to disordered bodily functions, nor to
prescribe pills and powders in the place of Scripture texts. More than
thirty years after the commencement of his labors at Kidderminster he
thus writes: "I was troubled this year with multitudes of melancholy
persons from several places of the land; some of high quality, some of
low, some exquisitely learned, and some unlearned. I know not how it
came to pass, but if men fell melancholy I must hear from them or see
them, more than any physician I knew." He cautions against ascribing
melancholy phantasms and passions to the Holy Spirit, warns the young
against licentious imaginations and excitements, and ends by advising all
to take heed how they make of religion a matter of "fears, tears, and
scruples." "True religion," he remarks, "doth principally consist in
obedience, love, and joy."
At this early period of his ministry, however, he had all of Whitefield's
intensity and fervor, added to reasoning powers greatly transcending
those of the revivalist of the next century. Young in years, he was even
then old in bodily infirmity and mental experience. Believing himself
the victim of a mortal disease, he lived and preached in the constant
prospect of death. His memento mori was in his bed-chamber, and sat by
him at his frugal meal. The glory of the world was stained to his
vision. He was blind to the beauty of all its "pleasant pictures." No
monk of Mount Athos or silent Chartreuse, no anchorite of Indian
superstition, ever more completely mortified the flesh, or turned his
back more decidedly upon the "good things" of this life. A solemn and
funeral atmosphere surrounded him. He walked in the shadows of the
cypress, and literally "dwelt among the tombs." Tortured by incessant
pain, be wrestled against its attendant languor and debility, as a sinful
wasting of inestimable time; goaded himself to constant toil and
devotional exercise, and, to use his own words, "stirred up his sluggish
soul to speak to sinners with compassion, as a dying man to dying men."
Such entire consecration could not long be without its effect, even upon
the "vicious rabble," as Baxter calls them. His extraordinary
earnestness, self-forgetting concern for the spiritual welfare of others,
his rigid life of denial and sacrifice, if they failed of bringing men to
his feet as penitents, could not but awaken a feeling of reverence and
awe. In Kidderminster, as in most other parishes of the kingdom, there
were at this period pious, sober, prayerful people, diligent readers of
the Scriptures, who were derided by their neighbors as Puritans,
precisians, and hypocrites. These were naturally drawn towards the new
preacher, and he as naturally recognized them as "honest seekers of the
word and way of God." Intercourse with such men, and the perusal of the
writings of certain eminent Non-conformists, had the effect to abate, in
some degree, his strong attachment to the Episcopal formula and polity.
He began to doubt the rightfulness of making the sign of the cross in
baptism, and to hesitate about administering the sacrament to profane
swearers and tipplers.
But while Baxter, in the seclusion of his parish, was painfully weighing
the arguments for and against the wearing of surplices, the use of
marriage rings, and the prescribed gestures and genuflections of his
order, tithing with more or less scruple of conscience the mint and anise
and cummin of pulpit ceremonials, the weightier matters of the law,
freedom, justice, and truth were claiming the attention of Pym and
Hampden, Brook and Vane, in the Parliament House. The controversy
between King and Commons had reached the point where it could only be
decided by the dread arbitrament of battle. The somewhat equivocal
position of the Kidderminster preacher exposed him to the suspicion of
the adherents of the King and Bishops. The rabble, at that period
sympathizing with the party of license in morals and strictness in
ceremonials, insulted and mocked him, and finally drove him from his
parish.
On the memorable 23d of tenth month, 1642, he was invited to occupy a
friend's pulpit at Alcester.
While preaching, a low, dull, jarring roll, as of continuous thunder,
sounded in his ears. It was the cannon-fire of Edgehill, the prelude to
the stern battle-piece of revolution. On the morrow, Baxter hurried to
the scene of action. "I was desirous," he says, "to see the field. I
found the Earl of Essex keeping the ground, and the King's army facing
them on a hill about a mile off. There were about a thousand dead bodies
in the field between them." Turning from this ghastly survey, the
preacher mingled with the Parliamentary army, when, finding the surgeons
busy with the wounded, he very naturally sought occasion for the exercise
of his own vocation as a spiritual practitioner. He attached himself to
the army. So far as we can gather from his own memoirs and the testimony
of his contemporaries, he was not influenced to this step by any of the
political motives which actuated the Parliamentary leaders. He was no
revolutionist. He was as blind and unquestioning in his reverence for
the King's person and divine right, and as hearty in his hatred of
religious toleration and civil equality, as any of his clerical brethren
who officiated in a similar capacity in the ranks of Goring and Prince
Rupert. He seems only to have looked upon the soldiers as a new set of
parishioners, whom Providence had thrown in his way. The circumstances
of his situation left him little choice in the matter. "I had," he says,
"neither money nor friends. I knew not who would receive me in a place
of safety, nor had I anything to satisfy them for diet and
entertainment." He accepted an offer to live in the Governor's house at
Coventry, and preach to the soldiers of the garrison. Here his skill in
polemics was called into requisition, in an encounter with two New
England Antinomians, and a certain Anabaptist tailor who was making more
rents in the garrison's orthodoxy than he mended in their doublets and
breeches. Coventry seems at this time to have been the rendezvous of a
large body of clergymen, who, as Baxter says, were "for King and
Parliament,"--men who, in their desire for a more spiritual worship, most
unwillingly found themselves classed with the sentries whom they regarded
as troublers and heretics, not to be tolerated; who thought the King had
fallen into the hands of the Papists, and that Essex and Cromwell were
fighting to restore him; and who followed the Parliamentary forces to see
to it that they were kept sound in faith, and free from the heresy of
which the Court News-Book accused them. Of doing anything to overturn
the order of Church and State, or of promoting any radical change in the
social and political condition of the people, they had no intention
whatever. They looked at the events of the time, and upon their duties
in respect to them, not as politicians or reformers, but simply as
ecclesiastics and spiritual teachers, responsible to God for the
religious beliefs and practices of the people, rather than for their
temporal welfare and happiness. They were not the men who struck down
the solemn and imposing prelacy of England, and vindicated the divine
right of men to freedom by tossing the head of an anointed tyrant from
the scaffold at Whitehall. It was the so-called sebismatics, ranters,
and levellers, the disputatious corporals and Anabaptist musketeers, the
dread and abhorrence alike of prelate and presbyter, who, under the lead
of Cromwell,
"Ruined the great work of time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mould."
The Commonwealth was the work of the laity, the sturdy yeomanry and God-
fearing commoners of England.
The news of the fight of Naseby reaching Coventry, Baxter, who had
friends in the Parliamentary forces, wishing, as he says, to be assured
of their safety, passed over to the stricken field, and spent a night
with them. He was afflicted and confounded by the information which they
gave him, that the victorious army was full of hot-headed schemers and
levellers, who were against King and Church, prelacy and ritual, and who
were for a free Commonwealth and freedom of religious belief and worship.
He was appalled to find that the heresies of the Antinomians, Arminians,
and Anabaptists had made sadder breaches in the ranks of Cromwell than
the pikes of Jacob Astley, or the daggers of the roysterers who followed
the mad charge of Rupert. Hastening back to Coventry, he called together
his clerical brethren, and told them "the sad news of the corruption of
the army." After much painful consideration of the matter, it was deemed
best for Baxter to enter Cromwell's army, nominally as its chaplain, but
really as the special representative of orthodoxy in politics and
religion, against the democratic weavers and prophesying tailors who
troubled it. He joined Whalley's regiment, and followed it through many
a hot skirmish and siege. Personal fear was by no means one of Baxter's
characteristics, and he bore himself through all with the coolness of an
old campaigner. Intent upon his single object, he sat unmoved under the
hail of cannon-shot from the walls of Bristol, confronted the well-plied
culverins of Sherburne, charged side by side with Harrison upon Goring's
musketeers at Langford, and heard the exulting thanksgiving of that grim
enthusiast, when "with a loud voice he broke forth in praises of God, as
one in rapture;" and marched, Bible in hand, with Cromwell himself, to
the storming of Basing-House, so desperately defended by the Marquis of
Winchester. In truth, these storms of outward conflict were to him of
small moment. He was engaged in a sterner battle with spiritual
principalities and powers, struggling with Satan himself in the guise of
political levellers and Antinomian sowers of heresy. No antagonist was
too high and none too low for him. Distrusting Cromwell, he sought to
engage him in a discussion of certain points of abstract theology,
wherein his soundness seemed questionable; but the wary chief baffled off
the young disputant by tedious, unanswerable discourses about free grace,
which Baxter admits were not unsavory to others, although the speaker
himself had little understanding of the matter. At other times, he
repelled his sad-visaged chaplain with unwelcome jests and rough,
soldierly merriment; for he had "a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as
another man hath when he hath taken a cup too much." Baxter says of him,
complainingly, "he would not dispute with me at all." But, in the midst
of such an army, he could not lack abundant opportunity for the exercise
of his peculiar powers of argumentation. At Amersham, he had a sort of
pitched battle with the contumacious soldiers. "When the public talking
day came," says he, "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
with them from morning until almost night; for I knew their trick, that
if I had gone out first, they would have prated what boasting words they
listed, and made the people believe that they had baffled me, or got the
best; therefore I stayed it out till they first rose and went away." As
usual in such cases, both parties claimed the victory. Baxter got thanks
only from the King's adherents; "Pitchford's troops and the leader of the
Chesham men" retired from their hard day's work, to enjoy the countenance
and favor of Cromwell, as men after his own heart, faithful to the Houses
and the Word, against kingcraft and prelacy.
Laughed at and held at arm's length by Cromwell, shunned by Harrison and
Berry and other chief officers, opposed on all points by shrewd, earnest
men, as ready for polemic controversy as for battle with the King's
malignants, and who set off against his theological and metaphysical
distinctions their own personal experiences and spiritual exercises, he
had little to encourage him in his arduous labors. Alone in such a
multitude, flushed with victory and glowing with religious enthusiasm,
he earnestly begged his brother ministers to come to his aid. "If the
army," said he, "had only ministers enough, who could have done such
little as I did, all their plot might have been broken, and King,
Parliament, and Religion might have been preserved." But no one
volunteered to assist him, and the "plot" of revolution went on.
After Worcester fight he returned to Coventry, to make his report to the
ministers assembled there. He told them of his labors and trials, of the
growth of heresy and levelling principles in the army, and of the evident
design of its leaders to pull down Church, King, and Ministers. He
assured them that the day was at hand when all who were true to the King,
Parliament, and Religion should come forth to oppose these leaders, and
draw away their soldiers from them. For himself, he was willing to go
back to the army, and labor there until the crisis of which he spoke had
arrived. "Whereupon," says he, "they all voted me to go yet longer."
Fortunately for the cause of civil and religious freedom, the great body
of the ministers, who disapproved of the ultraism of the victorious army,
and sympathized with the defeated King, lacked the courage and
devotedness of Baxter. Had they promptly seconded his efforts, although
the restoration of the King might have been impossible at that late
period, the horrors of civil war must have been greatly protracted. As
it was, they preferred to remain at home, and let Baxter have the benefit
of their prayers and good wishes. He returned to the army with the
settled purpose, of causing its defection from Cromwell; but, by one of
those dispensations which the latter used to call "births of Providence,"
he was stricken down with severe sickness. Baxter's own comments upon
this passage in his life are not without interest. He says, God
prevented his purposes in his last and chiefest opposition to the army;
that he intended to take off or seduce from their officers the regiment
with which he was connected, and then to have tried his persuasion upon
the others. He says he afterwards found that his sickness was a mercy to
himself, "for they were so strong and active, and I had been likely to
have had small success in the attempt, and to have lost my life among
them in their fury." He was right in this last conjecture; Oliver
Cromwell would have had no scruples in making an example of a plotting
priest; and "Pitchford's soldiers" might have been called upon to
silence, with their muskets, the tough disputant who was proof against
their tongues.
After a long and dubious illness, Baxter was so far restored as to be
able to go back to his old parish at Kidderminster. Here, under the
Protectorate of Cromwell, he remained in the full enjoyment of that
religious liberty which he still stoutly condemned in its application to
others.
He afterwards candidly admits, that, under the "Usurper," as he styles
Cromwell, "he had such liberty and advantage to preach the Gospel with
success, as he could not have under a King, to whom he had sworn and
performed true subjection and obedience." Yet this did not prevent him
from preaching and printing, "seasonably and moderately," against the
Protector. "I declared," said he, "Cromwell and his adherents to be
guilty of treason and rebellion, aggravated by perfidiousness and
hypocrisy. But yet I did not think it my duty to rave against him in the
pulpit, or to do this so unseasonably and imprudently as might irritate
him to mischief. And the rather, because, as he kept up his approbation
of a godly life in general, and of all that was good, except that which
the interest of his sinful cause engaged him to be against. So I
perceived that it was his design to do good in the main, and to promote
the Gospel and the interests of godliness more than any had done before
him."
Cromwell, if he heard of his diatribes against him, appears to have cared
little for them. Lords Warwick and Broghill, on one occasion, brought
him to preach before the Lord Protector. He seized the occasion to
preach against the sentries, to condemn all who countenanced them, and to
advocate the unity of the Church. Soon after, he was sent for by
Cromwell, who made "a long and tedious speech" in the presence of three
of his chief men, (one of whom, General Lambert, fell asleep the while,)
asserting that God had owned his government in a signal manner. Baxter
boldly replied to him, that he and his friends regarded the ancient
monarchy as a blessing, and not an evil, and begged to know how that
blessing was forfeited to England, and to whom that forfeiture was made.
Cromwell, with some heat, made answer that it was no forfeiture, but that
God had made the change. They afterwards held a long conference with
respect to freedom of conscience, Cromwell defending his liberal policy,
and Baxter opposing it. No one can read Baxter's own account of these
interviews, without being deeply impressed with the generous and
magnanimous spirit of the Lord Protector in tolerating the utmost freedom
of speech on the part of one who openly denounced him as a traitor and
usurper. Real greatness of mind could alone have risen above personal
resentment under such circumstances of peculiar aggravation.
In the death of the Protector, the treachery of Monk, and the restoration
of the King, Baxter and his Presbyterian friends believed that they saw
the hand of a merciful Providence preparing the way for the best good of
England and the Church. Always royalists, they had acted with the party
opposed to the King from necessity rather than choice. Considering all
that followed, one can scarcely avoid smiling over the extravagant
jubilations of the Presbyterian divines, on the return of the royal
debauchee to Whitehall. They hurried up to London with congratulations
of formidable length and papers of solemn advice and counsel, to all
which the careless monarch listened, with what patience he was master of.
Baxter was one of the first to present himself at Court, and it is
creditable to his heart rather than his judgment and discrimination that
he seized the occasion to offer a long address to the King, expressive of
his expectation that his Majesty would discountenance all sin and promote
godliness, support the true exercise of Church discipline and cherish and
hold up the hands of the faithful ministers of the Church. To all which
Charles II. "made as gracious an answer as we could expect," says Baxter,
"insomuch that old Mr. Ash burst out into tears of joy." Who doubts that
the profligate King avenged himself as soon as the backs of his unwelcome
visitors were fairly turned, by coarse jests and ribaldry, directed
against a class of men whom he despised and hated, but towards whom
reasons of policy dictated a show of civility and kindness?
There is reason to believe that Charles II., had he been able to effect
his purpose, would have gone beyond Cromwell himself in the matter of
religious toleration; in other words, he would have taken, in the outset
of his reign, the very steps which cost his successor his crown, and
procured the toleration of Catholics by a declaration of universal
freedom in religion. But he was not in a situation to brave the
opposition alike of Prelacy and Presbyterianism, and foiled in a scheme
to which he was prompted by that vague, superstitious predilection for
the Roman Catholic religion which at times struggled with his habitual
scepticism, his next object was to rid himself of the importunities of
sentries and the trouble of religious controversies by reestablishing the
liturgy, and bribing or enforcing conformity to it on the part of the
Presbyterians. The history of the successful execution of this purpose
is familiar to all the readers of the plausible pages of Clarendon on the
one side, or the complaining treatises of Neal and Calamy on the other.
Charles and his advisers triumphed, not so much through their own art,
dissimulation, and bad faith as through the blind bigotry, divided
counsels, and self-seeking of the Nonconformists. Seduction on one hand
and threats on the other, the bribe of bishoprics, hatred of Independents
and Quakers, and the terror of penal laws, broke the strength of
Presbyterianism.
Baxter's whole conduct, on this occasion, bears testimony to his honesty
and sincerity, while it shows him to have been too intolerant to secure
his own religious freedom at the price of toleration for Catholics,
Quakers, and Anabaptists; and too blind in his loyalty to perceive that
pure and undefiled Christianity had nothing to hope for from a scandalous
and depraved King, surrounded by scoffing, licentious courtiers and a
haughty, revengeful prelacy. To secure his influence, the Court offered
him the bishopric of Hereford. Superior to personal considerations, he
declined the honor; but somewhat inconsistently, in his zeal for the
interests of his party, he urged the elevation of at least three of his
Presbyterian friends to the Episcopal bench, to enforce that very liturgy
which they condemned. He was the chief speaker for the Presbyterians at
the famous Savoy Conference, summoned to advise and consult upon the Book
of Common Prayer. His antagonist was Dr. Gunning, ready, fluent, and
impassioned. "They spent," as Gilbert Burnet says, "several days in
logical arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon them as a
couple of fencers, engaged in a discussion which could not be brought to
an end." In themselves considered, many of the points at issue seem
altogether too trivial for the zeal with which Baxter contested them,--
the form of a surplice, the wording of a prayer, kneeling at sacrament,
the sign of the cross, etc. With him, however, they were of momentous
interest and importance, as things unlawful in the worship of God. He
struggled desperately, but unavailingly. Presbyterianism, in its
eagerness for peace and union and a due share of State support, had
already made fatal concessions, and it was too late to stand upon non-
essentials. Baxter retired from the conference baffled and defeated,
amidst murmurs and jests. "If you had only been as fat as Dr. Manton,"
said Clarendon to him, "you would have done well."
The Act of Conformity, in which Charles II. and his counsellors gave the
lie to the liberal declarations of Breda and Whitehall, drove Baxter from
his sorrowing parishioners of Kidderminster, and added the evils of
poverty and persecution to the painful bodily infirmities under which he
was already bowed down. Yet his cup was not one of unalloyed bitterness,
and loving lips were prepared to drink it with him.
Among Baxter's old parishioners of Kidderminster was a widowed lady of
gentle birth, named Charlton, who, with her daughter Margaret, occupied a
house in his neighborhood. The daughter was a brilliant girl, of
"strangely vivid wit," and "in early youth," he tells us, "pride, and
romances, and company suitable thereunto, did take her up." But erelong,
Baxter, who acted in the double capacity of spiritual and temporal
physician, was sent for to visit her, on an occasion of sickness. He
ministered to her bodily and mental sufferings, and thus secured her
gratitude and confidence. On her recovery, under the influence of his
warnings and admonitions, the gay young girl became thoughtful and
serious, abandoned her light books and companions, and devoted herself to
the duties of a Christian profession. Baxter was her counsellor and
confidant. She disclosed to him all her doubts, trials, and temptations,
and he, in return, wrote her long letters of sympathy, consolation, and
encouragement. He began to feel such an unwonted interest in the moral
and spiritual growth of his young disciple, that, in his daily walks
among his parishioners, he found himself inevitably drawn towards her
mother's dwelling. In her presence, the habitual austerity of his manner
was softened; his cold, close heart warmed and expanded. He began to
repay her confidence with his own, disclosing to her all his plans of
benevolence, soliciting her services, and waiting, with deference, for
her judgment upon them. A change came over his habits of thought and his
literary tastes; the harsh, rude disputant, the tough, dry logician,
found himself addressing to his young friend epistles in verse on
doctrinal points and matters of casuistry; Westminster Catechism in
rhyme; the Solemn League and Covenant set to music. A miracle alone
could have made Baxter a poet; the cold, clear light of reason "paled the
ineffectual fires" of his imagination; all things presented themselves to
his vision "with hard outlines, colorless, and with no surrounding
atmosphere." That he did, nevertheless, write verses, so creditable as
to justify a judicious modern critic in their citation and approval, can
perhaps be accounted for only as one of the phenomena of that subtle and
transforming influence to which even his stern nature was unconsciously
yielding. Baxter was in love.
Never did the blind god try his archery on a more unpromising subject.
Baxter was nearly fifty years of age, and looked still older. His life
had been one long fast and penance. Even in youth he had never known a
schoolboy's love for cousin or playmate. He had resolutely closed up his
heart against emotions which he regarded as the allurements of time and
sense. He had made a merit of celibacy, and written and published
against the entanglement of godly ministers in matrimonial engagements
and family cares. It is questionable whether he now understood his own
case, or attributed to its right cause the peculiar interest which he
felt in Margaret Charlton. Left to himself, it is more than probable
that he might never have discovered the true nature of that interest, or
conjectured that anything whatever of earthly passion or sublunary
emotion had mingled with his spiritual Platonism. Commissioned and set
apart to preach repentance to dying men, penniless and homeless, worn
with bodily pain and mental toil, and treading, as he believed, on the
very margin of his grave, what had he to do with love? What power had he
to inspire that tender sentiment, the appropriate offspring only of
youth, and health, and beauty?
"Could any Beatrice see
A lover in such anchorite!"
But in the mean time a reciprocal feeling was gaining strength in the
heart of Margaret. To her grateful appreciation of the condescension of
a great and good man--grave, learned, and renowned--to her youth and
weakness, and to her enthusiastic admiration of his intellectual powers,
devoted to the highest and holiest objects, succeeded naturally enough
the tenderly suggestive pity of her woman's heart, as she thought of his
lonely home, his unshared sorrows, his lack of those sympathies and
kindnesses which make tolerable the hard journey of life. Did she not
owe to him, under God, the salvation of body and mind? Was he not her
truest and most faithful friend, entering with lively interest into all
her joys and sorrows? Had she not seen the cloud of his habitual sadness
broken by gleams of sunny warmth and cheerfulness, as they conversed
together? Could she do better than devote herself to the pleasing task
of making his life happier, of comforting him in seasons of pain and
weariness, encouraging him in his vast labors, and throwing over the cold
and hard austerities of his nature the warmth and light of domestic
affection? Pity, reverence, gratitude, and womanly tenderness, her
fervid imagination and the sympathies of a deeply religious nature,
combined to influence her decision. Disparity of age and condition
rendered it improbable that Baxter would ever venture to address her in
any other capacity than that of a friend and teacher; and it was left to
herself to give the first intimation of the possibility of a more
intimate relation.
It is easy to imagine with what mixed feelings of joy, surprise, and
perplexity Baxter must have received the delicate avowal. There was much
in the circumstances of the case to justify doubt, misgiving, and close
searchings of heart. He must have felt the painful contrast which that
fair girl in the bloom of her youth presented to the worn man of middle
years, whose very breath was suffering, and over whom death seemed always
impending. Keenly conscious of his infirmities of temper, he must have
feared for the happiness of a loving, gentle being, daily exposed to
their manifestations. From his well-known habit of consulting what he
regarded as the divine will in every important step of his life, there
can be no doubt that his decision was the result quite as much of a
prayerful and patient consideration of duty as of the promptings of his
heart. Richard Baxter was no impassioned Abelard; his pupil in the
school of his severe and self-denying piety was no Heloise; but what
their union lacked in romantic interest was compensated by its purity and
disinterestedness, and its sanction by all that can hallow human passion,
and harmonize the love of the created with the love and service of the
Creator.
Although summoned by a power which it would have been folly to resist,
the tough theologian did not surrender at discretion. "From the first
thoughts yet many changes and stoppages intervened, and long delays," he
tells us. The terms upon which he finally capitulated are perfectly in
keeping with his character. "She consented," he says, "to three
conditions of our marriage. 1st. That I should have nothing that before
our marriage was hers; that I, who wanted no earthly supplies, might not
seem to marry her from selfishness. 2d. That she would so alter her
affairs that I might be entangled in no lawsuits. 3d. That she should
expect none of my time which my ministerial work should require."
As was natural, the wits of the Court had their jokes upon this singular
marriage; and many of his best friends regretted it, when they called to
mind what he had written in favor of ministerial celibacy, at a time
when, as he says, "he thought to live and die a bachelor." But Baxter
had no reason to regret the inconsistency of his precept and example.
How much of the happiness of the next twenty years of his life resulted
from his union with a kind and affectionate woman he has himself
testified, in his simple and touching Breviate of the Life of the late
Mrs. Baxter. Her affections were so ardent that her husband confesses
his fear that he was unable to make an adequate return, and that she must
have been disappointed in him in consequence. He extols her pleasant
conversation, her active benevolence, her disposition to aid him in all
his labors, and her noble forgetfulness of self, in ministering to his
comfort, in sickness and imprisonment. "She was the meetest helper I
could have had in the world," is his language. "If I spoke harshly or
sharply, it offended her. If I carried it (as I am apt) with too much
negligence of ceremony or humble compliment to any, she would modestly
tell me of it. If my looks seemed not pleasant, she would have me amend
them (which my weak, pained state of body indisposed me to do)." He
admits she had her failings, but, taken as a whole, the Breviate is an
exalted eulogy.
His history from this time is marked by few incidents of a public
character. During that most disgraceful period in the annals of England,
the reign of the second Charles, his peculiar position exposed him to the
persecutions of prelacy and the taunts and abuse of the sentries,
standing as he did between these extremes, and pleading for a moderate
Episcopacy. He was between the upper millstone of High Church and the
nether one of Dissent. To use his own simile, he was like one who seeks
to fill with his hand a cleft in a log, and feels both sides close upon
him with pain. All parties and sects had, as they thought, grounds of
complaint against him. There was in him an almost childish simplicity of
purpose, a headlong earnestness and eagerness, which did not allow him to
consider how far a present act or opinion harmonized with what he had
already done or written. His greatest admirers admit his lack of
judgment, his inaptitude for the management of practical matters. His
utter incapacity to comprehend rightly the public men and measures of his
day is abundantly apparent; and the inconsistencies of his conduct and
his writings are too marked to need comment. He suffered persecution for
not conforming to some trifling matters of Church usage, while he
advocated the doctrine of passive obedience to the King or ruling power,
and the right of that power to enforce conformity. He wrote against
conformity while himself conforming; seceded from the Church, and yet
held stated communion with it; begged for the curacy of Kidderminster,
and declined the bishopric of Hereford. His writings were many of them
directly calculated to make Dissenters from the Establishment, but he was
invariably offended to find others practically influenced by them, and
quarrelled with his own converts to Dissent. The High Churchmen of
Oxford burned his Holy Commonwealth as seditious and revolutionary; while
Harrington and the republican club of Miles's Coffee House condemned it
for its hostility to democracy and its servile doctrine of obedience to
kings. He made noble pleas for liberty of conscience and bitterly
complained of his own suffering from Church courts, yet maintained the
necessity of enforcing conformity, and stoutly opposed the tolerant
doctrines of Penn and Milton. Never did a great and good man so entangle
himself with contradictions and inconsistencies. The witty and wicked
Sir Roger L'Estrange compiled from the irreconcilable portions of his
works a laughable Dialogue between Richard and Baxter. The Antinomians
found him guilty of Socinianism; and one noted controversialist undertook
to show, not without some degree of plausibility, that he was by turns a
Quaker and a Papist!
Although able to suspend his judgment and carefully weigh evidence, upon
matters which he regarded as proper subjects of debate and scrutiny, he
possessed the power to shut out and banish at will all doubt and
misgiving in respect to whatever tended to prove, illustrate, or enforce
his settled opinions and cherished doctrines. His credulity at times
seems boundless. Hating the Quakers, and prepared to believe all manner
of evil of them, be readily came to the conclusion that their leaders
were disguised Papists. He maintained that Lauderdale was a good and
pious man, in spite of atrocities in Scotland which entitle him to a
place with Claverhouse; and indorsed the character of the infamous
Dangerfield, the inventor of the Meal-tub Plot, as a worthy convert from
popish errors. To prove the existence of devils and spirits, he
collected the most absurd stories and old-wives' fables, of soldiers
scared from their posts at night by headless bears, of a young witch
pulling the hooks out of Mr. Emlen's breeches and swallowing them, of Mr.
Beacham's locomotive tobacco-pipe, and the Rev. Mr. Munn's jumping Bible,
and of a drunken man punished for his intemperance by being lifted off
his legs by an invisible hand! Cotton Mather's marvellous account of his
witch experiments in New England delighted him. He had it republished,
declaring that "he must be an obstinate Sadducee who doubted it."
The married life of Baxter, as might be inferred from the state of the
times, was an unsettled one. He first took a house at Moorfields, then
removed to Acton, where he enjoyed the conversation of his neighbor, Sir
Matthew Hale; from thence he found refuge in Rickmansworth, and after
that in divers other places. "The women have most of this trouble," he
remarks, "but my wife easily bore it all." When unable to preach, his
rapid pen was always busy. Huge folios of controversial and doctrinal
lore followed each other in quick succession. He assailed Popery and the
Establishment, Anabaptists, ultra Calvinists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchy
men, and Quakers. His hatred of the latter was only modified by his
contempt. He railed rather than argued against the "miserable
creatures," as he styled them. They in turn answered him in like manner.
"The Quakers," he says, "in their shops, when I go along London streets,
say, 'Alas' poor man, thou art yet in darkness.' They have oft 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 have stood in the market-place, and under my
window, year after year, crying to the people, 'Take heed of your
priests, they deceive your souls;' and if any one wore a lace or neat
clothing, they cried out to me, 'These are the fruits of your ministry.'"
At Rickmansworth, he found himself a neighbor of William Penn, whom he
calls "the captain of the Quakers." Ever ready for battle, Baxter
encountered him in a public discussion, with such fierceness and
bitterness as to force from that mild and amiable civilian the remark,
that he would rather be Socrates at the final judgment than Richard
Baxter. Both lived to know each other better, and to entertain
sentiments of mutual esteem. Baxter himself admits that the Quakers, by
their perseverance in holding their religious meetings in defiance of
penal laws, took upon themselves the burden of persecution which would
otherwise have fallen upon himself and his friends; and makes special
mention of the noble and successful plea of Penn before the Recorder's
Court in London, based on the fundamental liberties of Englishmen and the
rights of the Great Charter.
The intolerance of Baxter towards the Separatists was turned against him
whenever he appealed to the King and Parliament against the proscription
of himself and his friends. "They gathered," he complains, "out of mine
and other men's books all that we had said against liberty for Popery and
Quakers railing against ministers in open congregation, and applied it as
against the toleration of ourselves." It was in vain that he explained
that he was only in favor of a gentle coercion of dissent, a moderate
enforcement of conformity. His plan for dealing with sentries reminds
one of old Isaak Walton's direction to his piscatorial readers, to impale
the frog on the hook as gently as if they loved him.
While at Acton, he was complained of by Dr. Ryves, the rector, one of the
King's chaplains in ordinary, for holding religious services in his
family with more than five strangers present. He was cast into
Clerkenwell jail, whither his faithful wife followed him. On his
discharge, he sought refuge in the hamlet of Totteridge, where he wrote
and published that Paraphrase on the New Testament which was made the
ground of his prosecution and trial before Jeffreys.
On the 14th of the sixth month, 1681, he was called to endure the
greatest affliction of his life. His wife died on that day, after a
brief illness. She who had been his faithful friend, companion, and
nurse for twenty years was called away from him in the time of his
greatest need of her ministrations. He found consolation in dwelling on
her virtues and excellences in the Breviate of her life; "a paper
monument," he says, "erected by one who is following her even at the door
in some passion indeed of love and grief." In the preface to his
poetical pieces he alludes to her in terms of touching simplicity and
tenderness: "As these pieces were mostly written in various passions, so
passion hath now thrust them out into the world. God having taken away
the dear companion of the last nineteen years of my life, as her sorrows
and sufferings long ago gave being to some of these poems, for reasons,
which the world is not concerned to know; so my grief for her removal,
and the revival of the sense of former things, have prevailed upon me to
be passionate in the sight of all."
The circumstances of his trial before the judicial monster, Jeffreys, are
too well known to justify their detail in this sketch. He was sentenced
to pay a fine of five hundred marks. Seventy years of age, and reduced
to poverty by former persecutions, he was conveyed to the King's Bench
prison. Here for two years he lay a victim to intense bodily suffering.
When, through the influence of his old antagonist, Penn, he was restored
to freedom, he was already a dying man. But he came forth from prison as
he entered it, unsubdued in spirit.
Urged to sign a declaration of thanks to James II., his soul put on the
athletic habits of youth, and he stoutly refused to commend an act of
toleration which had given freedom not to himself alone, but to Papists
and sentries. Shaking off the dust of the Court from his feet, he
retired to a dwelling in Charter-House Square, near his friend
Sylvester's, and patiently awaited his deliverance. His death was quiet
and peaceful. "I have pain," he said to his friend Mather; "there is no
arguing against sense; but I have peace. I have peace." On being asked
how he did, he answered, in memorable words, "Almost well!"
He was buried in Christ Church, where the remains of his wife and her
mother had been placed. An immense concourse attended his funeral, of
all ranks and parties. Conformist and Non-conformist forgot the
bitterness of the controversialist, and remembered only the virtues and
the piety of the man. Looking back on his life of self-denial and
faithfulness to apprehended duty, the men who had persecuted him while
living wept over his grave. During the last few years of his life, the
severity of his controversial tone had been greatly softened; he lamented
his former lack of charity, the circle of his sympathies widened, his
social affections grew stronger with age, and love for his fellow-men
universally, and irrespective of religious differences, increased within
him. In his Narrative, written in the long, cool shadows of the evening
of life, he acknowledges with extraordinary candor this change in his
views and feelings. He confesses his imperfections as a writer and
public teacher.
"I wish," he says, "all over-sharp passages were expunged from my
writings, and I ask forgiveness of God and man." He tells us that
mankind appear more equal to him; the good are not so good as he once
thought, nor the bad so evil; and that in all there is more for grace to
make advantage of, and more to testify for God and holiness, than he once
believed. "I less admire," he continues, "gifts of utterance, and the
bare profession of religion, than I once did, and have now much more
charity for those who, by want of gifts, do make an obscurer profession."
He laments the effects of his constitutional irritability and impatience
upon his social intercourse and his domestic relations, and that his
bodily infirmities did not allow him a free expression of the tenderness
and love of his heart. Who does not feel the pathos and inconsolable
regret which dictated the following paragraph?
"When God forgiveth me, I cannot forgive myself, especially for my rash
words and deeds by which I have seemed injurious and less tender and kind
than I should have been to my near and dear relations, whose love
abundantly obliged me. When such are dead, though we never differed in
point of interest or any other matter, every sour or cross or provoking
word which I gave them maketh me almost irreconcilable to myself, and
tells me how repentance brought some of old to pray to the dead whom they
had wronged to forgive them, in the hurry of their passion."
His pride as a logician and skilful disputant abated in the latter and
better portion of his life he had more deference to the judgment of
others, and more distrust of his own. "You admire," said he to a
correspondent who had lauded his character, "one you do not know;
knowledge will cure your error." In his Narrative he writes: "I am much
more sensible than heretofore of the breadth and length and depth of the
radical, universal, odious sin of selfishness, and therefore have written
so much against it; and of the excellency and necessity of self-denial
and of a public mind, and of loving our neighbors as ourselves." Against
many difficulties and discouragements, both within himself and in his
outward circumstances, he strove to make his life and conversation an
expression of that Christian love whose root, as he has said with equal
truth and beauty, "is set
In humble self-denial, undertrod,
While flower and fruit are growing up to God."
Of the great mass of his writings, more voluminous than those of any
author of his time, it would ill become us to speak with confidence. We
are familiar only with some of the best of his practical works, and our
estimate of the vast and appalling series of his doctrinal, metaphysical
and controversial publications would be entitled to small weight, as the
result of very cursory examination. Many of them relate to obsolete
questions and issues, monumental of controversies long dead, and of
disputatious doctors otherwise forgotten. Yet, in respect to even these,
we feel justified in assenting to the opinion of one abundantly capable
of appreciating the character of Baxter as a writer. "What works of Mr.
Baxter shall I read?" asked Boswell of Dr. Johnson. "Read any of them,"
was the answer, "for they are all good." He has left upon all the
impress of his genius. Many of them contain sentiments which happily
find favor with few in our time: philosophical and psychological
disquisitions, which look oddly enough in the light of the intellectual
progress of nearly two centuries; dissertations upon evil spirits,
ghosts, and witches, which provoke smiles at the good man's credulity;
but everywhere we find unmistakable evidences of his sincerity and
earnest love of truth. He wrote under a solemn impression of duty,
allowing neither pain, nor weakness, nor the claims of friendship, nor
the social enjoyments of domestic affection, to interfere with his
sleepless intensity of purpose. He stipulated with his wife, before
marriage, that she should not expect him to relax, even for her society,
the severity of his labors. He could ill brook interruption, and
disliked the importunity of visitors. "We are afraid, sir, we break in
upon your time," said some of his callers to him upon one occasion. "To
be sure you do," was his answer. His seriousness seldom forsook him;
there is scarce a gleam of gayety in all his one hundred and sixty-eight
volumes. He seems to have relished, however, the wit of others,
especially when directed against what he looked upon as error. Marvell's
inimitable reply to the High-Church pretensions of Parker fairly overcame
his habitual gravity, and he several times alludes to it with marked
satisfaction; but, for himself, he had no heart for pleasentry. His
writings, like his sermons, were the earnest expostulations of a dying
man with dying men. He tells us of no other amusement or relaxation than
the singing of psalms. "Harmony and melody," said he, "are the pleasure
and elevation of my soul. It was not the least comfort that I had in the
converse of my late dear wife, that our first act in the morning and last
in bed at night was a psalm of praise."
It has been fashionable to speak of Baxter as a champion of civil and
religious freedom. He has little claim to such a reputation. He was the
stanch advocate of monarchy, and of the right and duty of the State to
enforce conformity to what he regarded as the essentials of religious
belief and practice. No one regards the prelates who went to the Tower,
under James II., on the ground of conscientious scruples against reading
the King's declaration of toleration to Dissenters, as martyrs in the
cause of universal religious freedom. Nor can Baxter, although he wrote
much against the coercion and silencing of godly ministers, and suffered
imprisonment himself for the sake of a good conscience, be looked upon in
the light of an intelligent and consistent confessor of liberty. He did
not deny the abstract right of ecclesiastical coercion, but complained of
its exercise upon himself and his friends as unwarranted and unjust.
One of the warmest admirers and ablest commentators of Baxter designates
the leading and peculiar trait of his character as unearthliness. In our
view, this was its radical defect. He had too little of humanity, he
felt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived too
exclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly, for a full and healthful
development of his nature as a man, or of the graces, charities, and
loves of the Christian. He undervalued the common blessings and joys of
life, and closed his eyes and ears against the beauty and harmony of
outward nature. Humanity, in itself considered, seemed of small moment
to him; "passing away" was written alike on its wrongs and its rights,
its pleasures and its pains; death would soon level all distinctions; and
the sorrows or the joys, the poverty or the riches, the slavery or the
liberty, of the brief day of its probation seemed of too little
consequence to engage his attention and sympathies. Hence, while he was
always ready to minister to temporal suffering wherever it came to his
notice, he made no efforts to remove its political or social causes.
In this respect he differed widely from some of his illustrious
contemporaries. Penn, while preaching up and down the land, and writing
theological folios and pamphlets, could yet urge the political rights of
Englishmen, mount the hustings for Algernon Sydney, and plead for
unlimited religious liberty; and Vane, while dreaming of a coming
millennium and reign of the saints, and busily occupied in defending his
Antinomian doctrines, could at the same time vindicate, with tongue and
pen, the cause of civil and religious freedom. But Baxter overlooked the
evils and oppressions which were around him, and forgot the necessities
and duties of the world of time and sense in his earnest aspirations
towards the world of spirits. It is by no means an uninstructive fact,
that with the lapse of years his zeal for proselytism, doctrinal
disputations, and the preaching of threats and terrors visibly declined,
while love for his fellow-men and catholic charity greatly increased, and
he was blessed with a clearer perception of the truth that God is best
served through His suffering children, and that love and reverence for
visible humanity is an indispensable condition of the appropriate worship
of the Unseen God.
But, in taking leave of Richard Baxter, our last words must not be those
of censure. Admiration and reverence become us rather. He was an honest
man. So far as we can judge, his motives were the highest and best which
can influence human action. He had faults and weaknesses, and committed
grave errors, but we are constrained to believe that the prayer with
which he closes his Saints' Rest and which we have chosen as the fitting
termination of our article, was the earnest aspiration of his life:--
"O merciful Father of Spirits! suffer not the soul of thy unworthy
servant to be a stranger to the joys which he describes to others, but
keep me while I remain on earth in daily breathing after thee, and in a
believing affectionate walking with thee! Let those who shall read these
pages not merely read the fruits of my studies, but the breathing of my
active hope and love; that if my heart were open to their view, they
might there read thy love most deeply engraven upon it with a beam from
the face of the Son of God; and not find vanity or lust or pride within
where the words of life appear without, that so these lines may not
witness against me, but, proceeding from the heart of the writer, be
effectual through thy grace upon the heart of the reader, and so be the
savor of life to both."
