Born at Eaton-Constantine, near Shrewsbury, 12[?] Nov. 1615. At Free School, Wroxeter, 1630–33; then for a short time under tuition of Richard Wickstead at Ludlow Castle. To Court of Whitehall with introduction to Master of the Revels, 1633. Return home owing to mother’s death, 1634. In charge of Wroxeter School for three months. Began theological studies. Ordained, and appointed Headmaster of new school at Dudley, 1638. Assistant minister at Bridgnorth, 1639–41. Appointed preacher at Kidderminster, 5 April 1641. Espoused cause of Parliament in Civil War. To Coventry, 1643[?]. Chaplain to Captain Whalley’s regiment, 1645. In retirement, owing to ill-health, 1647–50. “Aphorismes of Justification” published, 1649; “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest,” 1650. Returned to Kidderminster. To London, 1660. Preached before House of Commons at St. Margaret’s, 30 April 1660; before Lord Mayor and Alderman at St. Paul’s, 10 May 1660. Appointed Chaplain to Charles II. Finally left Church of England, 16 May 1662, and retired to Acton. Married Margaret Charlton, 10 Sept. 1662. Visit to Richard Hampden in Buckinghamshire, 1665. “A Call to the Unconverted” published, 1665. Wife died, 1681. Wrote “Breviate” of her Life, 1681. Arrested, 28 Feb. 1685, for libel on the Church in his “Paraphrase of the New Testament.” Trial, 30 May. Sentenced to fine of 500 marks and imprisonment till paid. Discharged from prison, 24 Nov. 1686, fine being remitted. Active in coalition of dissenters with conforming clergy, 1688. Died, 8 Dec. 1691. Buried in Christ Church, London. Works: Between 1649 and 1691 Baxter published 148 works. Nine were published posthumously between 1692 and 1701. A complete list is given in Orme’s “Life of Baxter,” 1830, and A. B. Grosart’s “Annotated List” of Baxter’s Writings, 1868. Baxter’s “Practical Works” were published in 4 vols. 1707; again, in 23 vols., with life, by W. Orme, 1830. “Reliquiæ Baxterianæ” (autobiography), edited by M. Sylvester, 1696.

Personal

  Richard, Richard, dost thou think we’ll hear thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old fellow, an old knave; thou hast written books enough to load a cart, every one is full of sedition, I might say treason, as an egg is full of meat. Hadst thou been whipped out of thy writing trade forty years ago, it had been happy. Thou pretendest to be a preacher of the Gospel of peace, and thou hast one foot in the grave: it is time for thee to begin to think what account thou intendest to give. But leave thee to thyself, and I see thou’lt go on as thou hast begun; but, by the grace of God, I’ll look after thee. I know thou hast a mighty party, and I see a great many of the brotherhood in corners, waiting to see what will become of their mighty Don, and a Doctor of the party (looking to Dr. Bates) at your elbow; but, by the grace of Almighty God, I’ll crush you all. Come, what do you say for yourself, you old knave; come, speak up. What doth he say? I am not afraid of you, for all the snivelling calves you have got about you.

  Concerning almost all my writings, I must confess that my own judgment is, that fewer, well studied and polished, had been better; but the reader who can safely censure the books, is not fit to censure the author, unless he had been upon the place, and acquainted with all the occasions and circumstances. Indeed, for the “Saint’s Rest,” I had four months’ vacancy to write it, but in the midst of continual languishing and medicine; but, for the rest, I wrote them in the crowd of all my other employments, which would allow me no great leisure for polishing and exactness, or any ornament; so that I scarce ever wrote one sheet twice over, nor stayed to make any blots or interlinings, but was fain to let it go as it was first conceived; and when my own desire was rather to stay upon one thing long than run over many, some sudden occasions or other extorted almost all my writings from me.

  Mr. Baxter, an eminent school-master, (who put out Horace and Anacreon, and was the chief mourner at the famous Mr. Rich. Baxter’s funeral, who was his near relation,) did assure Mr. Halley, that old Baxter, when he was opened after his death, had a gaul in him as large as that of an horse.

  His zeal for religion was extraordinary, but it seems never to have prompted him to faction, or carried him to enthusiasm. This champion of the Presbyterians was the common butt of men of every other religion, and of those who were of no religion at all. But this had very little effect upon him: his presence and his firmness of mind on no occasion forsook him. He was just the same man before he went into prison, while he was in it, and when he came out of it; and he maintained a uniformity of character to the last gasp of his life. His enemies have placed him in hell; but every man who has not ten times the bigotry that Mr. Baxter himself had, must conclude that he is in a better place. This is a very faint and imperfect sketch of Mr. Baxter’s character: men of his size are not to be drawn in miniature.

  The natural temper of Baxter was quick and irritable, impatient of contradiction, and prone to severity. This was partly owing to the diseased state of body, from which he endured constant and incredible pain. It appears that he was deeply sensible of this infirmity, and that he laboured hard to subdue it. It led him frequently to use harsh and irritating language towards his opponents, which created increased hostility, and gave them an idea that he was an unamiable man, who might be feared or esteemed, but who could not be loved. But if Baxter was easily provoked, he was ever ready to forgive. He was warm, but not irascible. He cherished no resentments, was always happy to accept an explanation or apology, and was as prompt to pardon, as he had been to take offence. In the expression of all his feelings, he was open and undisguised. He always spoke from the heart, whether it was filled with indignation, or overflowed with love.

  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.

  His character is wanting in hearty vigour—in emotional healthiness. There is a poverty of the merely natural life—a lack of genial interest—and of the appreciation of any mere earthly beauty or art—that takes from it the richness of a full manhood. He was a Puritan, and little more…. He rose but slightly above his time. As its systems confined his intellect, its moral narrowness bound his character. He was strong in its strength; he was weak in its deficiencies. The very intensity of his spiritual earnestness was in some degree born of this one-sidedness. Had he possessed a broader feeling, and sympathies more widely responsive to nature and life, he could not have lived so entirely as he did above the world, and given himself with such an unresting vigilance to the love and ministry of souls. If we look at him as a man, this want of breadth and variety of interest diminishes his greatness; if we look at him as the Puritan pastor and divine, it was the very singleness of his spiritual energy that made his excellence and crown.

  Even in his outward life he exemplified as few men else have ever done the confluence of all Christian influences. He was born of Puritan parents, yet converted by a book of Jesuit devotions. He was ordained in Anglican orders, offered an Anglican Bishopric, the pastor of an Anglican parish, even a candidate, though an unsuccessful candidate, for a place in Convocation; yet the oracle and patriarch of Evangelical Nonconformity, the friend of Calamy and Howe, of Hampden, and of Pym. Immersed as he was in the controversial theology of the Puritans, he was yet the zealous admirer of Richard Hooker, the most majestic of our divines, of George Herbert, the most saintly of our sacred poets—Herbert in whose “temple” he took refuge with the “sound of Aaron’s bells from the jingling of scholastic philosophy;”—and be delighted in the converse of Tillotson and Tillotson’s disciples and companions, whom the fanatics of his own and of later times have so severely condemned as almost unworthy of the name of Christian. He is claimed as the first parent of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, the most venerable of the Missionary Societies of the Church; he is claimed also as the first parent of the extreme school of Nonconformity which in Kidderminster possesses his pulpit, and which, in a wider sense, dating its spiritual lineage from his large and liberal spirit, has often, with whatever departure from his theology, lifted up before the churches the banner of tolerance and freedom that Baxter was among the first to unfurl.

  His strong sense of the reality of the spiritual world and his tenderness in dealing with individual cases endeared him to his congregation. Yet Baxter was above all things a controversialist, one who loved to set forth the gospel as addressed indeed to the hearts of men, but as guarded by all the minute distinctions of Puritan theology. For forms of church government he did not care much. He did not altogether approve of the system which Parliament and Assembly were attempting to set up, and he would probably at any time of his life have been content with a compromise, if such could be found, between Presbyterianism and Episcopacy. His mind, in fact, was essentially unpolitical. He could comprehend ideas, but he could not comprehend men, and even in 1645 the common-place about fighting for King and Parliament was still for him a stern reality, which every man in England was bound to do his best to carry into effect.

  He was a voracious reader and an acute critic; but he was, most of all, successful as a preacher and a parish priest. At Kidderminster, during the crisis of the Civil War, and at Coventry, he ministered with assiduous eagerness, and he had the firmness to maintain his opinions in the face of both parties. He was of the Parliament side, but he could not reconcile himself to a republic. He opposed both the Covenant and the Engagement, and the abolition of bishops, yet he was much more of a Presbyterian than a Churchman. A strong Parliament man, after the Restoration he refused a bishopric, and by his nonconformity laid himself open to the persecuting violence of the state laws. He was, in fact, so honest, so firm, and, it must be admitted, so narrow in his own opinions, that he could find no party in the state, and but few in religion, who would agree with or even tolerate them. In literature he was a master, but in practical life he was unfit for the rubs of daily existence. Though Cromwell’s theology was inadequate in his eyes, he was just as little willing as the great Protector to tolerate religious teaching beyond certain fixed limits. He, more than any single man, stood in the way of toleration of Roman Catholics at the Restoration. His political tracts were burnt by the University of Oxford with those of Buchanan and Milton, in the fervour of the Royalist reaction. The fierce persecuting ardour of the secular power, the squires and the lawyers who could never forgive the Commonwealth, broke over his head. He would not conform to the laws, and he was committed to prison by two justices of the peace.

The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, 1650

  Let me mention here, before entering into deeper matters, one formal merit which the Saint’s “Everlasting Rest” eminently possesses. I refer to that without which, I suppose, no book ever won permanent place in the literature of a nation, and which I have no scruple in ascribing to it—I mean its style. A great admirer of Baxter has recently suggested a doubt whether he ever recast a sentence or bestowed a thought on its rhythm and the balance of its several parts; statements of his own make it tolerably certain that he did not. As a consequence he has none of those bravura passages which must have cost Jeremy Taylor, in his “Holy Living and Dying” and elsewhere, so much of thought and pains, for such do not come of themselves and unbidden to the most accomplished masters of language. But for all this there reigns in Baxter’s writings, and not least in “The Saint’s Rest,” a robust and masculine eloquence; nor do these want from time to time rare and unsought felicity of language, which once heard can scarcely be forgotten. In regard, indeed, of the choice of words, the book might have been written yesterday. There is hardly one which has become obsolete, hardly one which has drifted away from the meaning which it has in his writings. This may not be a great matter, but it argues a rare insight, conscious or unconscious, into all which was truest, into all which was furthest removed from affectation and untruthfulness in the language, that after more than two hundred years so it should be; and one may recognise here an element, not to be overlooked, of the abiding popularity of the book.

  Its deep piety, its clear and beautiful style, the dignity and enthusiasm and modernness of its language, have made it an English classic. Narrow as Baxter’s system may seem, we feel that he is more tolerant than his creed, and at the root of all his stubborn individuality lies a true and tender conscience. If the Nonconformity of the Stuart age laid heavy burdens on men’s shoulders, it suffered from the consequences of its actions. In its provision for men of religion it brought upon itself the severity of secular opinion. But it left two priceless gifts to English literature and English religion in the “Pilgrim’s Progress” and the “Saints’ Rest.”

General

  Baxter wrote as in the view of eternity; but generally judicious, nervous, spiritual, and evangelical, though often charged with the contrary. He discovers a manly eloquence, and the most evident proofs of an amazing genius, with respect to which he may not improperly be called the English Demosthenes.

  I would recommend you to read some practical divinity every day; especially the works of Howe, Henry, Watts, Doddridge, and writers of that strain and spirit, whom God eminently honoured as instruments of great usefulness in his church. Above all, Baxter, who was, with regard to the success of his labours and writings, superior to them all.

  There is a living energy and spirit in the practical writings of Baxter, which the reader seldom meets with in any other author. His appeals to the conscience are often mighty and irresistible.

  Among the chief, if not the very chief, of those writers of “an opposition persuasion,” was Richard Baxter; a divine of a most capricious, yet powerful and original mind. What Prynne was in law and history, Baxter was in theology: as the similarity, in point of quaintness, of the titles of their respective works, testifies…. Baxter was a man of great gravity of demeanor and great piety of soul. He was acute and learned withal, and an air of originality pervades most of his writings.

  Pray read with great attention Baxter’s Life of himself. It is an inestimable work. I may not unfrequently doubt Baxter’s memory, or even his competence, in consequence of his particular modes of thinking; but I could almost as soon doubt the Gospel verity as his veracity.

  The style of Baxter is considerably diversified. It is often incorrect, rugged, and inharmonious, abounding in parentheses and digressions, and enfeebled by expansion. It is happiest when it is divested entirely of a controversial character, and the subject relates to the great interests of salvation and charity. It then flows with a copiousness and purity to which there is nothing superior in the language in which he wrote. The vigorous conceptions of his mind are then conveyed in a corresponding energy of expression; so that the reader is carried along with a breathless impetuosity, which he finds it impossible to resist…. Truth in all its majesty and infinite importance alone occupied the throne of his spirit, and dictated the forms in which its voice should be uttered. And when it spoke, it was in language divinely suited to its nature, never distracting by its turgidness, or disgusting by its regularity. He could be awful or gentle, pathetic or pungent, at pleasure; always suiting his words to his thoughts, and dissolving his audience in tenderness, or overwhelming them with terror, as heaven or hell, the mercies of the Lord, or the wrath to come, was the topic of discourse. It may confidently be affirmed, that from no author of the period could a greater selection of beautiful passages of didactic, hortatory, and a consolatory writings, be made.

  To substitute for this self-portraiture, any other analysis of Baxter’s intellectual and moral character would indeed be a vain attempt. If there be any defect or error of which he was unconscious, and which he therefore has not avowed, it was the combination of an undue reliance on his own powers of investigating truth, with an undue distrust in the result of his enquiries. He proposed to himself, and executed, the task of exploring the whole circle of the moral sciences, logic, ethics, divinity, politics, and metaphysics, and this toil be accomplished amidst public employments of ceaseless importunity, and bodily pains almost unintermitted. Intemperance never assumed a more venial form; but that this insatiate thirst for knowledge was indulged to a faulty excess, no reader of his life, or of his works, can doubt.

  His theological writings, though too moderate to be pleasing to the bigots of any party, had an immense reputation. Zealous Churchmen called him a Roundhead; and many Nonconformists accused him of Erastianism and Arminianism. But the integrity of his heart, the purity of his life, the vigour of his faculties, and the extent of his attainments, were acknowledged by the best and wisest men of every persuasion. His political opinions, in spite of the oppression which he and his brethren had suffered, were moderate. He was partial to that small party which was hated by both Whigs and Tories.

  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 Saint’s 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.

  Differing as Baxter did from Owen and others; involved as he was in constant controversy with the extreme Calvinists of his generation; and disposed as some would be to deny him the name of a Calvinist altogether,—there is yet no divine of his age bears, in deeper and broader impress, the spirit of its religious and theological belief. He rose above a more formal Calvinism; but the very processes of reasoning, and peculiarities of intellectual apprehension, by which he did so, were Calvinistic. He waged a ceaseless fight with the Sectarian exaggerations, both of doctrine and ecclesiastical practice, that surrounded him; but the weapons by which he did so were the very same which had cut out for the sects a more lawless and independent way on the great high-road of Protestantism. Certainly, of all the men who express and represent the spiritual thought of the Puritan age, none does so more completely, and to the very center of his intelligence, than Richard Baxter.

  Grasping his fecundity of publication with the engrossing ministry which occupied his chief energies, it must be manifest that Richard Baxter was an extraordinary man. In his physique naturally weak, and tainted from the outset with consumptive tendencies, and later worn and valetudinarian, he so conquered the body, that he did the work of a score of ordinary men as an author alone. Baxter had beyond all dispute a penetrative, almost morbidly acute brain. He was the creator of our popular christian literature. Regarded intrinsically and as literature, his books need fear no comparison with contemporaries.

  The autobiography of this pious, useful, boisterous heresiarch, which appeared posthumously in 1696, is pleasant reading.

  One of the greatest of Englishmen, not only of his own, but of any time…. Considering his character and popularity, the extent of his writings, his genius and learning, he may be said to be the greatest of English theologians (or one of the greatest), as he has certainly been one of the most lasting influences on popular theology. He was not without faults, of which, we gather from his writings and also from the narrative to which I referred at first, too great pugnacity and contentiousness were the most serious. In the days of his youth he was too fervid and vehement and inconsiderate.

  Considering the defects of his education, and the incessant whirl in which his life was passed, his literary fecundity is perfectly marvellous. He is said to have taken no pains with his style, and to have written straight from the heart; “he never recast a sentence or bestowed a thought on its rhythm, and the balance of its several parts;” but in spite—or shall we say, in consequence?—of this, his style is in its way remarkably good; there is a freedom and naturalness about it which perhaps would have been lost if he had elaborated his compositions more carefully. Earnestness and robust eloquence breathe through every page…. That, in spite of his independent position, his works were admired, is partly due to the obvious earnestness and sincerity of the man, but partly to the excellence of his matter and style. He was to a great extent a self-taught man, and his writings bear traces of this; he was not a trained theologian, and can hardly be ranked with the giants of that golden age of theology; but his works are read where theirs are not.