Exalted by the acclamation of the whole Episcopalian party to the head of all human writings, not without some doubts whether it should not rather class with those of the sacred canon, the Book of Common Prayer was pronounced by the bishops, at the opening of the conferences, to be exempt from any errors which they could detect, and incapable of any improvements which they could suggest. They could not therefore advance to the encounter until their antagonists should have unrolled the long catalogue of their hostile criticisms and projected amendments. From such a challenge it was not in Baxter's nature to shrink, though warned by his associates of the motives by which it was dictated, and of the dangers to which it would lead. "Bishop Sheldon," says Burnet, "saw well enough what the effect would be of obliging them to make all their demands at once, that the number would raise a mighty outcry against them as a people that could never be satisfied." In fourteen days Baxter prepared a new liturgy. In a few more he had completed his objections to the former rubric, with an humble petition for peace and indulgence. Fast and thick flew over the field the missiles of theological thesis before the closer conflict of oral debate. This was waged in high dialectic latitudes. Take the following example:-"That command" (we quote the Episcopalian proponitur) "which enjoins only an act in itself lawful, and no other act whereby an unjust penalty is enjoined, or any circumstance whence directly or per accidens any sin is consequent, which the commander ought to provide against, hath in it all things requisite to the lawfulness of a command, and particularly cannot be charged with enjoining an act per accidens unlawful, nor of commanding an act under an unjust penalty." As an Indian listens to the war-cry of a hostile tribe, Baxter heard the announcement of this heretical doctrine, and plunged headlong into the fight. Pouring fourth his boundless stores of metaphysical, moral, and scholastic speculation, he alternately plunged and soared beyond the reach of ordinary vision-distinguished and qualified, quoted and subtilized, till his voice was drowned "in noise and confusion, and high reflections on his dark and cloudy imagination." Bishop Sanderson, the moderator, adjudged the palm of victory to his opponent. "Baxter and Gunning" (the words are Burnet's) spent several days in logical arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon them as a couple of fencers engaged in a dispute that could not be brought to any end." It had, however, reached the only end which the king and his advisers had ever contemplated. An apology had been made for the breach of the royal promise. Henceforth the Presbyterians might be denounced as men whom reason could not convince, and who were therefore justly given up to the coercion of penal laws. To cast on them a still deeper shade of contumacy, some few trifling changes were made in the rubric by the convocation. The church was required to celebrate the martyrdom of the first Charles, and the restoration of the second, that "most religious and gracious king," (the last epithet with which in the same sentence 66 the monarch was complimented and the Deity invoked;) and, as if still more certainly to exclude from her pale those who had sued in vain for entrance, Bel and the dragon, aud other worthies of the apocrypha, were now called to take their stations in her weekly services. | Had Charles been permitted to follow the dictates of his own easy nature, or of his religious predilections, he would (though for precisely opposite reasons) have emulated the zeal of Cromwell for liberty of conscience. He would gladly have secured that freedom to his Roman Catholic subjects; and would still more gladly have relieved himself from the trouble of persecuting the Protestant dissenters. But the time was still unripe for such hazardous experiments. At the dictation of Clarendon, he was made to assure his Parliament that he was " as much in love with the Book of Common Prayer as they could wish, and had prejudices enough against those who did not love it." Within two years from his return, the depth and sincerity of this affection were attested by the imprisonment of more than four thousand Quakers, and by the promulgation of the act of uniformity. Among the two thousand clergymen whom this law excluded from the church, Baxter was on every account the most conspicuous. He had refused the bishopric of Hereford, and the united interest of Charles and Clarendon had been exerted in vain (so with most elaborate hypocrisy it was pretended) to recover for him a curacy at Kidderminster. He for ever quitted that scene of his apostolic labours; and in the forty-seventh year of his age, bowed down with bodily infirmities, was driven from his home and his weeping congregation, to pass the remainder of his life in loathsome jails or precarious hiding-places; there to achieve, in penury and almost ceaseless pain, works without a parallel in the history of English theological literature, for their extent, or their prodigality of mental resources. Solitude was not among the aggravations of his lot. Margaret Charlton was a lady of gentle birth, rich in the gifts of nature and of for tune. She dwelt in her mother's house at Kidderminster, where both parent and child found in Baxter their teacher and spiritual guide. "In her youth, pride and romances, and company suitable thereto, did take her up." But sickness came, and he ministered to her anxieties; and health returned, and he led the thanksgiving of the congregation; and there were mental conflicts in which he sustained her, and works of mercy in which he directed her, and notes were made of his sermons, and passages were transcribed from his consolatory letters, and gradually—but who needs to be told the result? Margaret was no ordinary woman. Her "strangely vivid wit" is celebrated by the admirable John Howe; and her widowed husband, in "The breviate of her life," has drawn a portrait the original of which it would have been criminal not to love. Timid, gentle, and reserved, and nursed amidst all the luxuries of her age, her heart was the abode of affections so intense, and of a fortitude so enduring, that her meek spirit, impatient of one selfish wish, progressively acquired all the heroism of be nevolence, and seemed at length incapable of | fection had blended itself with their devotional one selfish fear. In prison, in sickness, in evil feelings; and that she encouraged him to claim report, in every form of danger and fatigue, that place in her heart which the holiest of she was still with unabated cheerfulness at human beings has still left for mere human the side of him to whom she had pledged her sympathy. It was an attachment hallowed on conjugal faith;-prompting him to the dis- either side by all that can give dignity to the charge of every duty, calming the asperities of passions to which all are alike subject. To his temper, his associate in unnumbered acts her it afforded the daily delight of supporting of philanthropy, embellishing his humble home in his gigantic labours, and of soothing in his by the little arts with which a cultivated mind unremitted cares, a husband who repaid her imparts its own gracefulness to the meanest tenderness with unceasing love and gratitude. dwelling-place; and during the nineteen years To him it gave a friend whose presence was of their union joining with him in one un- tranquillity, who tempered by her milder wisbroken strain of filial affiance to the Divine dom, and graced by her superior elegance, and mercy, and of a grateful adoration for the Di- exalted by her more confiding piety, whatever vine goodness. Her tastes and habits had was austere, or rude, or distrustful in his been moulded into a perfect conformity to his. rugged character. After all, it must be conHe celebrates her Catholic charity to the op- fessed that the story will not fall handsomely ponents of their religious opinions, and her in- to any niche in the chronicles of romance; flexible adherence to her own; her high es- though, even in that light, Crabbe or Marmontel teem of the active and passive virtues of the would have made something of it. Yet, unChristian life, as contrasted with a barren supported by any powers of narrative, it is a orthodoxy; her noble disinterestedness, her tale which will never want its interest, so long skill in casuistry, her love of music, and her as delight shall be felt in contemplating the medicinal arts. Peace be to the verses which submission of the sternest and most powerful he poured out not to extol but to animate her minds to that kindly influence which cements devotion. If Margaret was wooed in strains and blesses, and which should ennoble human over which Sacharissa would have slumbered, society. Baxter's uncouth rhymes have a charm which Waller's lyrics cannot boast-the charm of purity, and reverence, and truth. The Eloise of Abelard, and the Eloise of Rousseau, revealing but too accurately one of the dark chambers of the human heart, have poisoned the imagination, and rendered it difficult to conceive of such ties as those which first drew together the souls of the nonconformist minister and his pupil-he approaching his fiftieth and she scarcely past her twentieth year; he stricken with penury, disease, and persecution, and she in the enjoyment of affluence and of the world's alluring smiles. It was not in the reign of Charles the Second, that wit or will were wanting to ridicule, or to upbraid such espousals. Grave men sighed over the weakness of the venerable divine; and gay men disported themselves with so effective an incident in the tragi-comedy of life. Much had the great moralist written upon the benefits of clerical celibacy; for," when he said so, he thought that he should die a bachelor." Something he wrote as follows, in defence of his altered opinions: -“The unsuitableness of our age, and my former known purposes against marriage and against the conveniency of minister's marriage, who have no sort of necessity, made our marriage the matter of much talk;" but he most judiciously proceeds, "the true opening of her case and mine, and the many strange occurrences which brought it to pass, would take away the wonder of her friends and mine that knew us, and the notice of it would conduce to the understanding of some other passages of our lives. Yet wise friends, by whom I am advised, think it better to omit such personal particularities at this time. Both in her case and in mine there was much extraordinary, which it doth not much concern the world to be acquainted with." Under this apology, it veiled the fact that Margaret herself first felt, or first betrayed the truth, that a sublunary af Over the declining years of Baxter's life, friendship, as well as conjugal love, threw a glow of consolation which no man ever needed or ever valued more. His affectionate record of his associates has rescued some of their names from oblivion. Such is the case with "good old Simon Ash, who went seasonably to heaven at the very time he was to be cast out of the church; who, having a good estate, and a very good wife, inclined to entertainments and a liberality, kept a house much frequented by ministers, where, always cheerful, without profuse laughter, or levity, and never troubled with doubtings," he imparted to others the gayety of his own heart, and died as he had lived, "in great consolation and cheerful exercise of faith, molested with no fears or doubts, exceedingly glad of the company of his friends, and greatly encouraging all about him." Such also was "good Mr. James Walton, commonly called the weeping prophet; of a most holy blameless life, and, though learned, greatly averse to controversy and dispute;" a man who had struggled successfully against constitutional melancholy, until troubled with the sad case of the church and the multitude of ministers cast out, and at his own unserviceableness, he consumed to death." To the Democritus and Heraclitus of nonconformity, a far greater name succeeds in the catalogue of Baxter's friends. In the village of Acton, Sir Matthew Hale had found an occasional retreat from the cares of his judicial life; and devoted his leisure to science and theology, and to social intercourse with the ejected nonconformist. In an age of civil strife, he had proposed to himself the example of Atticus, and, like that accomplished person, endeavoured to avert the enmity of the contending parties by the fearless discharge of his duties to all, without ministering to the selfish ends of any. The frugal simplicity of his habits, his unaffected piety and studious pursuits, enabled him to keep this hazardous | jail, and, when at length discharged from it, path with general esteem, though he was more indebted for safety to his unrivalled eminence as a lawyer and a judge. Though Cromwell and Ludlow rebelled against the papal authority of Westminster Hall, their age lagged far behind them. In the overthrow of all other institutions, the courts in which Fortescue and Coke had explained or invented the immemorial customs of England, were still the objects of universal veneration; and the supremacy of the law secured to its sages the homage of the people. Never was it rendered more justly than to Hale. With the exception of Roger North, we remember no historian of that day who does not bear an unqualified testimony to his uprightness, to the surpassing compass of his professional learning, and the exquisite skill with which it was employed. That agreeable, though most prejudiced writer, refuses him not only this, but the still higher praise of spotless patriotism, and ridicules his pretensions as a philosopher and divine. Baxter, an incomparably better judge, thought far otherwise. In the learning in which he himself excelled all others, he assigned a high station to Hale: and has recorded that his "conference, mostly about the immortality of the soul and other philosophical and foundation points, was so edifying, that his very questions and objections did help me to more light than other men's solutions." Differing on those subjects which then agitated society, their minds, enlarged by nobler contemplations, rose far above the controversies of their age; and were united in efforts for their mutual improvement, and for advancing the interests of religion, truth, and virtue. It was a grave and severe, but an affectionate friendship; such as can subsist only between men who have lived in the habitual restraint of their lower faculties, and in the strenuous culture of those powers which they believe to be destined hereafter, and to be ripening now, for an indefinite expansion and an immortal existence. From such intercourse Baxter was rudely called away. Not satisfied with the rigid uniformity of professed belief and external observances amongst the clergy of the established church, Parliament had denounced a scale of penalties, graduated from fine, to banishment to the plantations, against laics who should attend any other form of religious worship, even in private houses, where more than five strangers should be present. At Acton, a personage of no mean importance watched over the ecclesiastical discipline of the parish. "Dr. Ryves, rector of that church and of Hadley, dean of Windsor and of Wolverhampton, and chaplain in ordinary to the king," could not patiently endure the irregularities of his learned neighbour. The dean indeed officiated by deputy, and his curate was a raw and ignorant youth; and Baxter (an occasional conformist) was a regular attendant on all the sacred offices. But he refused the Oxford oath, and at his domestic worship there were sometimes found more than the statutable addition to the family circle. Such offences demanded expiation. He was committed to Clerkenwell was compelled to seek a new and more hospitable residence. He had his revenge. It was to obtain, through the influence of one of his most zealous disciples, the charter which incorporates the Church of England Society for the Propagation of the Gospel-a return of good for evil for which his name might well displace those of some of the saints in the calendar. While the plague was depopulating London, and the silenced clergymen were discharging the unenvied office of watching over the mul titude appointed to death, the king and Clarendon, at a secure distance from the contagion, were employed in framing the statute which denounced the most rigid punishment against any nonconformist minister who should approach within five miles of any town in England, or of any parish in which he had formerly officiated. Totteridge, a hamlet, round which a circle of ten miles in diameter could be drawn without including any of the residences thus proscribed to Baxter, became his next abode, but was not permitted to be a place of security or rest. His indefatigable pen had produced a paraphrase on the New Testament, where the keen scrutiny of his enemies detected libels, to be refuted only by the logic of the court and prison of the King's Bench. From the records of that court, Mr. Orme has extracted the indictment, which sets forth, that "Richardus Baxter, persona seditiosa et factiosa, pravæ mentis, impiæ, inquietæ, turbulent' disposition' et conversation';""falso, illicite, injuste, nequit, factiose, seditiose, et irreligiose, fecit, composuit, scripsit quendam falsum, seditiosum, libellosum, factiosum, et irreligiosum librum." The classi cal pleader proceeds in a vein of unconscious humour to justify these hard words by the use of the figure called, we believe, a "scilicet" by those who now inhabit the ancient abode of the Knights Templars. "It is folly," says the paraphrase, “to doubt whether there be devils, while devils incarnate dwell amongst us here," (clericos pred' hujus regni Angl' innuendo.) "What else but devils could make ceremonious hypocrites,' (clericos pred' innuendo :) "men that preach in Christ's name,' (seipsum R. B. et al' seditiosas et factiosas person' innuendo) "therefore, are not to be silenced if they do no more harm than good. Dreadful then is the case of men," (episcopos et ministros justitiæ infr' hujus regni Angl' innuendo) "that silence Christ's faithful ministers," (seipsum R. B. et al' seditiosas et factiosas person' innuendo.) Ansley and George Stevens were dull fellows compared with the great originals from which they drew. L'Estrange himself might have taken a lesson in the art of defamation, from this innuendoing special pleader. But the absurdity was crowned by the conduct of the trial. Abhorrence, disgust, indignation, and all other feelings of the sterner kind, gave way to the irresistible sense of the ludicrous, in some parts of the judicial career of Jeffries and "to be grave exceeds all powers of face," in reading the narrative of this proceeding, which was drawn up by one of the spectators. I'll not hurt you. But these things will surely be understood one day; what fools one sort of Protestants are made, to prosecute the other." 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 flaming, "he snorted and squeaked, blew his nose and clenched his hands, and lifted up his 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, Jefsome 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 a 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 heightened 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 |