II. The New Testament a standing Monument and Verification of the Divine Mission of Jesus Christ. By the late PRIN- cipal Lorimer, D.D., of the English Presbyterian College, III. Hymnology as a Reflection of Christian Doctrine and Life. By . VI. Buddhism. By the Rev. DUNLOP MOORE, D.D., New Brighton, VII. The Body an Argument for the Soul. By CHARLES P. KRAUTH, IX. Haeckel on the Evolution of Man. By PRINCIPAL DAWSON, I. Professor Robertson Smith and the Pentateuch. By the Rev. V. Missions and Missionaries. By the Rev. CHARLES G. M'CRIE, VIII. The Faith of Islám. By the Rev. EDWARD SELL, Church BRITISH AND FOREIGN EVANGELICAL REVIEW. JANUARY 1880. ART. I.—Richard Baxter. THERE is a strong drift of thought at the present day towards a revisal of ecclesiastical differences, with an almost pathetic longing for wider religious fellowship. At such a time, and in such a mood, men recall with honour the names of those Divines, who, in the old stormy days, shunned extreme positions, and advocated, no matter with how little success, a forbearing and reconciling policy. No wonder then that Richard Baxter has been rising out of the neglect into which his memory at one time fell; for he was one of those very rare men who, even in the thick of debate and controversy, preserve an elevation of soul above the battle, and when they fight, contend not for victory so much as for peace. Many thanks to worthy Matthew Sylvester for having "faithfully published from his original manuscript" the " Reliquiæ Baxterianæ." The old folio (1696) lies before us, and wonderfully rich it is in "fine confused reading." As Sylvester says, it was written sparsim et raptim, and never revised; so much the better-spoil it not by abridgment. It is naïve as the Diaries of Pepys and of Evelyn, frank and almost garrulous as Burnet's History of his Times, and yet grave and selfsearching like the autobiographies of Halyburton and Boston. VOL. XXIX.-NO. CXI. A There is no pretence of perfect consistency; though, indeed, Baxter was more consistent than most men are who lead a long public life. But his consistency was not that of a wooden pole, always the same till it decays, but that of a tree which, however it grows and spreads, is always true to itself. Perhaps the most useful, and certainly the most fascinating, passage in the whole book is that in which Baxter reviews himself, and shows with equal candour and humility to what extent and effect he had learned to enlarge or correct some of the more confident opinions of his youth. It occurs not at the end of the volume, as one might naturally expect, but at the close of the first part. It was a very favourite passage with the late Sir James Stephen. Dean Stanley has told how Sir James pointed it out to him and said, "Lose not a day in reading it, you will never repent of it." "That very night," adds the Dean, "I followed his advice, and have ever since, publicly and privately, advised every theological student to do the same. We venture to say that there is nothing to be found in the whole range of autobiographical literature to surpass this unpretending, unaffected self-criticism. It has something in it of both the " Confessiones " and the "Retractationes" of Augustine. "1 Alas for the "good old times" in Shropshire, when Richard Baxter was a boy (born A.D. 1615). Both pastors and people were generally ignorant and irreligious. There was no clergyman in or near the village where the Baxters lived. The schoolmaster "read common prayer on Sundays and holidays, and taught school, and tippled on the week-days." A few of the villagers (Richard's father among them) were stigmatised as Puritans and Precisians, because they would not join in the rough sports and dancing in the open air, to which the people betook themselves on the Lord's Day, so soon as common prayer was said. But as yet those early Puritans had raised no scruple about the Prayer-Book or Church ceremonies. Richard Baxter was quite grown up before he even heard any one pray "without a book." At such schools as were within his reach, the young Richard greatly distinguished himself; but he never enjoyed the advantage of a University education; in this unlike the great Puritan leaders with whom he was afterwards on a par-as 1 Address at the inauguration of Baxter's Statue at Kidderminster, 1875. Howe, Goodwin, Manton, and Owen-all of whom were University men. But Baxter, by great application, acquired a wide, if somewhat undisciplined erudition, and gathered such materials as his quick and ingenious mind knew well how to employ. Deficient in classical accuracy, he delighted in logic and scholastic metaphysics. "I read all the Schoolmen I could get; for, next to practical Divinity, no books so suited with my disposition as Aquinas, Scotus, Durandus, Ockham, and their disciples, because I thought that they narrowly searched after truth, and brought things out of the darkness of confusion, for I could never from my first studies endure confusion. Till Equivocals were explained, and Definition. and Distinction led the way, I had rather hold my tongue than speak, and was never more weary of learned men's discourses, than when I heard them long wrangling about unexpounded words or things, and vehemently asserting modes, and consequences, and adjuncts, before they considered of the Quod sit, the Quid sit, or the Quotuplex." This combination of a fervent spirit, with a keen logical faculty revelling in the subtle dialectic of the schoolmen, reminds us of Samuel Rutherfurd, who, with all his glowing piety, was one of the sharpest logicians and disputers of his time. But the fervent spirit was Baxter's strongest characteristic. It was not caught from any great preacher touching his heart, or kindling his enthusiasm. He heard no such preacher in his youth, and his religious convictions were due to books that pedlars brought to his father's door, and not least to a book originally composed by a Jesuit, with which Baxter fell in at the age of fifteen. The tone of seriousness which his mind then assumed was deepened by his extreme feebleness, inducing a constant expectation of death. Who that had seen that young man with his "violent cough," and "spitting of blood," and "bleeding at the nose, many times half a pint or a pint a day," and all his ailments aggravated by the absurd prescriptions of his physicians, could have expected him to live and labour as very few men have laboured up to the age of seventy-six? One physician advised him to take "flour of brimstone, which took off most of the remainder of my cough, but increased the acrimony of my blood." Another persuaded him that he "had a hectick." So he betook himself to "much milk from the cow, and other pituitous cooling things." A third " was confident that scurvy was my chief distemper, and thereupon prescribed me more acrimonious medicaments, scurvy-grass, horse-radish, mustard, wormwood, etc., which abundantly increased my bleeding at the nose !" It is pitiful to read of the maltreatment which a life so valuable to the Church of God had to suffer. But all the suffering was borne with a wonderfully cheerful and intrepid spirit. In Baxter, as in Calvin and William of Orange, some secret resource of strength lay hidden in an apparently weak and insufficient frame; and lofty purpose triumphed over bodily infirmity. Baxter never allowed his illnesses to hinder his studies. Expecting to die young, he nevertheless zealously addressed himself to preparation for public usefulness. His ardent wish was to spend his uncertain life in the Christian ministry, conscious as he was (the language is his own, and worthy of him) of a thirsty desire of men's conversion and salvation, and of some competent persuading faculty of expression which fervent affections might help to actuate." The Bishop of Worcester ordained him at the age of twenty-three. In the early days of his ministry, though he would not himself wear the surplice, or make the sign of the cross in baptism, he tried to be content with the Church system in which he had been brought up, and "disputed daily against the Nonconformists" in his neighbourhood, blaming them for " censoriousness and inclinations towards separation." "But I found," he quaintly adds, "that their sufferings from the Bishops were the great impediment of my success; and that to persecute men, and then call them to charity, is like whipping children to make them give over crying." Serious scruples on ecclesiastical matters seem to have been first excited in the mind of Baxter by the imposition on the clergy of what was commonly called the "et cetera" oath, binding them "never to consent to the alteration of the present government of the Church by Archbishops, Bishops, Deans, Archdeacons, etc." Baxter at once condemned and refused such an obligation, and the majority of the clergy in the neighbourhood was of one mind with him. With all due gravity, he argued "that it was intolerable to swear to a blind et cetera." The officers of the ecclesiastical court exercised church-government. Must he swear never to change "lay chancellors, surrogates, commissaries," and all that "anomalous |