1820.

Among the grounds for recommending the perusal of our elder writers, Hooker ­Taylor ­Baxter ­in short almost any of the folios composed from Edward vi. to Charles ii.  I note: 

1.  The overcoming the habit of deriving your whole pleasure passively from the book itself, which can only be effected by excitement of curiosity or of some passion.  Force yourself to reflect on what you read paragraph by paragraph, and in a short time you will derive your pleasure, an ample portion of it, at least, from the activity of your own mind.  All else is picture sunshine.

2.  The conquest of party and sectarian prejudices, when you have on the same table before you the works of a Hammond and a Baxter, and reflect how many and momentous their points of agreement, how few and almost childish the differences, which estranged and irritated these good men.  Let us but imagine what their blessed spirits now feel at the retrospect of their earthly frailties, and can we do other than strive to feel as they now feel, not as they once felt?  So will it be with the disputes between good men of the present day; and if you have no other reason to doubt your opponent’s goodness than the point in dispute, think of Baxter and Hammond, of Milton and Taylor, and let it be no reason at all.

3.  It will secure you from the idolatry of the present times and fashions, and create the noblest kind of imaginative power in your soul, that of living in past ages; wholly devoid of which power, a man can neither anticipate the future, nor even live a truly human life, a life of reason in the present.

4.  In this particular work we may derive a most instructive lesson, that in certain points, as of religion in relation to law, the ’medio tutissimus ibis’ is inapplicable.  There is no ‘medium’ possible; and all the attempts, as those of Baxter, though no more required than “I believe in God through Christ,” prove only the mildness of the proposer’s temper, but as a rule would be equal to nothing, at least exclude only the two or three in a century that make it a matter of religion to declare themselves Atheists, or else be just as fruitful a rule for a persecutor as the most complete set of articles that could be framed by a Spanish Inquisition.

For to ‘believe,’ must mean to believe aright ­and ‘God’ must mean the true God ­and ‘Christ’ the Christ in the sense and with the attributes understood by Christians who are truly Christians.  An established Church with a Liturgy is a sufficient solution of the problem ’de jure magistratus’.  Articles of faith are in this point of view superfluous; for is it not too absurd for a man to hesitate at subscribing his name to doctrines which yet in the more awful duty of prayer and profession he dares affirm before his Maker!  They are therefore in this sense merely superfluous; ­not worth re-enacting, had they ever been done away with; ­not worth removing now that they exist.

5.  The characteristic contradistinction between the speculative reasoners of the age before the Revolution, and those since, is this:  ­the former cultivated metaphysics, without, or neglecting, empirical psychology the latter cultivate a mechanical psychology to the neglect and contempt of metaphysics.  Both therefore are almost equi-distant from pure philosophy.  Hence the belief in ghosts, witches, sensible replies to prayer, and the like, in Baxter and in a hundred others.  See also Luther’s Table Talk.

6.  The earlier part of this volume is interesting as materials for medical history.  The state of medical science in the reign of Charles I. was almost incredibly low.

The saddest error of the theologians of this age is, [Greek:  hos emoige dokei], the disposition to urge the histories of the miraculous actions and incidents, in and by which Christ attested his Messiahship to the Jewish eye-witnesses, in fulfilment of prophecies, which the Jewish Church had previously understood and interpreted as marks of the Messiah, before they have shewn what and how excellent the religion itself is including the miracles as for us an harmonious part of the internal or self-evidence of the religion.  Alas! and even when our divines do proceed to the religion itself as to a something which no man could be expected to receive except by a compulsion of the senses, which by force of logic only is propagated from the eye witnesses to the readers of the narratives in 1820 ­(which logic, namely, that the evidence of a miracle is not diminished by lapse of ages, though this includes loss of documents and the like; which logic, I say, whether it be legitimate or not, God forbid that the truth of Christianity should depend on the decision!) ­even when our divines do proceed to the religion itself, on what do they chiefly dwell?  On the doctrines peculiar to the religion?  No! these on the contrary are either evaded or explained away into metaphors, or resigned in despair to the next world where faith is to be swallowed up in certainty.

But the worst product of this epidemic error is, the fashion of either denying or undervaluing the evidence of a future state and the survival of individual consciousness, derived from the conscience, and the holy instinct of the whole human race.  Dreadful is this: ­for the main force of the reasoning by which this scepticism is vindicated consists in reducing all legitimate conviction to objective proof:  whereas in the very essence of religion and even of morality the evidence, and the preparation for its reception, must be subjective; ­’Blessed are they that have not seen and yet believe’.  And dreadful it appears to me especially, who in the impossibility of not looking forward to consciousness after the dissolution of the body (’corpus phoenomenon’,) have through life found it (next to divine grace.) the strongest and indeed only efficient support against the still recurring temptation of adopting, nay, wishing the truth of Spinoza’s notion, that the survival of consciousness is the highest prize and consequence of the highest virtue, and that of all below this mark the lot after death is self-oblivion and the cessation of individual being.  Indeed, how a Separatist or one of any other sect of Calvinists, who confines Redemption to the comparatively small number of the elect, can reject this opinion, and yet not run mad at the horrid thought of an innumerable multitude of imperishable self-conscious spirits everlastingly excluded from God, is to me inconceivable.

Deeply am I persuaded of Luther’s position, that no man can worthily estimate, or feel in the depth of his being, the Incarnation and Crucifixion of the Son of God who is a stranger to the terror of immortality as ingenerate in man, while it is yet unquelled by the faith in God as the Almighty Father.

Book I. Part I. .

  But though my conscience would trouble me when I sinned, yet divers
  sins I was addicted to, and oft committed against my conscience; which
  for the warning of others I will confess here to my shame.

  1.  I was much addicted when I feared correction to lie, that I might
  scape.

  2.  I was much addicted to the excessive gluttonous eating of apples
  and pears, &c.

  3.  To this end, and to concur with naughty boys that gloried in evil,
  I have oft gone into other men’s orchards, and stolen their fruit,
  when I had enough at home, &c.

There is a childlike simplicity in this account of his sins of his childhood which is very pleasing.

Ib. , 6.

And the use that God made of books, above ministers, to the benefit of my soul made me somewhat excessively in love with good books; so that I thought I had never enough, but scraped up as great a treasure of them as I could. It made the world seem to me as a carcase that had neither life nor loveliness; and it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame which were the sin of my childhood. And for the mathematics, I was an utter stranger to them, and never could find in my heart to divert any studies that way.  But in order to the knowledge of divinity, my inclination was most to logic and metaphysics, with that part of physics which treateth of the soul, contenting myself at first with a slighter study of the rest:  and there had my labour and delight.

What a picture of myself!

Ib. .

  In the storm of this temptation I questioned awhile whether I were
  indeed a Christian or an Infidel, and whether faith could consist with
  such doubts as I was conscious of.

One of the instances of the evils arising from the equivoque between faith and intellectual satisfaction or insight.  The root of faith is in the will.  Faith is an oak that may be a pollard, and yet live.

Ib.

  The being and attributes of God were so clear to me, that he was to my
  intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which I see itself and all
  things.

Even so with me; ­but, whether God was existentially as well as essentially intelligent, this was for a long time a sore combat between the speculative and the moral man.

Ib. .

  Mere Deism, which is the most plausible competitor with Christianity,
  is so turned out of almost all the whole world, as if Nature made its
  own confession, that without a Mediator it cannot come to God.

Excellent.

Ib.

  All these assistances were at hand before I came to the immediate
  evidences of credibility in the sacred oracles themselves.

This is as it should be; that is, the evidence ‘a priori’, securing the rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality.  Pity that Baxter’s chapters in ‘The Saints’ Rest’ should have been one and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or ‘minimum’ of faith; the maxim being, ‘quanto minus tanto melius’.

Ib. .

And once all the ignorant rout were raging mad against me for preaching the doctrine of Original Sin to them, and telling them that infants, before regeneration, had so much guilt and corruption as made them loathsome in the eyes of God.

No wonder; ­because the babe would perish without the mother’s milk, is it therefore loathsome to the mother?  Surely the little ones that Christ embraced had not been baptized.  And yet ’of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’.

Ib. .

Some thought that the King should not at all be displeased and provoked, and that they were not bound to do any other justice, or attempt any other reformation but what they could procure the King to be willing to.  And these said, when you have displeased and provoked him to the utmost, he will be your King still. The more you offend him, the less you can trust him; and when mutual confidence is gone, a war is beginning. And if you conquer him, what the better are you?  He will still be King.  You can but force him to an agreement; and how quickly will he have power and advantage to violate that which he is forced to, and to be avenged on you all for the displeasure you have done him!  He is ignorant of the advantages of a King that cannot foresee this.

This paragraph goes to make out a case in justification of the Régicides which Baxter would have found it difficult to answer.  Certainly a more complete exposure of the inconsistency of Baxter’s own party cannot be.  For observe, that in case of an agreement with Charles all those classes, which afterwards formed the main strength of the Parliament and ultimately decided the contest in its favour, would have been politically inert, with little influence and no actual power, ­I mean the Yeomanry, and the Citizens of London:  while a vast majority of the Nobles and landed Gentry, who sooner or later must have become the majority in Parliament, went over to the King at once.  Add to these the whole systematized force of the High Church Clergy and all the rude ignorant vulgar in high and low life, who detested every attempt at moral reform, ­and it is obvious that the King could not want opportunities to retract and undo all that he had conceded under compulsion.  But that neither the will was wanting, nor his conscience at all in the way, his own advocate Clarendon and others have supplied damning proofs.

Ib. .

And though Parliaments may draw up Bills for repealing laws, yet hath the King his negative voice, and without his consent they cannot do it; which though they acknowledge, yet did they too easily admit of petitions against the Episcopacy and Liturgy, and connived at all the clamors and papers which were against them.

How so?  If they admitted the King’s right to deny, they must admit the subject’s right to entreat.

Ib.

Had they endeavoured the ejection of lay-chancellors, and the reducing of the diocèses to a narrower compass, or the setting up of a subordinate discipline, and only the correcting and reforming of the Liturgy, perhaps it might have been borne more patiently.

Did Baxter find it so himself ­and when too he had the formal and recorded promise of Charles ii. for it?

Ib.

But when the same men (Ussher, Williams, Morton, &c.) saw that greater things were aimed at, and episcopacy itself in danger, or their grandeur and riches at least, most of them turned against the Parliament.

This, and in this place, is unworthy of Baxter.  Even he, good man, could not wholly escape the jaundice of party.

Ib. .

  They said to this; ­that as all the courts of justice do execute their
  sentences in the King’s name, and this by his own law, and therefore
  by his authority, so much more might his Parliament do.

A very sound argument is here disguised in a false analogy, an inapplicable precedent, and a sophistical form.  Courts of justice administer the total of the supreme power retrospectively, involved in the name of the most dignified part.  But here a part, as a part, acts as the whole, where the whole is absolutely requisite, ­that is, in passing laws; and again as B. and C. usurp a power belonging to A. by the determination of A. B. and C. The only valid argument is, that Charles had by acts of his own ceased to be a lawful King.

Ib. .

  And that the authority and person of the King were inviolable, out of
  the reach of just accusation, judgment, or execution by law; as having
  no superior, and so no judge.

But according to Grotius, a king waging war against the lawful copartners of the ‘summa potestas’ ceases to be their king, and if conquered forfeits to them his former share.  And surely if Charles had been victor, he would have taken the Parliament’s share to himself.  If it had been the Parliament, and not a mere faction with the army, that tried and beheaded Charles, I do not see how any one could doubt the lawfulness of the act, except upon very technical grounds.

Ib. .

  For if once legislation, the chief act of government, be denied to any
  part of government at all, and affirmed to belong to the people as
  such, who are no governors, all government will hereby be overthrown.

Here Baxter falls short of the subject, and does not see the full consequents of his own prior, most judicious, positions.  Legislation in its high and most proper sense belongs to God only.  A people declares that such and such they hold to be laws, that is, God’s will.

Ib. .

In Cornwall Sir Richard Grenvill, having taken many soldiers of the Earl of Essex’s army, sentenced about a dozen to be hanged.  When they had hanged two or three, the rope broke which should have hanged the next.  And they sent for new ropes so oft to hang him, and all of them still broke, that they durst go no further, but saved all the rest.

The soldiers, doubtless, contrived this from the aversion natural to Englishmen of killing an enemy in cold blood; and because they foresaw that there would be Tit for Tat.

Ib. .

It is easy to see from Baxter’s own account, that his party ruined their own cause and that of the kingdom by their tenets concerning the right and duty of the civil magistrate to use the sword against such as were not of the same religion with themselves.

Ib. .

They seem not to me to have answered satisfactorily to the main argument fetched from the Apostle’s own government, with which Saravia had inclined me to some Episcopacy before:  though miracles and infallibility were Apostolical temporary privileges, yet Church government is an ordinary thing to be continued.  And therefore as the Apostles had successors as they were preachers, I see not but that they must have successors as Church governors.

Was not Peter’s sentence against Ananias an act of Church government?  Therefore though Church government is an ordinary thing in some form or other, it does not follow that one particular form is an ordinary thing.  For the time being the Apostles, as heads of the Church, did what they thought best; but whatever was binding on the Church universal and in all times they delivered as commands from Christ.  Now no other command was delivered but that all things should conduce to order and edification.

Ib. .

And therefore how they could refuse to receive the King, till he consented to take the Covenant, I know not, unless the taking of the Covenant had been a condition on which he was to receive his crown by the laws or fundamental constitutions of the kingdom, which none pretendeth.  Nor know I by what power they can add anything to the Coronation Oath or Covenant, which by his ancestors was to be taken, without his own consent.

And pray, how and by whom were the Coronation Oaths first imposed?  The Scottish nation in 1650 had the same right to make a bargain with the claimant of their throne as their ancestors had.  It is strange that Baxter should not have seen that his objections would apply to our ‘Magna Charta’.  So he talks of the “fundamental constitutions,” just as if these had been aboriginal or rather ‘sans’ origin, and not as indeed they were extorted and bargained for by the people.  But throughout it is plain that Baxter repeated, but never appropriated, the distinction between the King as the executive power, and as the individual functionary.  What obligation lay on the Scottish Parliament and Church to consult the man Charles Stuart’s personal likes and dislikes?  The Oath was to be taken by him as their King.  Doubtless, he equally disliked the whole Protestant interest; and if the Tories and Church of England Jacobites of a later day had recalled James ii., would Baxter have thought them culpable for imposing on him an Oath to preserve the Protestant Church of England and to inflict severe penalties on his own Church-fellows?

Ib. .

  And some men thought it a very hard question, whether they should
  rather wish the continuance of a usurper that will do good, or the
  restoration of a rightful governor whose followers will do hurt.

And who shall dare unconditionally condemn those who judged the former to be the better alternative?  Especially those who did not adopt Baxter’s notion of a ‘jus divinum’ personal and hereditary in the individual, whose father had broken the compact on which the claim rested.

Ib. .

One Mrs. Dyer, a chief person of the Sect, did first bring forth a monster, which had the parts of almost all sorts of living creatures, some parts like man, but most ugly and misplaced, and some like beasts, birds and fishes, having horns, fins and claws; and at the birth of it the bed shook, and the women present fell a vomiting, and were fain to go forth of the room.

This babe of Mrs. Dyer’s is no bad emblem of Richard Baxter’s own credulity.  It is almost an argument on his side, that nothing he believed is more strange and inexplicable than his own belief of them.

Ib. .

  The third sect were the Ranters.  These also made it their business, as
  the former, to set up the light of nature under the name of Christ in
  men, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, &c.

But why does Baxter every where assert the identity of the new light with the light of nature?  Or what does he mean exclusively by the latter?  The source must be the same in all lights as far as it is light.

Ib. .

  And that was the fourth sect, the Quakers; who were but the Ranters
  turned from horrid profaneness and blasphemy to a life of extreme
  austerity on the other side.

Observe the but.

Ib.

Their doctrine is to be seen in Jacob Behmen’s books by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms.

This is not in all its parts true.  It is true that the first principles of Behmen are to be found in the writings of the Neo-Platonists after Plotinus, and (but mixed with gross impieties) in Paracelsus; ­but it is not true that they are easily known, and still less so that they are communicable in common familiar terms.  But least of all is it true that there is nothing original in Behmen.

Ib.

  The chiefest of these in England are Dr. Pordage and his family.

It is curious that Lessing in the Review, which he, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn conducted under the form of Letters to a wounded Officer, joins the name of Pordage with that of Behmen.  Was Pordage’s work translated into German?

Ib. .

Also the Socinians made some increase by the ministry of one Mr. Biddle, sometimes schoolmaster in Gloucester; who wrote against the Godhead of the Holy Ghost, and afterwards of Christ; whose followers inclined much to mere Deism.

For the Socinians till Biddle retained much of the Christian religion, for example, Redemption by the Cross, and the omnipresence of Christ as to this planet even as the Romanists with their Saints.  Luther’s obstinate adherence to the ubiquity of the Body of Christ and his or rather its real presence in and with the bread was a sad furtherance to the advocates of Popish idolatry and hierolatry.

Ib. .

Many a time have I been brought very low, and received the sentence of death in myself, when my poor, honest, praying neighbours have met, and upon their fasting and earnest prayers I have been recovered.  Once when I had continued weak three weeks, and was unable to go abroad, the very day that they prayed for me, being Good Friday, I recovered, and was able to preach, and administer the Sacrament the next Lord’s Day, and was better after it, &c.

Strange that the common manuals of school logic should not have secured Baxter from the repeated blunder of ‘Cum hoc, ergo, propter hoc’; but still more strange that his piety should not have revolted against degrading prayer into medical quackery.

Before the Revolution of 1688, metaphysics ruled without experimental psychology, and in these curious paragraphs of Baxter we see the effect:  since the Revolution experimental psychology without metaphysics has in like manner prevailed, and we now feel the result.  In like manner from Plotinus to Proclus, that is, from A. D. 250 to A. D. 450, philosophy was set up as a substitute for religion:  during the dark ages religion superseded philosophy, and the consequences are equally instructive.  The great maxim of legislation, intellectual or political, is ’Subordinate, not exclude’.  Nature in her ascent leaves nothing behind, but at each step subordinates and glorifies: ­mass, crystal, organ, sensation, sentience, reflection.

Ib. .

Another time, as I sat in my study, the weight of my greatest folio books brake down three or four of the highest shelves, when I sat close under them, and they fell down every side me, and not one of them hit me, save one upon the arm; whereas the place, the weight, the greatness of the books was such, and my head just under them, that it was a wonder they had not beaten out my brains, &c.

[Greek:  Mega biblion mega kakon.]

Ib. .

For all the pains that my infirmities ever brought upon me were never half so grievous an affliction to me, as the unavoidable loss of my time, which they occasioned.  I could not bear, through the weakness of my stomach, to rise before seven o’clock in the morning, &c.

Alas! in how many respects does my lot resemble Baxter’s; but how much less have my bodily evils been; and yet how very much greater an impediment have I suffered them to be!  But verily Baxter’s labours seem miracles of supporting grace.  Ought I not therefore to retract the note ?  I waver.

Ib. .

For my part, I bless God, who gave me even under a Usurper, whom I opposed, such liberty and advantage to preach his Gospel with success, which I cannot have under a King to whom I have sworn and performed true subjection and obedience; yea, which no age since the Gospel came into this land did before possess, as far as I can learn from history.  Sure I am that when it became a matter of reputation and honour to be godly, it abundantly furthered the successes of the ministry.  Yea, and I shall add this much more for the sake of posterity, that as much as I have said and written against licentiousness in religion, and for the magistrate’s power in it, and though I think that land most happy, whose rulers use their authority for Christ as well as for the civil peace; yet in comparison of the rest of the world, I shall think that land happy that hath but bare liberty to be as good as they are willing to be; and if countenance and maintenance be but added to liberty, and tolerated errors and sects be but forced to keep the peace, and not to oppose the substantials of Christianity, I shall not hereafter much fear such toleration, nor despair that truth will bear down adversaries.

What a valuable and citable paragraph!  Likewise it is a happy instance of the force of a cherished prejudice in an honest mind ­practically yielding to the truth, but yet with a speculative, “Though I still think, &c.”

Ib. .

Among truths certain in themselves, all are not equally certain unto me; and even of the mysteries of the Gospel I must needs say, with Mr. Richard Hooker, that whatever some may pretend, the subjective certainty cannot go beyond the objective evidence. Therefore I do more of late than ever discern the necessity of a methodical procedure in maintaining the doctrine of Christianity. My certainty that I am a man is before my certainty that there is a God. My certainty that there is a God is greater than my certainty that he requireth love and holiness of his creature, &c.

There is a confusion in this paragraph, which asks more than a marginal note to disentangle.  Briefly, the process of acquirement is confounded with the order of the truths when acquired.  A tinder spark gives light to an Argand’s lamp:  is it therefore more luminous?

Ib. .

And when I have studied hard to understand some abstruse admired book, as ’de Scientia Dei, de Providentia circa malum, de Decretis, de Praedeterminatione, de Libertate creaturae’, &c.  I have but attained the knowledge of human imperfection, and to see that the author is but a man as well as I.

On these points I have come to a resting place.  Let such articles, as are either to be recognized as facts, for example, sin or evil having its origination in a will; and the reality of a responsible and (in whatever sense freedom is presupposed in responsibility,) of a free will in man; ­or acknowledged as laws, for example, the unconditional bindingness of the practical reason; ­or to be freely affirmed as necessary through their moral interest, their indispensableness to our spiritual humanity, for example, the personeity, holiness, and moral government and providence of God; ­let these be vindicated from absurdity, from self-contradiction, and contradiction to the pure reason, and restored to simple incomprehensibility.  He who seeks for more, knows not what he is talking of; he who will not seek even this is either indifferent to the truth of what he professes to believe, or he mistakes a general determination not to disbelieve for a positive and especial faith, which is only our faith as far as we can assign a reason for it.  O! how impossible it is to move an inch to the right or the left in any point of spiritual and moral concernment, without seeing the damage caused by the confusion of reason with the understanding.

Ib. .

My soul is much more afflicted with the thoughts of the miserable world, and more drawn out in desire of their conversion than heretofore.  I was wont to look but little further than England in my prayers, as not considering the state of the rest of the world; ­or if I prayed for the conversion of the Jews, that was almost all.  But now as I better understand the care of the world, and the method of the Lord’s Prayer, so there is nothing in the world that lieth so heavy upon my heart, as the thought of the miserable nations of the earth.

I dare not not condemn myself for the languid or dormant state of my feelings respecting the Mohammedan and Heathen nations; yet know not in what degree to condemn.  The less culpable grounds of this languor are, first, my utter ignorance of God’s purposes with respect to the Heathens; and second, the strong conviction, I have that the conversion of a single province of Christendom to true practical Christianity would do more toward the conversion of Heathendom than an army of Missionaries.  Romanism and despotic government in the larger part of Christendom, and the prevalence of Epicurean principles in the remainder; ­these do indeed lie heavy on my heart.

Ib. .

Therefore I confess I give but halting credit to most histories that are written, not only against the Albigenses and Waldenses, but against most of the ancient heretics, who have left us none of their own writings, in which they speak for themselves; and I heartily lament that the historical writings of the ancient schismatics and heretics, as they were called, perished, and that partiality suffered them not to survive, that we might have had more light in the Church affairs of those times, and been better able to judge between the Fathers and them.

It is greatly to the credit of Baxter that he has here anticipated those merits which so long after gave deserved celebrity to the name and writings of Beausobre and Lardner, and still more recently in this respect of Eichhorn, Paulus and other Neologists.

Ib. .

And therefore having myself now written this history of myself, notwithstanding my protestation that I have not in anything wilfully gone against the truth, I expect no more credit from the reader than the self-evidencing light of the matter, with concurrent rational advantages from persons, and things, and other witnesses, shall constrain him to.

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.

Book I. Part ii. .

The following Book of this Work is interesting and most instructive as an instance of Syncretism, and its Epicurean ‘clinamen’, even when it has been undertaken from the purest and most laudable motives, and from impulses the most Christian, and yet its utter failure in its object, that of tending to a common centre.  The experience of eighteen centuries seems to prove that there is no practicable ‘medium’ between a Church comprehensive (which is the only meaning of a Catholic Church visible) in which A. in the North or East is allowed to advance officially no doctrine different from what is allowed to B. in the South or West; ­and a co-existence of independent Churches, in none of which any further unity is required but that between the minister and his congregation, while this again is secured by the election and continuance of the former depending wholly on the will of the latter.

Perhaps the best state possible, though not the best possible state, is where both are found, the one established by maintenance, the other by permission; in short that which we now enjoy.  In such a state no minister of the former can have a right to complain, for it was at his own option to have taken the latter; ‘et volenti nulla fit injuria’.  For an individual to demand the freedom of the independent single Church when he receives L500 a year for submitting to the necessary restrictions of the Church General, is impudence and Mammonolatry to boot.

Ib. .

They (the Erastians) misunderstood and injured their brethren, supposing and affirming them to claim as from God a coercive power over the bodies or purses of men, and so setting up ’imperium in imperio’; whereas all temperate Christians (at least except Papists) confess that the Church hath no power of force, but only to manage God’s word unto men’s consciences.

But are not the receivers as bad as the thief?  Is it not a poor evasion to say: ­“It is true I send you to a dungeon there to rot, because you do not think as I do concerning some point of faith; ­but this only as a civil officer.  As a divine I only tenderly entreat and persuade you!” Can there be fouler hypocrisy in the Spanish Inquisition than this?

Ib. .

That hereby they (the Diocesan party) altered the ancient species of Presbyters, to whose office the spiritual government of their proper folks as truly belonged, as the power of preaching and worshiping God did.

I could never rightly understand this objection of Richard Baxter’s.  What power not possessed by the Rector of a parish, would he have wished a parochial Bishop to have exerted?  What could have been given by the Legislature to the latter which might not be given to the former?  In short Baxter’s plan seems to do away Archbishops ­[Greek:  koinoi episkopoi] ­but for the rest to name our present Rectors and Vicars Bishops.  I cannot see what is gained by his plan.  The true difficulty is that Church discipline is attached to an Establishment by this world’s law, not to the form itself established:  and his objections from paragraph 5 to paragraph 10 relate to particular abuses, not to Episcopacy itself.

Ib. .

But above all I disliked that most of them (the Independents) made the people by majority of votes to be Church governors in excommunications, absolutions, &c., which Christ hath made an act of office; and so they governed their governors and themselves.

Is not this the case with the Houses of Legislature?  The members taken individually are subjects; collectively governors.

Ib. .

The extraordinary gifts of the Apostles, and the privilege of being eye and ear witnesses to Christ, were abilities which they had for the infallible discharge of their function, but they were not the ground of their power and authority to govern the Church. ’Potestas clavium’ was committed to them only, not to the Seventy.

I wish for a proof, that all the Apostles had any extraordinary gifts which none of the LXX. had.  Nay as an Episcopalian of the Church of England, I hold it an unsafe and imprudent concession, tending to weaken the governing right of the Bishops.  But I fear that as the law and right of patronage in England now are, the question had better not be stirred; lest it should be found that the true power of the keys is not, as with the Papists, in hands to which it is doubtful whether Christ committed them exclusively; but in hands to which it is certain that Christ did not commit them at all.

Ib. .

  It followeth not a mere Bishop may have a multitude of Churches,
  because an Archbishop may, who hath many Bishops under him.

What then does Baxter quarrel about?  That our Bishops take a humbler title than they have a right to claim; ­that being in fact Archbishops, they are for the most part content to be styled as one of the brethren!

Ib. .

  I say again, No Church, no Christ; for no body, no head; and if no
  Christ then, there is no Christ now.

Baxter here forgets his own mystical regenerated Church.  If he mean this, it is nothing to the argument in question; if not, then he must assert the monstrous absurdity of, No unregenerate Church, no Christ.

Ib. .

  Or if they would not yield to this at all, we might have communion
  with them as Christians, without acknowledging them for Pastors.

Observe the inconsistency of Baxter.  No Pastor, no Church; no Church, no Christ; and yet he will receive them as Christians:  much to his honor as a Christian, but not much to his credit as a logician.

Ib. .

We are agreed that as some discovery of consent on both parts (the pastors and people) is necessary to the being of the members of a political particular Church:  so that the most express declaration of that consent is the most plain and satisfactory dealing, and most obliging, and likest to attain the ends.

In our Churches, especially in good livings, there is such an overflowing fullness of consent on the part of the Pastor as supplies that of the people altogether; nay, to nullify their declared dissent.

Ib. .

By the establishment of what is contained in these twelve propositions or articles following, the Churches in these nations may have a holy communion, peace and concord, without any wrong to the consciences or liberties of Presbyterians, Congregational, Episcopal, or any other Christians.

Painfully instructive are these proposals from so wise and peaceable a divine as Baxter.  How mighty must be the force of an old prejudice when so generally acute a logician was blinded by it to such palpable inconsistencies!  On what ground of right could a magistrate inflict a penalty, whereby to compel a man to hear what he might believe dangerous to his soul, on which the right of burning the refractory individual might not be defended as well?

Ib. .

To which ends I think that this is all that should be required of any Church or member ordinarily to be professed:  In general I do believe all that is contained in the sacred canonical Scriptures, and particularly I believe all explicitly contained in the ancient Creed, &c.

To a man of sense, but unstudied in the context of human nature, and from having confined his reading to the writers of the present and the last generation unused to live in former ages, it must seem strange that Baxter should not have seen that this test is either all or nothing.  And the Creed!  Is it certain that the so called Apostles’ Creed was more than the mere catechism of the Catechumens?  Was it the Baptismal Creed of the Eastern or Western Church, especially the former?  The only test really necessary, in my opinion, is an established Liturgy.

Ib. .

As reverend Bishop Ussher hath manifested that the Western Creed, now called the Apostles’ (wanting two or three clauses that now are in it) was not only before the Nicene Creed, but of much further antiquity, that no beginning of it below the Apostles’ days can be found.

Remove these two or three clauses, and doubtless the substance of the remainder must have been little short of the Apostolic age.  But so is one at least of the writings of Clement.  The great question is:  Was this the Baptismal Symbol, the ‘Regula Fidei’, which it was forbidden to put in writing; ­or was it not the Christian A. B. C. of the ‘Catechumeni’ previously to their Baptismal initiation into the higher mysteries, to the ‘strong meat’ which was not for babes’?

Ib. .

Not so much for my own sake as others; lest it should offend the Parliament, and open the mouths of our adversaries, that we cannot ourselves agree in fundamentals; and lest it prove an occasion for others to sue for a universal toleration.

That this apprehension so constantly haunted, so powerfully actuated, even the mild and really tolerant Baxter, is a strong proof of my old opinion, ­that the dogma of the right and duty of the civil magistrate to restrain and punish religious avowals by him deemed heretical, universal among the Presbyterians and Parliamentary Churchmen, joined with the persecuting spirit of the Presbyterians, ­was the main cause of Cromwell’s despair and consequent unfaithfulness concerning a Parliamentary Commonwealth.

Ib. .

I tried, when I was last with you, to revive your reason by proposing to you the infallibility of the common senses of all the world; and I could not prevail though you had nothing to answer that was not against common sense.  And it is impossible any thing controverted can be brought nearer you, or made plainer than to be brought to your eyes and taste and feeling; and not yours only, but all men’s else.  Sense goes before faith.  Faith is no faith but upon supposition of sense and understanding:  if therefore common sense be fallible, faith must needs be so.

This is one of those two-edged arguments, which not indeed began, but began to be fashionable, just before and after the Restoration.  I was half converted to Transubstantiation by Tillotson’s common senses against it; seeing clearly that the same grounds ’totidem verbis et syllabis’ would serve the Socinian against all the mysteries of Christianity.  If the Roman Catholics had pretended that the phenomenal bread and wine were changed into the phenomenal flesh and blood, this objection would have been legitimate and irresistible; but as it is, it is mere sensual babble.  The whole of Popery lies in the assumption of a Church, as a numerical unit, infallible in the highest degree, inasmuch as both which is Scripture, and what Scripture teaches, is infallible by derivation only from an infallible decision of the Church.  Fairly undermine or blow up this:  and all the remaining peculiar tenets of Romanism fall with it, or stand by their own right as opinions of individual Doctors.

An antagonist of a complex bad system, ­a system, however, notwithstanding ­and such is Popery, ­should take heed above all things not to disperse himself.  Let him keep to the sticking place.  But the majority of our Protestant polemics seem to have taken for granted that they could not attack Romanism in too many places, or on too many points; ­forgetting that in some they will be less strong than in others, and that if in any one or two they are repelled from the assault, the feeling of this will extend itself over the whole.  Besides, what is the use of alleging thirteen reasons for a witness’s not appearing in Court, when the first is that the man had died since his ‘subpoena’?  It is as if a party employed to root up a tree were to set one or two at that work, while others were hacking the branches, and others sawing the trunk at different heights from the ground.

N. B. The point of attack suggested above in disputes with the Romanists is of special expediency in the present day:  because a number of pious and reasonable Roman Catholics are not aware of the dependency of their other tenets on this of the infallibility of their Church decisions, as they call them, but are themselves shaken and disposed to explain it away.  This once fixed, the Scriptures rise uppermost, and the man is already a Protestant, rather a genuine Catholic, though his opinions should remain nearer to the Roman than the Reformed Church.

Ib.

But methinks yet I should have hope of reviving your charity.  You cannot be a Papist indeed, but you must believe that out of their Church (that is out of the Pope’s dominions) there is no salvation; and consequently no justification and charity, or saving grace.  And is it possible you can so easily believe your religious father to be in hell; your prudent, pious mother to be void of the love of God, and in a state of damnation, &c.

This argument ‘ad affectum’ is beautifully and forcibly stated; but yet defective by the omission of the point; ­not for unbelief or misbelief of any article of faith, but simply for not being a member of this particular part of the Church of Christ.  For it is possible that a Christian might agree in all the articles of faith with the Roman doctors against those of the Reformation, and yet if he did not acknowledge the Pope as Christ’s vicar, and held salvation possible in any other Church, he is himself excluded from salvation!  Without this great distinction Lady Ann Lindsey might have replied to Baxter: ­“So might a Pagan orator have said to a convert from Paganism in the first ages of Christianity; so indeed the advocates of the old religion did argue.  What! can you bear to believe that Numa, Camillus, Fabricius, the Scipios, the Catos, that Cicero, Seneca, that Titus and the Antonini, are in the flames of Hell, the accursed objects of the divine hatred?  Now whatever you dare hope of these as heathens, we dare hope of you as heretics.”

Ib. .

But this is not the worst.  You consequently anathematize all Papists by your sentence:  for hérésies by your own sentence cut off men from heaven:  but Popery is a bundle of hérésies:  therefore it cuts off men from heaven.  The minor I prove, &c.

This introduction of syllogistic form in a letter to a young Lady is whimsically characteristic.

Ib. .

You say, the Scripture admits of no private interpretation.  But you abuse yourself and the text with a false interpretation of it in these words.  An interpretation is called private either as to the subject person, or as to the interpreter.  You take the text to speak of the latter, when the context plainly sheweth you that it speaks of the former.  The Apostle directing them to understand the prophecies of the Old Testament, gives them this caution; ­that none of these Scriptures that are spoken of Christ the public person must be interpreted as spoken of David or other private person only, of whom they were mentioned but as types of Christ, &c.

It is strange that this sound and irrefragable argument has not been enforced by the Church divines in their controversies with the modern Unitarians, as Capp, Belsham and others, who refer all the prophetic texts of the Old Testament to historical personages of their time, exclusively of all double sense.

Ib. .

As to what you say of Apostles still placed in the Church: ­when any shew us an immediate mission by their communion, and by miracles, ‘tongues’, and a spirit of revelation and infallibility prove themselves Apostles, we shall believe them.

This is another of those two-edged arguments which Baxter and Jeremy Taylor imported from Grotius, and which have since become the universal fashion among Protestants.  I fear, however, that it will do us more hurt by exposing a weak part to the learned Infidels than service in our combat with the Romanists.  I venture to assert most unequivocally that the New Testament contains not the least proof of the ‘linguipotence’ of the Apostles, but the clearest proofs of the contrary:  and I doubt whether we have even as decisive a victory over the Romanists in our Middletonian, Farmerian, and Douglasian dispute concerning the miracles of the first two centuries and their assumed contrast ‘in génère’ with those of the Apostles and the Apostolic age, as we have in most other of our Protestant controversies.

N.B.  These opinions of Middleton and his more cautious followers are no part of our real Church doctrine.  This passion for law Court evidence began with Grotius.

Ib. .

We conceived there needs no more to be said for justifying the imposition of the ceremonies by law established than what is contained in the beginning ­of this Section....  Inasmuch as lawful authority hath already determined the ceremonies in question to be decent and orderly, and to serve to edification:  and consequently to be agreeable to the general rules of the Word.

To a self-convinced and disinterested lover of the Church of England, it gives an indescribable horror to observe the frequency, with which the Prelatic party after the Restoration appeal to the laws as of equal authority with the express words of Scripture; ­as if the laws, by them appealed to, were other than the vindictive determinations of their own furious partizans; ­as if the same appeals might not have been made by Bonner and Gardiner under Philip and Mary!  Why should I speak of the inhuman sophism that, because it is silly in my neighbour to break his egg at the broad end when the Squire and the Vicar have declared their predilection for the narrow end, therefore it is right for the Squire and the Vicar to hang and quarter him for his silliness: ­for it comes to that.

Ib. .

To you it is indifferent before your imposition:  and therefore you may without any regret of your own consciences forbear the imposition, or persuade the law makers to forbear it.  But to many of those that dissent from you, they are sinful, &c.

But what is all this, good worthy Baxter, but saying and unsaying?  If they are not indifferent, why did you previously concede them to be such?  In short nothing can be more pitiably weak than the conduct of the Presbyterian party from the first capture of Charles I. Common sense required, either a bold denial that the Church had power in ceremonies more than in doctrines, or that the Parliament was the Church, since it is the Parliament that enacts all these things; ­or if they admitted the authority lawful and the ceremonies only, in their mind, inexpedient, good God! can self-will more plainly put on the cracked mask of tender conscience than by refusal of obedience?  What intolerable presumption, to disqualify as ungodly and reduce to null the majority of the country, who preferred the Liturgy, in order to force the long winded vanities of bustling God-orators on those who would fain hear prayers, not spouting!

Ib. .

The great controversies between the hypocrite and the true Christian, whether we should be serious in the practice of the religion which we commonly profess, hath troubled England more than any other; ­none being more hated and divided as Puritans than those that will make religion their business, &c.

Had not the Governors had bitter proofs that there are other and more cruel vices than swearing and careless living; ­and that these were predominant chiefly among such as made their religion their business?

Ib.

And whereas you speak of opening a gap to Sectaries for private conventicles, and the evil consequents to the state, we only desire you to avoid also the cherishing of ignorance and profaneness, and suppress all Sectaries, and spare not, in a way that will not suppress the means of knowledge and godliness.

The present company, that is, our own dear selves, always excepted.

Ib. .

  Otherwise the poor undone Churches of Christ will no more believe you
  in such professions than we believed that those men intended the
  King’s just power and greatness, who took away his life.

Or who, like Baxter, joined the armies that were showering cannon balls and bullets around his inviolable person!  Whenever by reading the Prelatical writings and histories, I have had an over dose of anti-Prelatism in my feelings, I then correct it by dipping into the works of the Presbyterians, and their fellows, and so bring myself to more charitable thoughts respecting the Prelatists, and fully subscribe to Milton’s assertion, that “Presbyter was but Old Priest writ large.”

Ib. .

  The apocryphal matter of your lessons in Tobit, Judith, Bel and the
  Dragon, &c., is scarce agreeable to the word of God.

Does not Jude refer to an apocryphal book?

Ib.

Our experience unresistibly convinceth us that a continued prayer doth more to help most of the people, and carry on their desires, than turning almost every petition into a distinct prayer; and making prefaces and conclusions to be near half the prayers.

This now is the very point I most admire in our excellent Liturgy.  To any particular petition offered to the Omniscient, there may be a sinking of faith, a sense of its superfluity; but to the lifting up of the soul to the Invisible and there fixing it on his attributes, there can be no scruple.

Ib. .

The not abating of the impositions is the carting off of many hundreds of your brethren out of the ministry, and of many thousand Christians out of your communion; but the abating of the impositions will so offend you as to silence or excommunicate none of you at all.  For example, we think it a sin to subscribe, or swear canonical obedience, or use the transient image of the Cross in Baptism, and therefore these must cast us out, &c.

As long as independent single Churches, or voluntarily synodical were forbidden and punishable by penal law, this argument remained irrefragable.  The imposition of such trifles under such fearful threats was the very bitterness of spiritual pride and vindictiveness; ­after the law passed by which things became as they now are, it was a mere question of expediency for the National Church to determine in relation to its own comparative interests.  If the Church chose unluckily, the injury has been to itself alone.

It seems strange that such men as Baxter should not see that the use of the ring, the surplice and the like, are indifferent according to his own confession, yea, mere trifles, in comparison with the peace of the Church; but that it is no trifle, that men should refuse obedience to lawful authority in matters indifferent, and prefer the sin of schism to offending their taste and fancy.  The Church did not, upon the whole, contend for a trifle, nor for an indifferent matter, but for a principle on which all order in society must depend.  Still this is true only, provided the Church enacts no ordinances that are not necessary or at least plainly conducive to order or (generally) to the ends for which it is a Church.  Besides, the point which the King had required them to consider was not what ordinances it was right to obey, but what it was expedient to enact or not to enact.

Ib. .

That the Pastors of the respective parishes may be allowed not only publicly to preach, but personally to catechize or otherwise instruct the several families, admitting none to the Lord’s Table that have not personally owned their Baptismal covenant by a credible profession of faith and obedience; and to admonish and exhort the scandalous, in order to their repentance:  to hear the witnesses and the accused party, and to appoint fit times and places for these things, and to deny such persons the communion of the Church in the holy Eucharist, that remain impenitent, or that wilfully refuse to come to their Pastors to be instructed, or to answer such probable accusations; and to continue such exclusion of them till they have made a credible profession of repentance, and then to receive them again to the communion of the Church; ­provided there be place for due appeals to superior power.

Suppose only such men Pastors as are now most improperly, whether as boast or as sneer, called Evangelical, what an insufferable tyranny would this introduce!  Who would not rather live in Algiers?  This alone would make this minute history of the ecclesiastic factions invaluable, that it must convince all sober lovers of independence and moral self-government, how dearly we ought to prize our present Church Establishment with all its faults.

Ib. .

Therefore we humbly crave that your Majesty will here declare, that it is your Majesty’s pleasure that none be punished or troubled for not using the Book of Common Prayer, till it be effectually reformed by divines of both persuasions equally deputed thereunto.

The dispensing power of the Crown not only acknowledged, but earnestly invoked!  Cruel as the conduct of Laud and that of Sheldon to the Dissentients was, yet God’s justice stands clear towards them; for they demanded that from others, which they themselves would not grant.  They were to be allowed at their own fancies to denounce the ring in marriage, and yet impowered to endungeon, through the magistrate, the honest and peaceable Quaker for rejecting the outward ceremony of water in Baptism, as seducing men to take it as a substitute for the spiritual reality; ­though the Quakers, no less than themselves, appealed to Scripture authority ­the Baptist’s own contrast of Christ’s with the water Baptism.

Ib. .

We are sure that kneeling in any adoration at all, in any worship, on any Lord’s Day in the year, or any week day between Easter and Pentecost, was not only disused, but forbidden by General Councils, &c. ­and therefore that kneeling in the act of receiving is a novelty contrary to the decrees and practice of the Church for many hundred years after the Apostles.

Was not this because kneeling was the agreed sign of sorrow and personal contrition, which was not to be introduced into the public worship on the great day and the solemn seasons of the Church’s joy and thanksgiving?  If so, Baxter’s appeal to this usage is a gross sophism, a mere pun.

Ib. .

  Baxter’s Exceptions to the Common Prayer Book.

  1.  Order requireth that we begin with reverent prayer to God for his
     acceptance and assistance, which is not done.

Enunciation of God’s invitations, and promises in God’s own words, as in the Common Prayer Book, much better.

  2.  That the Creed and Decalogue containing the faith, in which we
     profess to assemble for God’s worship, and the law which we have
     broken by our sins, should go before the confession and Absolution;
     or at least before the praises of the Church; which they do not.

Might have deserved consideration, if the people or the larger number consisted of uninstructed ‘catechumeni’, or mere candidates for Church-membership.  But the object being, not the first teaching of the Creed and Decalogue, but the lively reimpressing of the same, it is much better as it is.

  3.  The Confession omitteth not only original sin, but all actual sin
     as specified by the particular commandments violated, and almost
     all the aggravations of those sins....  Whereas confession, being
     the expression of repentance, should be more particular, as
     repentance itself should be.

Grounded, on one of the grand errors of the whole Dissenting party, namely, the confusion of public common prayer, praise, and instruction, with domestic and even with private devotion.  Our Confession is a perfect model for Christian communities.

  4.  When we have craved help for God’s prayers, before we come to them,
     we abruptly put in the petition for speedy deliverance ­(’O God,
     make speed to save us:  O Lord make haste to help us’,) without any
     intimation of the danger that we desire deliverance from, and
     without any other petition conjoined.

  5.  It is disorderly in the manner, to sing the Scripture in a plain
     tune after the manner of reading.

  6. (’The Lord be with you.  And with thy spirit’,) being petitions
     for divine assistance, come in abruptly in the midst or near the
     end of morning prayer:  And (’Let us pray’.) is adjoined when we
     were before in prayer.

Mouse-like squeak and nibble.

  7. (’Lord have mercy upon us:  Christ have mercy upon us:  Lord have
     mercy upon us’.) seemeth an affected tautology without any special
     cause or order here; and the Lord’s Prayer is annexed that was
     before recited, and yet the next words are again but a repetition
     of the aforesaid oft repeated general (’O Lord, shew thy mercy upon
     us’.)

Still worse.  The spirit in which this and similar complaints originated has turned the prayers of Dissenting ministers into irreverent preachments, forgetting that tautology in words and thoughts implies no tautology in the music of the heart to which the words are, as it were, set, and that it is the heart that lifts itself up to God.  Our words and thoughts are but parts of the enginery which remains with ourselves; and logic, the rustling dry leaves of the lifeless reflex faculty, does not merit even the name of a pulley or lever of devotion.

  8.  The prayer for the King (’O Lord, save the King’.) is without any
     order put between the foresaid petition and another general request
     only for audience. (’And mercifully hear us when we call upon
     thee’).

A trifle, but just.

  9.  The second Collect is intituled (’For Peace’.) and hath not a word
     in it of petition for peace, but only ’for defence in assaults of
     enemies’, and that we ‘may not fear their power’.  And the prefaces
     (’in knowledge of whom standeth’, &c. and ‘whose service’, &c.)
     have no more evident respect to a petition for peace than to any
     other.  And the prayer itself comes in disorderly, while many
     prayers or petitions are omitted, which according both to the
     method of the Lord’s Prayer, and the nature of the things, should
     go before.

  10.  The third Collect intituled (’For Grace’.) is disorderly, &c.... 
      And thus the main parts of prayer, according to the rule of the
      Lord’s Prayer and our common necessities, are omitted.

Not wholly unfounded:  but the objection proceeds on an arbitrary and (I think) false assumption, that the Lord’s Prayer was universally prescriptive in form and arrangement.

  12.  The Litany ... omitteth very many particulars, ... and it is
      exceeding disorderly, following no just rules of method.  Having
      begged pardon of our sins, and deprecated vengeance, it proceedeth
      to evil in general, and some few sins in particular, and thence to
      a more particular enumeration of judgments; and thence to a
      recitation of the parts of that work of our redemption, and thence
      to the deprecation of judgments again, and thence to prayers for
      the King and magistrates, and then for all nations, and then for
      love and obedience, &c.

The very points here objected to as faults I should have selected as excellencies.  For do not the duties and temptations occur in real life even so intermingled?  The imperfection of thought much more of language, so singly successive, allows no better representation of the close neighbourhood, nay the co-inherence of duty in duty, desire in desire.  Every want of the heart pointing Godward is a chili agon that touches at a thousand points.  From these remarks I except the last paragraph of : 

  (As to the prayer for Bishops and Curates and the position of the
  General Thanksgiving, &c.)

which are defects so palpable and so easily removed, that nothing but antipathy to the objectors could have retained them.

13.  The like defectiveness and disorder is in the Communion Collects for the day....  There is no more reason why it should be appropriate to that day than another, or rather be a common petition for all days, &c.

I do not see how these supposed improprieties, for want of appropriateness to the day, could be avoided without risk of the far greater evil of too great appropriation to particular Saints and days as in Popery.  I am so far a Puritan that I think nothing would have been lost, if Christmas day and Good Friday had been the only week days made holy days, and Easter the only Lord’s day especially distinguished.  I should also have added Whitsunday; but that it has become unmeaning since our Clergy have, as I grieve to think, become generally Arminian, and interpreting the descent of the Spirit as the gift of miracles and of miraculous infallibility by inspiration have rendered it of course of little or no application to Christians at present.  Yet how can Arminians pray our Church prayers collectively on any day?  Answer.  See a ’boa constrictor’ with an ox or deer.  What they do swallow, proves so astounding a dilatability of gullet, that it would be unconscionable strictness to complain of the horns, antlers, or other indigestible non-essentials being suffered to rot off at the confines, [Greek:  herkos hodonton].  But to write seriously on so serious a subject, it is mournful to reflect that the influence of the systematic theology then in fashion with the anti-Prelatic divines, whether Episcopalians or Presbyterians, had quenched all fineness of mind, all flow of heart, all grandeur of imagination in them; while the victorious party, the Prelatic Arminians, enriched as they were with all learning and highly gifted with taste and judgment, had emptied revelation of all the doctrines that can properly be said to have been revealed, and thus equally caused the extinction of the imagination, and quenched the life in the light by withholding the appropriate fuel and the supporters of the sacred flame.  So that, between both parties, our transcendant Liturgy remains like an ancient Greek temple, a monumental proof of the architectural genius of an age long departed, when there were giants in the land.

Ib. .

As I was proceeding, Bishop Morley interrupted me according to his manner, with vehemency crying out The Bishop interrupted me again I attempted to speak, and still he interrupted me Bishop Morley went on, talking louder than I, &c.

The Bishops appear to have behaved insolently enough.  Safe in their knowledge of Charles’s inclinations, they laughed in their sleeves at his commission.  Their best answer would have been to have pressed the anti-impositionists with their utter forgetfulness of the possible, nay, very probable differences of opinion between the ministers and their congregations.  A vain minister might disgust a sober congregation with his ‘extempore’ prayers, or his open contempt of their kneeling at the Sacrament, and the like.  Yet by what right if he acts only as an individual?  And then what an endless source of disputes and preferences of this minister or of that!

Ib. .

  The paper offered by Bishop Cosins.

  1.  That the question may be put to the managers of the division,
     Whether there be anything in the doctrine, or discipline, or the
     Common Prayer, or ceremonies, contrary to the word of God; and if
     they can make any such appear; let them be satisfied.

  2.  If not, let them propose what they desire in point of expediency,
     and acknowledge it to be no more.

This was proposed, doubtless, by one of your sensible men; it is so plain, so plausible, shallow, ‘nihili, nauci, pili, flocci-cal’.  Why, the very phrase “contrary to the word of God” would take a month to define, and neither party agree at last.  One party says: 

The Church has power from God’s word to order all matters of order so as shall appear to them to conduce to decency and edification:  but ceremonies respect the orderly performance of divine service:  ergo, the Church has power to ordain ceremonies:  but the Cross in baptizing is a ceremony; ergo, the Church has power to prescribe the crossing in Baptism.  What is rightfully ordered cannot be rightfully withstood: ­but the crossing, &c., is rightfully ordered: ­’ergo’, the crossing cannot be rightfully omitted.

To this, how easily would the other party reply;

1.  That a small number of Bishops could not be called the Church: 

2.  That no one Church had power or pretence from God’s word to prescribe
   concerning mere matters of outward decency and convenience to other
   Churches or assemblies of Christian people: 

3.  That the blending an unnecessary and suspicious, if not
   superstitious, motion of the hand with a necessary and essential act
   doth in no wise respect order or propriety: 

Lastly, that to forbid a man to obey a direct command of God because he will not join with it an admitted mere tradition of men, is contrary to common sense, no less than to God’s word, expressly and by breach of charity, which is the great end and purpose of God’s word.  Besides; might not the Pope and his shavelings have made the same proposition to the Reformers in the reign of Edward VI., in respect to the greater part of the idle superfluities which were rejected by the Reformers, only as idle and superfluous, and for that reason contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, though few, if any, were in the direct teeth of a positive prohibition?  Above all, an honest policy dictates that the end in view being fully determined, as here for instance, the preclusion of disturbance and indecorum in Christian assemblies, every addition to means, already adequate to the securing of that end, tends to frustrate the end, and is therefore evidently excluded from the prerogatives of the Church, (however that word may be interpreted) inasmuch as its power is confined to such ceremonies and regulations as conduce to order and general edification.  In short it grieves me to think that the Heads of the most Apostolical Church in Christendom should have insisted on three or four trifles, the abolition of which could have given offence to none but such as from the baleful superstition that alone could attach importance to them effectually, it was charity to offend;-when all the rest of Baxter’s objections might have been answered so triumphantly.

Ib. .

  Answer to the foresaid paper.

  8.  That none may be a preacher, that dare not subscribe that there is
  nothing in the Common Prayer Book, the Book of Ordination, and the
  Articles, that is contrary to the word of God.

I think this might have been left out as well as the other two articles mentioned by Baxter.  For as by the words “contrary to the word of God” in Cosins’s paper, it was not meant to declare the Common Prayer Book free from all error, the sense must have been, that there is not anything in it in such a way or degree contrary to God’s word, as to oblige us to assign sin to those who have overlooked it, or who think the same compatible with God’s word, or who, though individually disapproving the particular thing, yet regard that acquiescence as an allowed sacrifice of individual opinion to modesty, charity, and zeal for the peace of the Church.  For observe that this eighth instance is additional to, and therefore not inclusive of, the preceding seven:  otherwise it must have been placed as the first, or rather as the whole, the seven following being motives and instances in support and explanation of the point.

Ib. .

Let me mediate here between Baxter and the Bishops:  Baxter had taken for granted that the King had a right to promise a revision of the Liturgy, Canons and regiment of the Church, and that the Bishops ought to have met him and his friends as diplomatists on even ground.  The Bishops could not with discretion openly avow all they meant; and it would be bigotry to deny that the spirit of compromise had no indwelling in their feelings or intents.  But nevertheless it is true that they thought more in the spirit of the English Constitution than Baxter and his friends. ­“This,” thought they, “is the law of the land, ’quam nolumus mutari’; and it must be the King with and by the advice of his Parliament, that can authorize any part of his subjects to take the question of its repeal into consideration.  Under other circumstances a King might bring the Bishops and the Heads of the Romish party together to plot against the law of the land.  No! we would have no other secret Committees but of Parliamentary appointment.  We are but so many individuals.  It is in the Legislature that the congregations, the party most interested in this cause, meet collectively by their representatives.” ­Lastly, let it not be overlooked, that the root of the bitterness was common to both parties, ­namely, the conviction of the vital importance of uniformity; ­and this admitted, surely an undoubted majority in favor of what is already law must decide whose uniformity it is to be.

Ib. .

We must needs believe that when your Majesty took our consent to a Liturgy to be a foundation that would infer our concord, you meant not that we should have no concord but by consenting to this Liturgy without any considerable alteration.

This is forcible reasoning, but which the Bishops could fairly leave for the King to answer; ­the contract tacit or expressed, being between him and the anti-Prelatic Presbytero-Episcopalian party, to which neither the Bishops nor the Legislature had acceded or assented.  If Baxter and Calamy were so little imbued with the spirit of the Constitution as to consider Charles II. as the breath of their nostrils, and this dread sovereign Breath in its passage gave a snort or a snuffle, or having led them to expect a snuffle surprised them with a snort, let the reproach be shared between the Breath’s fetid conscience and the nostrils’ nasoductility.  The traitors to the liberty of their country who were swarming and intriguing for favor at Breda when they should have been at their post in Parliament or in the Lobby preparing terms and conditions! ­Had all the ministers that were afterwards ejected and the Presbyterian party generally exerted themselves, heart and soul, with Monk’s soldiers, and in collecting those whom Monk had displaced, and, instead of carrying on treasons against the Government ‘de facto’ by mendicant négociations with Charles, had taken open measures to confer the sceptre on him as the Scotch did, ­whose stern and truly loyal conduct has been most unjustly condemned, ­the schism in the Church might have been prevented and the Revolution of 1688 superseded.

N.B.  In the above I speak of the Bishops as men interested in a litigated estate.  God forbid, I should seek to justify them as Christians.

Ib. .

  ‘Quaere’.  Whether in the 20th Article these words are not
  inserted; ­’Habet Ecclesia auctoritatem in controversiis fidei’.

Strange, that the evident antithesis between power in respect of ceremonies, and authority in points of faith, should have been overlooked!

Ib.

Some have published, That there is a proper sacrifice in the Lord’s Supper, to exhibit Christ’s death in the ‘post-fact’, as there was a sacrifice to prefigure it in the Old Law in the ‘ante-fact’, and therefore that we have a true altar, and not only metaphorically so called.

Doubtless a gross error, yet pardonable, for to errors nearly as gross it was opposed.

Ib.

  Some have maintained that the Lord’s Day is kept merely by
  ecclesiastical constitution, and that the day is changeable.

Where shall we find the proof of the contrary? ­at least, if the position had been worded thus:  The moral and spiritual obligation of keeping the Lord’s Day is grounded on its manifest necessity, and the evidence of its benignant effects in connection with those conditions of the world of which even in Christianized countries there is no reason to expect a change, and is therefore commanded by implication in the New Testament, so clearly and by so immediate a consequence, as to be no less binding on the conscience than an explicit command.  A., having lawful authority, expressly commands me to go to London from Bristol.  There is at present but one safe road:  this therefore is commanded by A.; and would be so, even though A. had spoken of another road which at that time was open.

Ib. .

  Some have broached out of Socinus a most uncomfortable and desperate
  doctrine, that late repentance, that is, upon the last bed of
  sickness, is unfruitful, at least to reconcile the penitent to God.

This no doubt refers to Jeremy Taylor’s work on Repentance, and is but too faithful a description of its character.

Ib. .

A little after the King was beheaded, Mr. Atkins met this priest in London, and going into a tavern with him, said to him in his familiar way, “What business have you here?  I warrant you come about some roguery or other.”  Whereupon the priest told it him as a great secret, that there were thirty of them here in London, who by instructions from Cardinal Mazarine, did take care of such affairs, and had sat in council, and debated the question, whether the King should be put to death or not; ­and that it was carried in the affirmative, and there were but two voices for the negative, which was his own and another’s; and that for his part, he could not concur with them, as foreseeing what misery this would bring upon his country.  Mr. Atkins stood to the truth of this, but thought it a violation of the laws of friendship to name the man.

Richard Baxter was too thoroughly good for any experience to make him worldly wise; else, how could he have been simple enough to suppose, that Mazarine would leave such a question to be voted ‘pro’ and ‘con’, and decided by thirty emissaries in London!  And, how could he have reconciled Mazarine’s having any share in Charles’s death with his own masterly account, pp. 98, 99, 100?  Even Cromwell, though he might have prevented, could not have effected, the sentence.  The regicidal judges were not his creatures.  Consult the Life of Colonel Hutchinson upon this.

Ib. .

Since this, Dr. Peter Moulin hath, in his Answer to ’Philanax Anglicus’, declared that he is ready to prove, when authority will Call him to it, that the King’s death, and the change of the government, was first proposed both to the Sorbonne, and to the Pope with his Conclave, and consented to and concluded for by both.

The Pope in his Conclave had about the same influence in Charles’s fate as the Pope’s eye in a leg of mutton.  The letter intercepted by Cromwell was Charles’s death-warrant.  Charles knew his power; and Cromwell and Ireton knew it likewise, and knew that it was the power of a man who was within a yard’s length of a talisman, only not within an arm’s length, but which in that state of the public mind, could he but have once grasped it, would have enabled him to blow up Presbyterian and Independent both.  If ever a lawless act was defensible on the principle of self-preservation, the murder of Charles might be defended.  I suspect that the fatal delay in the publication of the ‘Icon Basilike’ is susceptible of no other satisfactory explanation.  In short it is absurd to burthen this act on Cromwell and his party, in any special sense.  The guilt, if guilt it was, was consummated at the gates of Hull; that is, the first moment that Charles was treated as an individual, man against man.  Whatever right Hampden had to defend his life against the King in battle, Cromwell and Ireton had in yet more imminent danger against the King’s plotting.  Milton’s reasoning on this point is unanswerable:  and what a wretched hand does Baxter make of it!

Ib. .

But if the laws of the land appoint the nobles, as next the King, to assist him in doing right, and withhold him from doing wrong, then be they licensed by man’s law, and so not prohibited by God’s, to interpose themselves for the safety of equity and innocency, and by all lawful and needful means to procure the Prince to be reformed, but in no case deprived, where the sceptre is inherited!  So far Bishop Bilson.

Excellent!  O, by all means preserve for him the benefit of his rightful heir-loom, the regal sceptre; only lay it about his shoulders, till he promises to handle it, as he ought!  But what if he breaks his promise and your head? or what if he will not promise?  How much honester would it be to say, that extreme cases are ‘ipso nomine’ not generalizable, ­therefore not the subjects of a law, which is the conclusion ’per genus singuli in génère inclusi’.  Every extreme case must be judged by and for itself under all the peculiar circumstances.  Now as these are not foreknowable, the case itself cannot be predeterminable.  Harmodius and Aristogiton did not justify Brutus and Cassius:  but neither do Brutus and Cassius criminate Harmodius and Aristogiton.  The rule applies till an extreme case occurs; and how can this be proved?  I answer, the only proof is success and good event; for these afford the best presumption, first, of the extremity, and secondly, of its remediable nature ­the two elements of its justification.  To every individual it is forbidden.  He who attempts it, therefore, must do so on the presumption that the will of the nation is in his will:  whether he is mad or in his senses, the event can alone determine.

Ib. .

  The governing power and obligation over the flock is essential to the
  office of a Pastor or Presbyter as instituted by Christ.

There is, [Greek:  hos emoige dokei], one flaw in Baxter’s plea for his Presbyterian form of Church government, that he uses a metaphor, which, inasmuch as it is but a metaphor, agrees with the thing meant in some points only, as if it were commensurate ‘in toto’, and virtually identical.  Thus, the Presbyter is a shepherd as far as the watchfulness, tenderness, and care, are to be the same in both; but it does not follow that the Presbyter has the same sole power and exclusive right of guidance; and for this reason, ­that his flock are not sheep, but men; not of a natural, generic, or even constant inferiority of judgment; but Christians, co-heirs of the promises, and therein of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and of the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.  How then can they be excluded from a share in Church Government?  The words of Christ, if they may be transferred from their immediate application to the Jewish Synagogue, suppose the contrary; ­and that highest act of government, the election of the officers and ministers of the Church, was confessedly exercised by the congregations including the Presbyters and Arch-presbyter or Bishop, in the primitive Church.  The question, therefore, is: ­Is a national Church, established by law, compatible with Christianity?  If so, as Baxter held, the representatives (King, Lords, and Commons,) are or may be representatives of the whole people as Christians as well as civil subjects; ­and their voice will then be the voice of the Church, which every individual, as an individual, themselves as individuals, and, ‘a fortiori’, the officers and administrators appointed by them, are bound to obey at the risk of excommunication, against which there would be no appeal, but to the heavenly Cæsar, the Lord and Head of the universal Church.  But whether as the accredited representatives and plenipotentiaries of the national Church, they can avail themselves of their conjoint but distinct character, as temporal legislators, to superadd corporal or civil penalties to the spiritual sentence in points peculiar to Christianity, as heretical opinions, Church ceremonies, and the like, thus destroying ‘discipline’, even as wood is destroyed by combination with fire; ­this is a new and difficult question, which yet Baxter and the Presbyterian divines, and the Puritans of that age in general, not only answered affirmatively, but most zealously, not to say furiously, affirmed with anathemas to the assertors of the negative, and spiritual threats to the magistrates neglecting to interpose the temporal sword.  In this respect the present Dissenters have the advantage over their earlier predecessors; but on the other hand they utterly evacuate the Scriptural commands against schism; take away all sense and significance from the article respecting the Catholic Church; and in consequence degrade the discipline itself into mere club-regulations or the by-laws of different lodges; ­that very discipline, the capability of exercising which in its own specific nature without superinduction of a destructive and transmutual opposite, is the fairest and firmest support of their cause.

20th October, 1829.

Ib. .

  That sententially it must be done by the Pastor or Governor of that
  particular Church, which the person is to be admitted into, or cast
  out of.

This most arbitrary appropriation of the words of Christ, and of the apostles, John and Paul, by the Clergy to themselves exclusively, is the [Greek:  proton pseudos], the fatal error which has practically excluded Church discipline from among Protestants in all free countries.  That it is retained, and an efficient power, among the Quakers, and only in that Sect, who act collectively as a Church, ­who not only have no proper Clergy, but will not allow a division of majority and minority, nor a temporary president, ­seems to supply an unanswerable confirmation of this my assertion, and a strong presumption for the validity of my argument.  The Wesleyan Methodists have, I know, a discipline, and the power is in their consistory, ­a general conclave of priests cardinal since the death of Pope Wesley.  But what divisions and sécessions this has given rise to; what discontents and heart-burnings it still occasions in their labouring inferior ministers, and in the classes, is no less notorious, and may authorize a belief that as the Sect increases, it will be less and less effective; nay, that it has decreased; and after all, what is it compared with the discipline of the Quakers? ­Baxter’s inconsistency on this subject would be inexplicable, did we not know his zealotry against Harrington, the Deists and the Mystics; ­so that, like an electrified pith-ball, he is for ever attracted towards their tenets concerning the pretended perfecting of spiritual sentences by the civil magistrate, but he touches only to fly off again.  “Toleration! dainty word for soul-murder!  God grant that my eye may never see a toleration!” he exclaims in his book against Harrington’s Oceana.

Ib. .

As for the democratical conceit of them that say that the Parliament hath their governing power, as they are the people’s representatives, and so have the members of the convocation, though those represented have no governing power themselves, it is so palpably self-contradicting, that I need not confute it.

Self-contradicting according to Baxter’s sense of the words “represent” and “govern.”  But every rational adult has a governing power:  namely, that of governing himself.

Ib. .

That though a subject ought to take an oath in the sense of his rulers who impose it, as far as he can understand it; yet a man that taketh an oath from a robber to save his life is not always bound to take it in the imposer’s sense, if he take it not against the proper sense of the words.

This is a point, on which I have never been able to satisfy myself. ­The only safe conclusion I have been able to draw, being the folly, mischief, and immorality of all oaths but judicial ones, ­and those no farther excepted than as they are means of securing a deliberate consciousness of the presence of the Omniscient Judge.  The inclination of my mind is at this moment, to the principle that an oath may deepen the guilt of an act sinful in itself, but cannot be detached from the act; it being understood that a perfectly voluntary and self-imposed oath is itself a sin.  The man who compels me to take an oath by putting a pistol to my ear has in my mind clearly forfeited all his right to be treated as a moral agent.  Nay, it seems to be a sin to act so as to induce him to suppose himself such.  Contingent consequences must be excluded; but would, I am persuaded, weigh in favour of annulling on principle an oath sinfully extorted.  But I hate casuistry so utterly, that I could not without great violence to my feelings put the case in all its bearings.  For example: ­it is sinful to enlarge the power of wicked agents; but to allow them to have the power of binding the conscience of those, whom they have injured, is to enlarge the power, &c.  Again:  no oath can bind to the perpetration of a sin; but to transfer a sum of money from its rightful owner to a villain is a sin, &c. and twenty other such.  But the robber may kill the next man!  Possibly:  but still more probably, many, who would be robbers if they could obtain their ends without murder, would resist the temptation if no exténuations of guilt were contemplated; ­and one murder is more effective in rousing the public mind to preventive measures, and by the horror it strikes, is made more directly preventive of the tendency, than fifty civil robberies by contract.

Ib. .

  That the minister be not bound to read the Liturgy himself, if
  another, by whomsoever, be procured to do it; so be it he preach not
  against it.

Wonderful, that so good and wise a man as Baxter should not have seen that in this the Church would have given up the best, perhaps the only efficient, preservative of her Faith.  But for our blessed and truly Apostolic and Scriptural Liturgy, our churches’ pews would long ago have been filled by Arians and Socinians, as too many of their desks and pulpits already are.

Part III. .

As also to make us take such a poor suffering as this for a sign of true grace, instead of faith, hope, love, mortification, and a heavenly mind; and that the loss of one grain of love was worse than a long imprisonment.

Here Baxter confounds his own particular case, which very many would have coveted, with the sufferings of other prisoners on the same score; ­sufferings nominally the same, but with few, if any, of Baxter’s almost flattering supports.

Ib. .

It would trouble the reader for me to reckon up the many diseases and dangers for these ten years past, in or from which God hath delivered me; though it be my duty not to forget to be thankful.  Seven months together I was lame with a strange pain in one foot, twice delivered from a bloody flux; a spurious cataract in my eye, with incessant webs and networks before it, hath continued these eight years, so that I have rarely one hour’s or quarter of an hour’s ease.  Yet through God’s mercy I was never one hour melancholy, &c.

The power of the soul, by its own act of will, is, I admit, great for any one occasion or for a definite time, yea, it is marvellous.  But of such exertions and such an even frame of spirit, as Baxter’s were, under such unremitting and almost unheard-of bodily dérangements and pains as his, and during so long a life, 1 do not believe a human soul capable, unless substantiated and successively potentiated by an especial divine grace.

Ib. .

The reasons why I make no larger a profession necessary than the Creed and Scriptures, are, because if we depart from this old sufficient Catholic rule, we narrow the Church, and depart from the old Catholicism.

Why then any Creed?  This is the difficulty.  If you put the Creed as in fact, and not by courtesy, Apostolic, and on a parity with Scripture, having, namely, its authority in itself, and a direct inspiration of the framers, inspired ‘ad id tempus et ad eam rem’, on what ground is this to be done, without admitting the binding power of tradition in the very sense of the term in which the Church of Rome uses it, and the Protestant Churches reject it?  That it is the sum total made by Apostolic contributions, each Apostle casting, as into a helmet, a several article as his [Greek:  symbolon], is the tradition; and this is holden as a mere legendary tale by the great majority of learned divines.  That it is simply the Creed of the Western Church is affirmed by many Protestant divines, and some of these divines of our Church.  Its comparative simplicity these divines explain by the freedom from hérésies enjoyed by the Western Church, when the Eastern Church had been long troubled therewith.  Others, again, and not unplausibly, contend that it was the Creed of the Catechumens preparatory to the Baptismal profession of faith, which other was a fuller comment on the union of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, into whose name (or power) they were baptised.  That the Apostles’ Creed received additions after the Apostolic age, seems almost certain; not to mention the perplexing circumstance that so many of the Latin Fathers, who give almost the words of the Apostolic Creed, declare it forbidden absolutely to write or by any material form to transmit the ‘Canon Fidei’, or ‘Symbolum’ or ‘Regula Fidei’, the Creed [Greek:  kat’ hexochaen], by analogy of which the question whether such a book was Scripture or not, was to be tried.  With such doubts how can the Apostles’ Creed be preferred to the Nicene by a consistent member of the Reformed Catholic Church?

Ib. .

They think while you (the Independents) seem to be for a stricter discipline than others, that your way or usual practice tendeth to extirpate godliness out of the land, by taking a very few that can talk more than the rest, and making them the Church, &c.

Had Baxter had as judicious advisers among his theological, as he had among his legal, friends; and had he allowed them equal influence with him; he would not, I suspect, have written this irritating and too egometical paragraph.  But Baxter would have disbelieved a prophet who had foretold that almost the whole orthodoxy of the Non-conformists would he retained and preserved by the Independent congregations in England, after the Presbyterian had almost without exception become, first, Arian, then Socinian, and finally Unitarian:  that is, the ‘demi-semi-quaver’ of Christianity, Arminianism being taken for the ‘semi-breve’.

Ib. .

After this I waited on him (Dr. John Owen) at London again, and he came once to me to my lodgings, when I was in town near him.  And he told me that he received my chiding letter and perceived that I suspected his reality in the business; but he was so hearty in it that I should see that he really meant as he spoke, concluding in these words, “You shall see it, and my practice shall reproach your diffidence” .  About a month after I went to him again, and he had done nothing, but was still hearty for the work.  And to be short, I thus waited on him time after time, till my papers had been near a year and a quarter in his hand, and then I advised him to return them to me, which he did, with these words, “I am still a well-wisher to those mathematics;” ­without any other words about them, or ever giving me any more exception against them.  And this was the issue of my third attempt for union with the Independents.

Dr. Owen was a man of no ordinary intellect.  It would be interesting to have his conduct in this point, seemingly so strange, in some measure explained:  The words “those mathematics” look like an innuendo, that Baxter’s scheme of union, by which all the parties opposed to the Prelatic Church were to form a rival Church, was, like the mathematics, true indeed, but true only in the idea, that is, abstracted from the subject matter.  Still there appears a very chilling want of open-heartedness on the part of Owen, produced perhaps by the somewhat overly and certainly most ungracious resentments of Baxter.  It was odd at least to propose concord in the tone and on the alleged ground of an old grudge.

Ib.

I have been twenty-six years convinced that dichotomizing will not do it, but that the divine Trinity in Unity hath expressed itself in the whole frame of nature and morality .  But he, Mr. George Lawson, had not hit on the true method of the ‘vestigia Trinitatis’, &c.

Among Baxter’s philosophical merits, we ought not to overlook, that the substitution of Trichotomy for the old and still general plan of Dichotomy in the method and disposition of Logic, which forms so prominent and substantial an excellence in Kant’s Critique of the Pure Reason, of the Judgment, and the rest of his works, belongs originally to Richard Baxter, a century before Kant; ­and this not as a hint, but as a fully evolved and systematically applied principle.  Nay, more than this: ­Baxter grounded it on an absolute idea presupposed in all intelligential acts:  whereas Kant takes it only as a fact in which he seems to anticipate or suspect some yet deeper truth latent, and hereafter to be discovered.

On recollection, however, I am disposed to consider ‘this’ alone as Baxter’s peculiar claim, I have not indeed any distinct memory of Giordano Bruno’s ‘Logice Venatrix Veritatis’; but doubtless the principle of Trichotomy is necessarily involved in the Polar Logic, which again is the same with the Pythagorean ‘Tetractys’, that is, the eternal fountain or source of nature; and this being sacred to contemplations of identity, and prior in order of thought to all division, is so far from interfering with Trichotomy as the universal form of division (more correctly of distinctive distribution in logic) that it implies it.  ‘Prothesis’ being by the very term anterior to ‘Thesis’ can be no part of it.  Thus in

                         ‘Prothesis’
               ‘Thesis’ ‘Antithesis’
                         ‘Synthesis’

we have the Tetrad indeed in the intellectual and intuitive contemplation, but a Triad in discursive arrangement, and a Tri-unity in result.

Ib. .

Seeing the great difficulties that lie in the way of increasing charities so as to meet the increase of population, or even so as to follow it, and the manifold desirableness of parish Churches, with the material dignity that in a right state of Christian order would attach to them, as compared with meeting-houses, chapels, and the like ­all more or less ‘privati juris’, I have often felt disposed to wish that the large majestic Church, central to each given parish, might have been appropriated to Public Prayer, to the mysteries of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and to the ‘quasi sacramenta’, Marriage, Penance, Confirmation, Ordination, and to the continued reading aloud, or occasional chanting, of the Scriptures during the intervals of the different Services, which ought to be so often performed as to suffice successively for the whole population; and that on the other hand the chapels and the like should be entirely devoted to teaching and expounding.

Ib. .

And I proved to him that Christianity was proved true many years before any of the New Testament was written, and that so it may be still proved by one that doubted of some words of the Scripture; and therefore the true order is, to try the truth of the Christian religion first, and the perfect verity of the Scriptures afterwards.

With more than Dominican virulence did Goeze, Head Pastor of the Lutheran Church at Hamburg, assail the celebrated Lessing for making and supporting the same position as the pious Baxter here advances.

This controversy with Goeze was in 1778, nearly a hundred years after Baxter’s writing this.

Ib. .

  And within a few days Mr. Barnett riding the circuit was cast by his
  horse, and died in the very fall.  And Sir John Medlicote and his
  brother, a few weeks after, lay both dead in his house together.

This interpreting of accidents and coincidences into judgments is a breach of charity and humility, only not universal among all sects and parties of this period, and common to the best and gentlest men in all; we should not therefore bring it in charge against any one in particular.  But what excuse shall be made for the revival of this presumptuous encroachment on the divine prerogative in our days?

Ib. .

Near this time my book called A Key for Catholics, was to be reprinted.  In the preface to the first impression I had mentioned with praise the Earl of Lauderdale. I thought best to prefix an epistle to the Duke, in which I said not a word of him but truth. But the indignation that men had against the Duke made some blame me, as keeping up the reputation of one whom multitudes thought very ill of; whereas I owned none of his faults, and did nothing that I could well avoid for the aforesaid reasons.  Long after this he professed his kindness to me, and told me I should never want while he was able, and humbly entreated me to accept twenty guineas from him, which I did.

This would be a curious proof of the slow and imperfect intercourse of communication between Scotland and London, if Baxter had not been particularly informed of Lauderdale’s horrible cruelties to the Scotch Covenanters: ­and if Baxter did know them, he surely ran into a greater inconsistency to avoid the appearance of a less.  And the twenty guineas! they must have smelt, I should think, of more than the earthly brimstone that might naturally enough have been expected in gold or silver, from his palm.  I would as soon have plucked an ingot from the cleft of the Devil’s hoof.

  [Greek:  Taut’ elegon perithumos ego gar misei en iso Lauderdalon echo
  kai kerkokeronucha Satan.]

Ib. .

About that time I had finished a book called Catholic Thoughts; in which I undertake to prove that besides things unrevealed, known to none, and ambiguous words, there is no considerable difference between the Arminians and Calvinists, except some very tolerable difference in the point of perseverance.

What Arminians? what Calvinists? ­It is possible that the guarded language and positions of Arminius himself may be interpreted into a “very tolerable” compatibility with the principles of the milder Calvinists, such as Archbishop Leighton, that true Father of the Church of Christ.  But I more than doubt the possibility of even approximating the principles of Bishop Jeremy Taylor to the fundamental doctrines of Leighton, much more to those of Cartwright, Twiss, or Owen.

Ib. .

Bishop Barlow told my friend that got my papers for him, that he could hear of nothing that we judged to be sin, but mere inconveniences.  When as above seventeen years ago, we publicly endeavoured to prove the sinfulness even of many of the old impositions.

Clearly an undeterminable controversy; inasmuch as there is no centra-definition possible of sin and inconvenience in religion:  while the exact point, at which an inconvenience, becoming intolerable, passes into sin, must depend on the state and the degree of light, of the individual consciences to which it appears or becomes intolerable.  Besides, a thing may not be only indifferent in itself, but may be declared such by Scripture, and on this indifference the Scripture may have rested a prohibition to Christians to judge each other on the point.  If yet a Pope or Archbishop should force this on the consciences of others, for example, to eat or not to eat animal food, would he not sin in so doing?  And does Scripture permit me to subscribe to an ordinance made in direct contempt of a command of Scripture?

If it were said, ­In all matters indifferent and so not sinful you must comply with lawful authority: ­must I not reply, But you have yourself removed the indifferency by your injunction?  Look in Popish countries for the hideous consequences of the unnatural doctrine ­that the Priest may go to Hell for sinfully commanding, and his parishioners go with him for not obeying that command.

Ib. .

About this time died my dear friend Mr. Thomas Gouge, of whose life you may see a little in Mr. Clark’s last book of Lives: ­a wonder of sincere industry in works of charity.  It would make a volume to recite at large the charity he used to his poor parishioners at Sepulchre’s, before he was ejected and silenced for non-conformity, &c.

I cannot express how much it grieves me, that our Clergy should still think it fit and expedient to defend the measures of the High Churchmen from Laud to Sheldon, and to speak of the ejected ministers, Calamy, Baxter, Gouge, Howe, and others, as schismatics, factionists, fanatics, or Pharisees: ­thus to flatter some half-dozen dead Bishops, wantonly depriving our present Church of the authority of perhaps the largest collective number of learned and zealous, discreet and holy, ministers that one age and one Church was ever blest with; and whose authority in every considerable point is in favor of our Church, and against the present Dissenters from it.  And this seems the more impolitic, when it must be clear to every student of the history of these times, that the unmanly cruelties inflicted on Baxter and others were, as Bishops Ward, Stillingfleet, and others saw at the time, part of the Popish scheme of the Cabal, to trick the Bishops and dignified Clergy into rendering themselves and the established Church odious to the public by laws, the execution of which the King, the Duke, Arlington, and the Popish priests directed towards the very last man that the Bishops themselves (the great majority at least) would have molested.

Appendix II. .

  If I can prove that it hath been the universal practice of the Church
  ‘in nudum apertum caput manus imponere’, doth it follow that this is
  essential, and the contrary null?

How likewise can it be proved that the imposition of hands in Ordination did not stand on the same ground as the imposition of hands in sickness; that is, the miraculous gifts of the first preachers of the Gospel?  All Protestants admit that the Church retained several forms so originated, after the cessation of the originating powers, which were the substance of these forms.

Ib.

If you think not only imposition to be essential, but also that nothing else is essential, or that all are true ministers that are ordained by a lawful Bishop per ‘manuum impositionem’, then do you egregiously ‘tibi ipsi imponere’.

Baxter, like most scholastic logicians, had a sneaking affection for puns.  The cause is, ­the necessity of attending to the primary sense of words, that is, the visual image or general relation expressed, and which remains common to all the after senses, however widely or even incongruously differing from each other in other respects.  For the same reason, schoolmasters are commonly punsters.  “I have indorsed your Bill, Sir,” said a pedagogue to a merchant, meaning he had flogged his son William. ­My old master the Rev. James Bowyer, the ‘Hercules furens’ of the phlogistic sect, but else an incomparable teacher, ­used to translate, ’Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu’, ­first reciting the Latin words, and observing that they were the fundamental article of the Peripatetic school, ­“You must flog a boy, before you can make him understand;” ­or, “You must lay it in at the tail before you can get it into the head.”

Ib. .

Then, that the will must follow the practical intellect whether right or wrong, ­that is no precept, but the nature of the soul in its acting, because that the will is ’potentia caeca, non nata ad intelligendum, sed ad volendum vel nolendum intellectum’.

This is the main fault in Baxter’s metaphysics, that he so often substantiates distinctions into dividuous self-subsistents.  As here; ­for a will not intelligent is no will.

Appendix.  III. .

And for many ages no other ordinarily baptised but infants.  If Christ had no Church then, where was his wisdom, his love, and his power?  What was become of the glory of his redemption, and his Catholic Church, that was to continue to the end?

But the Antipoedo-Baptists would deny any such consequences as applicable to them, who are to act according to the circumstances, in which God, who ordains his successive manifestations in due correspondence with other lights and states of things, has placed them.  He does not exclude from the Church of Christ (say they) those whom we do not accept into the communion of our particular Society, any more than the House of Lords excludes Commoners from being Members of Parliament.  And we do this because ­we think that such promiscuous admission would prolong an error which would be deadly to us, though not to you who interpret the Scriptures otherwise.

‘In fine.’

There are two senses in which the words, ‘Church of England,’ may be used; ­first, with reference to the idea of the Church as an estate of this Christian Realm, protesting against the Papal usurpation, comprising, first, the interests of a permanent learned class, that is, the Clergy; ­secondly, those of the proper, that is, the infirm poor, from age or sickness; ­and thirdly, the adequate proportional instruction of all in all classes by public prayer, recitation of the Scriptures, by expounding, preaching, catechizing, and schooling, and last, not least, by the example and influence of a pastor and a schoolmaster placed as a germ of civilization and cultivation in every parish throughout the land.  To this idea, the Reformed Church of England with its marriable and married Clergy would have approximated, if the revenues of the Church, as they existed at the death of Henry VII., had been rightly transferred by his successor; ­transferred, I mean, from reservoirs, which had by degeneracy on the one hand, and progressive improvement on the other, fallen into ruin, and in which those revenues had stagnated into contagion or uselessness, ­transferred from what had become public evils to their original and inherent purpose of public benefits, instead of being sacrilegiously alienated by a transfer to private proprietors.  That this was impracticable, is historically true; but no less true is it philosophically, that this impracticability, arising wholly from moral causes, (namely, the loose manners and corrupt principles of a great majority in all classes during the dynasty of the Tudors,) does not prevent this wholesale sacrilege, from deserving the character of the “first and deadliest wound inflicted on the Constitution of the kingdom; which term, in the body politic, as in bodies natural, expresses not only what is and has been evolved, but likewise whatever is potentially contained in the seminal principle of the particular body, and which would in its due time have appeared but for emasculation in its infancy.  This, however, is the first sense of the words, Church of England.

The second is the Church of England as now by law established, and by practice of the law actually existing.  That in the first sense it is the object of my admiration and the earthly ‘ne plus ultra’ of my religious aspirations, it were superfluous to say:  but I may be allowed to express my conviction, that on our recurring to the same ends and objects, (the restoration of a national and circulating property in counterpoise of individual possession, disposable and heritable) though in other forms and by other means perhaps, the decline or progress of this country depends.  In the second sense of the words I can sincerely profess, that I love and honour the Church of England, comparatively, beyond any other Church established or unestablished now existing in Christendom; and it is wholly in consequence of this deliberate and most affectionate filial preference, that I have read this work, and Calamy’s historical writings, with so deep and so melancholy an interest.  And I dare avow that I cannot but regard as an ignorant bigot every man who (especially since the publicity and authentication of the contents of the Stuart Papers, Memoirs and Life of James II. &c.) can place the far later furious High Church compilations and stories of Walker and others in competition with the veracity and general verity of Baxter and Calamy; or can forget that the great body of Non-conformists to whom these great and good men belonged, were not dissenters from the established Church willingly, but an orthodox and numerous portion of the Church.  Omitting then the wound received by religion generally under Henry VIII., and the shameless secularizations clandestinely effected during the reigns of Elizabeth and the first James, I am disposed to consider the three following as the grand evil epochs of our present Church.  First, The introduction and after-predominance of Latitudinarianism under the name of Arminianism, and the spirit of a conjoint Romanism and Socinianism at the latter half or towards the close of the reign of James I. in the persons of Montague, Laud, and their confederates.  Second, The ejection of the two thousand ministers after the Restoration, with the other violences in which the Churchmen made themselves the dupes of Charles, James, the Jesuits, and the French Court. (See the Stuart Papers ’passim’).  It was this that gave consistence and enduring strength to Schism in this country, prevented the pacation of Ireland, and prepared for the separation of America at a far too early period for the true interest of either country.  Third, The surrender by the Clergy of the right of taxing themselves, and the Jacobitical follies that combined with the former to put it in the power of the Whig party to deprive the Church of her Convocation, ­a bitter disgrace and wrong, to which most unhappily the people were rendered indifferent by the increasing contrast of the sermons of the Clergy with the Articles and Homilies of the Church itself, ­but a wrong nevertheless which already has avenged, and will sooner or later be seen to avenge, itself on the State and the governing classes that continue this boast of a short-sighted policy; the same policy which in our own days would have funded the property of the Church, and, by converting the Clergy into salaried dependents on the Government ‘pro tempore’, have deprived the Establishment of its fairest honor, that of being neither enslaved to the court, nor to the congregations; the same policy, alas! which even now pays and patronizes a Board of Agriculture to undermine all landed property by a succession of false, shallow, and inflammatory libels against tithes.

These are my weighed sentiments:  and fervently desiring, as I do, the perpetuity and prosperity of the established Church, zealous for its rights and dignity, preferring its forms, believing its Articles of Faith, and holding its Book of Common Prayer and its translation of the Scriptures among my highest privileges as a Christian and an Englishman, I trust that I may both entertain and avow these sentiments without forfeiting any part of my claim to the name of a faithful member of the Church of England.

June 1820.

N. B. As to Warburton’s Alliance of the Church and State, I object to the title (Alliance), and to the matter and mode of the reasoning.  But the inter-dependence of the Church and the State appears to me a truth of the highest practical importance.  Let but the temporal powers protect the subjects in their just rights as subjects merely:  and I do not know of any one point in which the Church has the right or the necessity to call in the temporal power as its ally for any purpose exclusively ecclesiastic.  The right of a firm to dissolve its partnership with any one partner, breach of contract having been proved, and publicly to announce the same, is common to all men as social beings.

I spoke above of “Romanism.”  But call it, if you like, Laudism, or Lambethism in temporalities and cérémonials, and of Socinianism in doctrine, that is, a retaining of the word but a rejecting or interpreting away of the sense and substance of the Scriptural Mysteries.  This spirit has not indeed manifested itself in the article of the Trinity, since Waterland gave the deathblow to Arianism, and so left no alternative to the Clergy, but the actual divinity or mere humanity of our Lord; and the latter would be too impudent an avowal for a public reader of our Church Liturgy:  but in the articles of original sin, the necessity of regeneration, the necessity of redemption in order to the possibility of regeneration, of justification by faith, and of prevenient and auxiliary grace, ­all I can say with sincerity is, that our orthodoxy seems so far in an improving state, that I can hope for the time when Churchmen will use the term Arminianism to express a habit of belief opposed not to Calvinism, or the works of Calvin, but to the Articles of our own Church, and to the doctrine in which all the first Reformers agreed.

Note ­that by Latitudinarianism, I do not mean the particular tenets of the divines so called, such as Dr. H. More, Cudworth and their compeers, relative to toleration, comprehension, and the general belief that in the greater number of points then most controverted, the pious of all parties were far more nearly of the same mind than their own imperfections, and the imperfection of language allowed them to see:  I mean the disposition to explain away the articles of the Church on the pretext of their inconsistency with right reason; ­when in fact it was only an incongruity with a wrong understanding, the faculty which St. Paul calls [Greek:  phronaema sarkos], the rules of which having been all abstracted from objects of sense, (finite in time and space,) are logically applicable to objects of the sense alone.  This I have elsewhere called the spirit of Socinianism, which may work in many whose tenets are anti-Socinian.

Law is ­’conclusio per regulam generis singulorum in génère isto inclusorum’.  Now the extremes ‘et inclusa’ are contradictory terms.  Therefore extreme cases are not capable subjects of law ‘a priori’, but must proceed on knowledge of the past, and anticipation of the future, and the fulfilment of the anticipation is the proof, because the only possible determination, of the accuracy of the knowledge.  In other words the agents may be condemned or honored according to their intentions, and the apparent source of their motives; so we honor Brutus, but the extreme case itself is tried by the event.