by his enemies. One unhappy exception is to life, as the free but unconscious agents of the be made. It is impossible to read without pain | Divine Will, is the higher design with which the names of Luther, Melancthon, and Bucer, he writes, to trace the mysterious inter eation amongst the subscribers to the address to the of Providence in reforming the errors and landgrave of Hesse, on the subject of his in-abuses of the Christian Church is his immetended polygamy. Those great but fallible diate end; and to exalt the name of Luther, his men remind his highness of the distinction be- labour of love. These purposes, as far as they tween universal laws and such as admit of are attainable, are effectually attained M. dispensation in particular cases. They cannot D'Aubigne is a Protestant of the original publicly sanction polygamy. But his highness stamp, and a biographer of the old fashi ́n;— is of a peculiar constitution, and is exhorted not a calm, candid, discriminating weiger and seriously to examine all the considerations measurer of a great man's parts, but a warmlaid before him; yet, if he is absolutely resolved hearted champion of his glory, and a resolute to marry a second time, it is their opinion that apologist even for his errors;-ready to do ne should do so as secretly as possible! Fear- battle in his cause with all who shall impugn ful is the energy with which the "Eagle of or derogate from his fame. His book is conMeaux" pounces on this fatal error,-tearing ceived in the spirit, and executed with all the to pieces the flimsy pretexts alleged in defence vigour, of Dr. M'Crie's "Life of Knox." He of such an evasion of the Christian code. The has all our lamented countryman's sincerity, charge admits of no defence. To the inference all his deep research, more skill in composition, drawn from it against the reformer's doctrine, and a greater mastery of subordinate details; every Protestant has a conclusive answer. along with the same inestimable faculty of Whether in faith or practice, he acknowledges carrying on his story from one stage to another, no infallible Head but one. with an interest which never subsides, and a vivacity which knows no intermission. If he displays no familiarity with the moral sciences, he is no mean proficient in that art which reaches to perfection only in the drama or the romance. This is not the talent of inventing, but the gift of discerning, incidents which impart life and animation to narrative. For M. D'Aubigne is a writer of scrupulous veracity. He is at least an honest guide, though his prepossessions may be too strong to render him worthy of implicit confidence. They are such, however, as to make him the uncoinpromising and devoted advocate of those cardinal tenets on which Luther erected the edifice of the Reformation. To the one great article on which the reformer assailed the papacy, the eye of the biographer is directed with scarcely less intentness. To this every other truth is viewed as subordinate and secondary; and although, on this favourite point of doctrine M. D'Aubigne's meaning is too often obscured by declaration, yet must he be hailed by every genuine friend of the Reformation, as having raised a powerful voice in favour of one of those fundamental truths which, so long as they are faithfully taught and diligently observed, will continue to form the great bul warks of Christendom against the overweening estimate, and the despotic use, of human autho⚫ rity, in opposition to the authority of the re vealed will of God. But we have wandered far and wide from our proper subject. Where, all this while, is the story of Luther's education, of his visit to Rome, of the sale of indulgences, of the denunciations of Tetzel, of the controversy with Eccius, the Diets of Worms and Augsburg, the citations before Cajetan and Charles, the papal excommunication, and the appeal to a general council? These, and many other of the most momentous incidents of the reformer's life, are recorded in M. D'Aubigne's work, from which our attention has been diverted by matters of less account, but perhaps a little less familiar. It would be unpardonable to dismiss such a work, with a merely ceremonious notice. The absolute merit of this life of Martin Luther is great, but the comparative value far greater. In the English language, it has no competitor; and though Melancthon himself was the biographer of his friend, we believe that no foreign tongue contains so complete and impressive a narrative of these events. It is true that M. D'Aubigne neither deserves nor claims a place amongst those historians, usually distinguished as philosophical. He does not aspire to illustrate the principles which determine or pervade the character, the policy, or the institutions of mankind. He arms himself with no dispassionate skepticism, and scarcely affects to be impartial. To tell his tale copiously and clearly, is the one object of his literary ambition. To exhibit the actors on the scene of LIFE AND TIMES OF RICHARD BAXTER.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1839.] THIS publication reminds us of an oversight! Such, from his tenth to his sixteenth year in omitting to notice the collection of the works of Richard Baxter, edited in the year 1830, by Mr. Orme. It was, in legal phrase, a demand for judgment, in the appeal of the great nonconformist to the ultimate tribunal of posterity, from the censures of his own age, on himself and his writings. We think that the decision was substantially right, and that, on the whole, it must be affirmed. Right it was, beyond all doubt, in so far as it assigned to him an elevated rank amongst those, who, taking the spiritual improvement of mankind for their province, have found there at once the motive and the reward for labours beneath which, unless sustained by that holy impulse, the utmost powers of our frail nature must have prematurely fainted. were the teachers of the most voluminous theological writer in the English language Of that period of his life, the only incidents which can now be ascertained are that his love of apples was inordinate, and that on the subject of robbing orchards, he held, in practice at least, the doctrines handed down amongs schoolboys by an unbroken tradition. Almost as barren is the only extant record of the three remaining years of his pupilage. They were spent at the endowed school at Wroxeter, which he quitted at the age of nineteen, destitute of all mathematical and physical scienceignorant of Hebrew-a mere smatterer in Greek, and possessed of as much Latin as enabled him in after life to use it with reckless facility. Yet a mind so prolific, and which yielded such early fruits, could not advance to manhood without much well-dressed culture. formed the whole of the good man's library, and would have been ill-exchanged for the treasures of the Vatican. He had been no stranger to the cares, nor indeed to the disorders of life; and, as his strength declined, it was his delight to inculcate on his inquisitive boy the lessons which inspired wisdom teaches most persuasively, when illustrated by dearbought experience, and enforced by parental love. For the mental infirmities of the son no better discipline could have been found. A pyrrhonist of nature's making, his threescore years and ten might have been exhausted in a fruitless struggle to adjudicate between anta About the time when the high-born guests of Whitehall were celebrating the nuptial revels of Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, The Bible which lay on his father's table, and the visiters of low degree were defraying the cost by the purchase of titles and monopolies, there was living at the pleasant village of Eton Constantine, between Wrekin Hill and the Severn, a substantial yeoman, incurious alike about the politics of the empire and the wants of the exchequer. Yet was he not without his vexations. On the green before his door, a Maypole, hung with garlands, allured the retiring congregation to dance out the Sunday afternoon to the sound of fife and tabret, while he, intent on the study of the sacred volume, was greeted with no better names than puritan, precisian, and hypocrite. If he bent his steps to the parish church, vene-gonist theories, if his mind had not thus been rable as it was, and picturesque, in contempt of all styles and orders of architecture, his case was not much mended. The aged and purblind incumbent executed his weekly task with the aid of strange associates. One of them laid aside the flail, and another the thimble, to mount the reading-desk. To these succeeded "the excellentest stage-player in all the country, and a good gamester, and a good fellow." This worthy having received holy orders, forged the like for a neighbour's son, who, on the strength of that title officiated in the pulpit and at the altar. Next in this goodly list came an attorney's clerk, who had "tippled himself in so great poverty," that he had no other way to live but by assuming the pastoral care of the flock at Eton Constantine. Time out of mind, the curate had been ex officio the depositary of the secular, as well as of the sacred literature of the parish; and to these learned persons our yeoman was therefore fain to commit the education of his only son and namesake, Richard Baxter. The Practical Works of Richard Barter, with a Preface, giving some Account of the Author, and of this edition of his Practical Works; and an Essay on his Genius, Works, and Times. 4 vols. 8vo. London, 1838. subjugated to the supreme authority of Holy Writ, by an influence coeval with the first dawn of reason, and associated indissolubly with his earliest and most enduring affections. It is neither the wise nor the good by whom the patrimony of opinion is most lightly regarded. Such is the condition of our exist ence, that beyond the precincts of abstract science, we must take much for granted, if we would make any advance in knowledge, or live to any useful end. Our hereditary prepossessions must not only precede our acquired judgments, but must conduct us to them. To begin by questioning every thing, is to end by answering nothing; and a premature revolt from human authority is but an incipient rebellion against conscience, reason, and truth. Launched into the ocean of speculative inquiry, without the anchorage of parental instruc tion and filial reverence, Baxter would have been drawn by his constitutional tendencies into that skeptical philosophy, through the long annals of which no single name is to be found to which the gratitude of mankind has been yielded, or is justly due. He had much in common with the most eminent doctors of that school-the animal frame characterized by sluggish appetites, languid passions, and great nervous energy; the intellectual nature distinguished by subtlety to seize distinctions more than by wit to detect analogies; by the power to dive, instead of the faculty to soar; by skill to analyze subjecti truths, rather than by ability to combine Jem with each other and with objective realities. But what was wanting in his sensitive, and deficient in his intellectual structure, was balanced and corrected by the spiritual elevation of his mind. If not enamoured of the beautiful, nor conversant with the ideal, nor able to grasp the comprehensive and the abstract, he enjoyed that clear mental vision which attends on moral purity-the rectitude of judgment which rewards the subjection of the will to the reason the loftiness of thought awakened by habitual communion with the source of lightand the earnest stability of purpose inseparable from the predominance of the social above the selfish affections. Skepticism and devotion were the conflicting elements of his internal life; but the radiance from above gradually dispersed the vapours from beneath, and, through a half a century of pain and strife, and agitation, he enjoyed that settled tranquillity which no efforts merely intellectual can attain, nor any speculative doubts destroy, the peace, of which it is said, that it passes understanding. Baxter was born in 1615, and consequently attained his early manhood amidst events ominous of approaching revolutions. Deep and latent as are the ultimate causes of the continued existence of Episcopacy in England, nothing can be less recondite than the human agency employed in working out that result. Nursed by the Tudors, adopted by the Stuarts, and wedded in her youth to a powerful aristocracy, the Anglican church retains the indelible stamp of these early alliances. To the great, the learned, and the worldly wise, it has for three centuries afforded a resting-place and a refuge. But a long interval had elapsed before the national temples and hierarchy were consecrated to the nobler end of enlightening the ignorant, and administering comfort to the poor. Rich beyond all Protestant rivalry in sacred literature, the Church of England, from the days of Parker to those of Laud, had scarcely produced any one considerable work of popular instruction. The pastoral care which Burnett depicted, in the reign of William and Mary, was at that time a vision which, though since nobly fulfilled, no past experience had realized. Till a much later time, the alphabet was among the mysteries which the English church concealed from her catechumens. There is no parallel in the annals of any other Protestant State, of so wonderful a concentration, and so imperfect a diffusion of learning and genius, of piety and zeal. The reigns of Whitgift, Bancroft, and Laud, were unmolested by cares so rude as those of evangenzing the artisans and peasantry. Jewel and Bull, Hall and Donne, Hooker and Taylor, lived and wrote for their peers, and for future ages, but not for the commonalty of their own. Yet was not Christianity bereft in England of her distinctive and glorious privilege. It was still the religion of the poor. Amidst persecution, contempt, and penury, the Puritans had toiled and suffered, and had, not rarely, died in their service. Thus in every city, and almost in every village, they who had eyes to see, and ears to hear, might, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, perceive the harbingers of the coming tempest. Thoughtful and resolute men had transferred the allegiance of the heart from their legitimate, to their chosen leaders; while, unconscious of their danger, the ruling were straining the bonds of autho rity, in exact proportion to the decrease of their number and their strength. It was when the future pastors of New England were training men to a generous contempt of all sublunary interest for conscience' sake, that Laud, not content to be terrible to the founders of Connecticut and New England, braved an enmity far more to be dreaded than theirs. With a view to the ends to which his life was devoted, his truth and courage would have been well exchanged for the wily and time-serving genius of Williams. Supported by Heylin, Cosins, Montague, and many others, who adopted or exaggerated his own opinions, he precipitated the temporary overthrow of a church, in harmony with the character, and strong in the affections of the people; upheld by a long line of illustrious names; connected with the whole aristocracy of the realm; and enthusiastically defended by the sovereign. Baxter's theological studies were com menced during these tumults, and were insensibly biassed by them. The ecclesiastical polity had reconciled him to Episcopal ordination; but as he read, and listened, and observed his attachment to the established ritual and discipline progressively declined. He be. gan by rejecting the practice of indiscriminate communion. He was dissatisfied with the compulsory subscription to articles, and the baptismal cross. "Deeper thoughts on the point of Episcopacy" were suggested to him by the et cetera oath; and these reflections soon rendered him an irreconcilable adversary to the "English diocesan frame." He distributed the sacred elements to those who would not kneel to receive them, and religiously abjured the surplice. Thus ripe for spiritual censures, and prepared to endure them, he was rescued from the danger he had braved by the demon of civil strife. The Scots in the north, and the Parliament in the south, summoned Charles and Laud to more serious cares than those of enforcing conformity, and left Baxter free to enlarge and to propagate his discoveries. With liberty of speech and action, his mind was visited by a corresponding audacity of thought. Was there indeed a future life?Was the soul of man immortal?-Were the Scriptures true?-were the questions which now assaulted and perplexed him. They came not as vexing and importunate suggestions, but "under pretence of sober reason," and all the resources of his understanding were sum moned to resist the tempter. Self-deception was abhorrent from his nature. He feared une face of no speculative difficulty. Dark as were the shapes which crossed his path, they must be closely questioned; and gloomy as was the abyss to which they led, it was to be unhesitat- against their confounding errors." The soldiers ingly explored. The result needs not to be discoursed as earnestly, and even published stated. From a long and painful conflict he as copiously as himself. After many an affair emerged victorious, but not without bearing to of posts, the hostile parties at length engaged the grave some scars to mark the severity of in a pitched battle at Amersham in Bucking the struggle. No man was ever blessed with hamshire. "When the public talking-day more profound convictions; but so vast and came," says Baxter, “I took the reading pew, elaborate was the basis of argumentation on and Pitchford's cornet and troopers took the which they rested, that to re-examine the tex- gallery. There did the leader of the Chesham ture, and ascertain the coherence of the ma- men begin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers terials of which it was wrought, formed the set in ; and I alone disputed against them from still recurring labour of his whole future life. morning until almost night." Too old a camWhile the recluse is engulfed in the vortices paigner to retire from the field in the presence of metaphysics, the victims of passion are still of his enemy, "he staid it out till they first rose urged forward in their wild career of guilt and and went away." The honours of the day misery. From the transcendental labyrinths were, however, disputed. In the strange book through which Baxter was winding his solitary published by Edwards, under his appropriate and painful way, the war recalled him to the title of "Gangræna," the fortunes of the field stern realities of life. In the immediate vicin- were chronicled; and there, as we are informed ity of the earlier military operations, Coventry by Baxter himself, may be read "the abunhad become a city of refuge to him, and to a dance of nonsense uttered on the occasion." large body of his clerical brethren. They believed, in the simplicity of their hearts, that Essex, Waller, and Cromwell, were fighting the battles of Charles, and that their real object was to rescue the king from the thraldom of the malignants, and the church from the tyranny of the prelatists. "We kept," says Baxter, speaking of himself and his associates, "to our old principles, and thought all others had done so too, except a very few inconsiderable persons. We were unfeignedly for king and Parliament. We believed that the war was only to save the Parliament and kingdom from the papists and delinquents, and to remove the dividers, that the king might again return to his Parliament, and that no changes might be made in religion, but by the laws which had his free consent. We took the true happiness of king and people, church and state, to be our end, and so we understood the covenant, engaging both against papists and schismatics; and when the Court News-Book told the world of the swarms of Anabaptists in our armies, we thought it had been a mere lie, because it was not so with us." Cromwell regarded these polemics with illdisguised aversion, and probably with secret contempt. He had given Baxter but a cold welcome to the army. "He would not dispute with me at all," is a fact related by the good man with evident surprise; "but he would in good discourse very fluently pour out himself in the extolling of free grace, which was sa voury to those that had right principles, though he had some misunderstanding of free grace himself. He was a man of excellent natural parts for affection and oratory, but not well seen in the principles of his religion; of a sanguine complexion, naturally of such a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as another man hath when he hath drunken a cup too much; but naturally, also, so far from humble thoughts of himself, that it was his ruin." The protector had surrendered his powerful mind to the religious fashions of his times, and never found the leisure or the inclination for deep inquiry into a subject on which it was enough for his purposes to excel in fluent and savoury discourse. Among those purposes, to obtain the approbation of his own conscience was not the least sincere. His devotion was ardent, and his piety genuine. But the alliance be tween habits of criminal self-indulgence, and a certain kind of theopathy, is but too ordinary a phenomenon. That at each step of his progress, Cromwell should have been deceived and sustained by some sophistry, is the less wonderful, since even now, in retracing his course, it is difficult to ascertain the point at which he first quitted the straight path of duty, or to discover what escape was at length open to him from the web in which he had become involved. There have been many worse, and few greater men. Yet to vindicate his name from the condemnation which rests upon it, would be to confound the distinctions of good and evil as he did, without the apology of being tempted as he was. Ontology and scholastic divinity have their charms, and never did man confess them more than Richard Baxter. But the pulse must beat languidly indeed, when the superior fascination of the "tented field" is not acknowledged; nor should it derogate from the reverence which attends his name, to admit that he felt and indulged this universal excitement. Slipping away from Durandus, Bradwardine, Suarez, and Ariminensis, he visited Edgehill and Naseby while the parliamentary armies still occupied the ground on which they had fought. He found the conquerors armed cap-a-pie for spiritual, as well as carnal combats; and to convert the troops from their theological errors, was the duty which, he was assured, had been committed to him by Providence. Becoming accordingly chaplain to Whalley's regiment, he witnessed in that capacity many a skirmish, Baxter was too profound a moralist to be and was present at the sieges of Bristol, Sher- dazzled by the triumph of bad men, however borne, and Worcester. Rupert and Goring specious their virtues; or to affect any com. proved less stubborn antagonists than the placency towards a bad cause, though indebted seekers and levellers of the lieutenant-gene- to it for the only period of serenity which it ral's camp; and Baxter was "still employed ever was his lot to enjoy. He had ministered in preaching, conferring, and still disputing to the forces of the parliamentary general but abhorred the regicide and usurper. In his zeal for the ancient constitution, he had meditated a scheme for detaching his own regiment, and ultimately all the generals of the army, from their leader. They were first to be undermined by a course of logic, and then blown up by the eloquence of the preacher. This profound device in the science of theological engineering would have been counterworked by the lieutenant-general, had he detected it, by methods somewhat less subtle, but certainly not less effective. A fortunate illness defeated the formidable conspiracy, and restored the projector to his pastoral duties and to peace. Even then, his voice was publicly raised against "the treason, rebellion, perfidiousness, and hypocrisy" of Cromwell, who probably never heard, and certainly never heeded, the denunciations of his former chap lain. Baxter enjoyed the esteem which he would not repay. He was once invited by the protector to preach at court. Sermons in those days were very serious things-point-blank shots at the bosoms of the auditory; and Cromwell was not a man to escape or fear the heaviest pulpit ordnance which could be brought to bear on him. From the many vulnerable points of attack, the preacher selected the crying sin of encouraging sectaries. Not satisfied with the errors of his own days, the great captain had anticipated those of a later age, and had asserted in their utmost extent the dangerous principles of religious liberty. This latitudinarian doctrine may have been suggested by motives merely selfish; and Baxter, at least, could acknowledge no deeper wisdom in which such an innovation could have had its birth. St. Paul was, therefore, made to testify "against the sin committed by politicians, in maintaining divisions for their own ends, that they might fish in troubled waters." He who now occupied the throne of the Stuarts claimed one prerogative to which even they had never aspired. It was that of controverting the argumentation of the pulpit. His zeal for the conversion of his monitor appears to have been exceedingly ardent. Having summoned him to his presence, "he began by a long tedious speech to me," (the narrative is Baxter's) "of God's providence in the change of the government, and how God had owned it, and what great things had been done at home and abroad, in the peace with Spain and Holland, &c. When he had wearied us all with speaking thus slowly for about an hour, I told him it was too great a condescension to acquaint me so fully with all these matters, which were above me; but I told him that we took our ancient monarchy to be a blessing, and not an evil to the land; and humbly craved his patience that I might ask him how England had ever forfeited that blessing, and unto whom that forfeiture was made. Upon that question he was awakened into some passion, and then told me that it was no forfeiture, but God had changed it as pleased him; and then he let fly at the Parliament which thwarted him, and especially by name at four or five of those members who were my chief acquaintances, whom I presumed to de fend against his passion, and thus four or five hours were spent." During this singular dialogue, Lambert fell asleep, an indecorum which, in the court of an hereditary monarch, would have been fatal to the prospects of the transgressor. But the drowsiness of his old comrade was more tole rable to Cromwell than the pertinacity of his former chaplain, against whom he a second time directed the artillery of his logic. On this occasion almost all the privy council were present; liberty of conscience being the thesis, Baxter the respondent, and Cromwell assuming to himself the double office of opponent and moderator. "After another slow, tedious speech of his, I told him," says the auto-biographer, "a little of my judgment, and when two of his company had spun out a great deal more of the time in such like tedious, but more ignorant speeches, I told him, that if he would be at the labour to read it, I could tell him more of my mind in writing two sheets than in that way of speaking many days. He received the paper afterwards, but I scarcely believe that he ever read it. I saw that what he learn must be from himself, being more disposed to speak many hours than hear one, and little heeding what another said when he had spoken himself." Whatever may have been the faults, or whatever the motives of the protector, there can be no doubt that under his sway England witnessed a diffusion, till then unknown, of the purest influence of genuine religious principles. The popular historians of that period, from various motives, have disguised or misrepresented the fact; and they who derive their views on this subject from Clarendon or from Hudibras, mistake a caricature for a genuine portrait. To this result, no single man contributed more largely than Baxter himself, by his writings and his pastoral labours. His residence at Kidderminster during the whole of the protectorate was the sabbath of his life; the interval in which his mind enjoyed the only repose of which it was capable, in labours of love, prompted by a willing heart, and unimpeded by a contentious world. Good Protestants hold, that the supreme Head of the Church reserves to himself alone to meditate and to reign, as his incommunicable attributes; and that to teach and to minister are the only offices he has delegated to the pastors of his flock. Wisdom to scale the heights of contemplation, love to explore the depths of wretchedness-a science and a servitude inseparably combined;-the one investigating the relations between man and his Creator, the other busied in the cares of a selfdenying philanthropy-such, at least in theory, are the endowments of that sacred institution, which, first established by the fishermen of Galilee, has been ever since maintained throughout the Christian commonwealth. A priesthood, of which all the members should be animated with this spirit, may be expected when angels shall resume their visits to our earth, and not till then. Human agency, even when employed to distribute the best gifts of Providence to man, must still bear the im press of human guilt and frailty. But if ther |