Ib.p. 47.
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.p. 59.
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.p. 62.
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.p. 66.
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.p. 71.
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.p. 75.
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.p. 76.
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.p. 77.
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.p. 79.
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.p. 80.
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.p. 82.
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: Méga biblíon méga kakón.dokei
Ib.p. 84.
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 p. 80? I waver.
Ib.p. 87.
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.p. 128.
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.p. 129.
And when I have studied hard to understand some abstruse admired book, asde Scientia Dei, de Providentia circa malum, de Decretis, de Prædeterminatione, de Libertate creaturæ, &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.p. 131.
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.p. 135.
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.p. 136.
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. p.139.
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 £500 a year for submitting to the necessary restrictions of the Church General, is impudence and Mammonolatry to boot.
Ib.p. 141.
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 upimperium 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.p. 142.
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: koinoì epískopoi
—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.p. 143.
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.p. 177.
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 claviumwas 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.p. 179.
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.p. 185.
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.p. 188.
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.p. 189.
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.p. 194.
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.p. 198.
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.p. 201.
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
2
?
Ib.p. 203.
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.p. 222.
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.