puted against them from morning until almost night; for I knew their trick, that if I had but gone out first, they would have prated what boasting words they listed when I was gone, and made the people believe that they had baffled me, or got the best; therefore I stayed it out till they first rose and went away." "Some of the

sober people of Agmondesham gave me abundance of thanks for that day's work, which they said would never be there forgotten; I heard also that the sectaries were so discouraged that they never met there any more."

"The great impediments to the success of my endeavors, I found, were only two; the discountenance of Cromwell and the chief officers of his mind, which kept me a stranger from their meetings and councils; and my incapacity of speaking to many, as soldiers' quarters are scattered far from one another, and I could be but in one place at once. So that one troop at a time, ordinarily, and some few more extraordinarily, was all thatI could speak to. The most of the service I did beyond Whalley's regiment was, by the help of Captain Lawrence, with some of the general's regiment, and sometimes I had converse with Major Harrison and a few others; but I found that if the army had only had ministers enough, who would have done but such a little as I did, all their plot must have been broken, and king, and parliament, and religion, might have been preserved. Therefore I sent abroad to get some more ministers among them, but I could get none. Saltmarsh and Dell were the two great preachers at the head-quarters; but honest and judicious Mr. Edward Bowles kept still with the general. At last I got Mr. Cook, of Roxhall, to come to assist me; and the soberer part of the officers and soldiers of Whalley's regiment were willing to pay him out of their own pay. A month or two he staid and assisted me; but was quickly weary, and left them again. He was a very worthy, humble, laborious man, unwearied in preaching, but weary when he had not an opportunity to preach, and weary of the spirits he had to deal with.

"All this while, though I came not near Cromwell, his designs were visible, and I saw him continually acting his part. The lord general suffered him to govern and to do all, and to choose almost all the officers of the army. He first made Ireton commissary-general; and when any troop or company was to be disposed of, or any considerable officer's place was void, he was sure to put a sectary in the place; and when the brunt of the war was over, he looked not so much at their valor as their opinions; so that, by degrees, he had headed the greatest part of the army with Anabaptists, Antinomians, Seekers, or Separatists at best. All these he tied together by the point of liberty of conscience, which was the common interest in which they did unite. Yet all the sober party

were carried on by his profession, that he only promoted the universal interest of the godly, without any distinction or partiality at all; but still, when a place fell void, it was twenty to one a secta

had it; and if a godly man, of another mind or temper, had a mind to leave the army, he would, secretly, or openly, further it. Yet he did not openly profess what opinion he was of himself."

The fact which Baxter here testifies, namely, that, all this while, he came not near Cromwell, is a fact which ought to qualify his strictures on Cromwell's proceedings and intentions. Baxter feared, as well he might, the progress of Arminianism, Antinomianism and fanaticism in the army; and he used, with laudable diligence, the weapons of his warfare to check those evils. Had he been intimate with the counsels of the sectarian commanders at head-quarters, he might have seen other evils at work in other quarters, and threatening to become, in their results, not less disastrous to the cause of truth and holiness. Cromwell saw, what the good chaplain of Whalley's regiment seems never to have suspected, that the Presbyterian party, in the assembly and in parliament, were determined to set up their Scotch hierarchy as the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and, under the claim of a divine right, to put again upon the necks of Independents, Baptists, and all other sectaries, that yoke of uniformity, which neither they nor their fathers had been able to bear. Seeing this, he must have felt himself bound to use all proper means for the defeat of such a design; and it is not difficult to suppose that he may have acted as conscientiously in his measures for the defence of the great principles on which the revolution rested, as Baxter acted in attempting to argue down the vagaries of Antinomian fanatics.

After the surrender of Worcester, the war with the king being apparently at an end, Baxter visited his old flock at Kidderminster, and was earnestly importuned to resume his labors there. On this application, he went to Coventry, and sought the advice of the ministers there, by whose counsel he had first gone into the army. In asking their advice, he told them not only all his fears, but that his own judgment was clear for staying in the army till the crisis which he expected should arrive. Their opinion accorded with his and he determined on a still longer absence from the peaceful labors of his pastoral charge.

About this time, he retired from his quarters for a while, on account of his health. He visited London for medical assistance, and spent some time at Tunbridge wells, and returned to his regiment in Worcestershire, prepared to go on with his work. But soon the fatigue and exposure of moving from place to place, as in

that military life he was under the necessity of doing, during a cold and snowy season, had almost proved fatal to him. He was attacked with a violent bleeding at the nose, which continued till his strength and almost his life was exhausted.

"And thus," he says, "God unavoidably prevented all the effect of my purposes in my last and chiefest opposition of the army; and took me off at the very time when my attempt should have begun. My purpose was to have done my best, first, to take off that regiment which I was with; and then, with Capt. Lawrence, to have tried upon the generals, in which too was Cromwell's chief confidence; and then to have joined with others of the same mind; for the other regiments were much less corrupted. But the determination of God against it was most observable; for the very time that I was bleeding, the council of war sat at Nottingham, where, as I have credibly heard, they first began to open their purposes, and act their part; and, presently after, they entered into their engagement at Triploe Heath. And as I perceived it was the will of God to permit them to go on, so I afterwards found that this great affliction was a mercy to myself; for they were so strong, and active, that I had been likely to have had small success in the attempt, and to have lost my life among them in their fury. And thus I was finally separated from the army.

"When I had staid at Melbourn, in my chamber, three weeks, being among strangers, and not knowing how to get home, I went to Mr. Nowell's house, at Kirby-Mallory, in Leicestershire, where, with great kindness, I was entertained three weeks. By that time, the tidings of my weakness came to the Lady Rous, in Worcestershire, who sent her servant to seek me out; and when he returned, and told her I was afar off, and he could not find me, she sent him again to find me, and bring me thither, if I were able to travel. So, in great weakness, thither I made shift to get, where I was entertained with the greatest care and tenderness, while I continued the use of means for my recovery; and when I had been there a quarter of a year, I returned to Kidderminster.”*

It was during this long sickness, and while he was anticipating a speedy departure, that he employed himself in writing that work on the "Saint's Everlasting Rest," which has made his name dear to the friends of serious and practical religion through the world. This was the first written of all his published compositions. A much smaller work, entitled "Aphorisms of Justification," designed to refute some of the Antinomian errors which he had been combating in the army, was commenced while the "Saint's Rest" was still unfinished, and was published in 1649, two years after his

return to Kidderminster. The "Saint's Rest" was published in 1650.

Of the circumstances in which this work was written, the author says, "While I was in health, I had not the least thought of writing books, or of serving God in any more public way than preaching; but when I was weakened with great bleeding, and left solitary in my chamber at Sir John Cook's in Derbyshire, without any acquaintance but my servant about me, and was sentenced to death by the physicians, I began to contemplate more seriously on the everlasting rest, which I apprehended myself to be just on the borders of. That my thoughts might not too much scatter in my meditation, I began to write something on that subject, intending but the quantity of a sermon or two; but being continued long in weakness, where I had no books and no better employment, I followed it on, till it was enlarged to the bulk in which it is published. The first three weeks I spent in it was at Mr. Nowel's house, at Kirkby Mallory, in Leicestershire; a quarter of a year more, at the seasons which so great weakness would allow, I bestowed on it at Sir Thomas Rous's house, at Rous-Lench in Worcestershire; and I finished it shortly after at Kidderminster. The first and last parts were first done, being all that I intended for my own use; and the second and third parts came afterwards in, besides my first intention."

"The marginal citations I put in, after I came home to my books, but almost all the book itself was written when I had no book but a Bible and a Concordance; and I found that the transcript of the heart hath the greatest force on the hearts of others. For the good that I have heard that multitudes have received by that writing, and the benefit which I have again received by their prayers, I here humbly return my thanks to him that compelled ine to write it."*

There are few testimonies to the great intellectual vigor, and the extraordinary industry of Baxter, more surprising than the fact that "The Saint's Everlasting Rest," which, at its first publication, was a quarto volume of eight hundred pages, was written in six months, while the author stood languishing and fainting between life and death.

* Narrative, Part I. P. 108.

PART THIRD.

FROM HIS RETURN TO KIDDERMINSTER TO THE YEAR 1660.

THE personal history of Baxter is so closely connected with the history of the times in which he lived, that it seems necessary, in this place, briefly to review the progress of public events from the siege of Oxford, in the beginning of the year 1646, to the death of Cromwell, in September, 1658.

After the battles and sieges by which all the south-western parts of England had been reduced under the power of the parliament, the victorious army, commanded by Fairfax and Cromwell, returned as soon as the spring opened, to put an end to the war by besieging the king in his head-quarters at Oxford. On receiving this intelligence, and learning that the enemy was just at hand, Charles, with only two attendants, left the city by night, in disguise, and, fleeing to the north, threw himself into the hands of the Scottish army, then employed in the siege of Newark. He was aware that the Scots, in their zeal for covenant uniformity, had begun to be disgusted with the dilatory proceedings of the English parliament respecting the establishment of Presbyterianism as the only and divinely-authorized form of church government. He knew that they looked on the progress of Independency with equal alarm and abhorrence; and his hope was that, by throwing himself upon them whose claims in relation to their own country he had fully satisfied, he might be able to break up their alliance with England. The Scottish generals, however, refused to enter into any separate treaty with him; and while they paid him scrupulously all the exterior respect due to majesty, he was in fact a prisoner rather than a sovereign. At their suggestion, which, in his circumstances, differed little from a command, he gave orders to the commanders at Oxford, and in all his other garrisons, to surrender to the parliament; and thus the war was ended, the last of the royal garrisons being surrendered, a little less than four years from the day on which the king set up his standard at Nottingham.

Charles continued with the Scots eight months. The parliament and the Scottish commissioners offered him terms of recon