which will make men serious in hearing and obeying it."

With the recommendation of a "familiar moving voice," it is easy to conceive how impressive and powerful Baxter must have been as a preacher. There is a simplicity, directness, and energy in his sermonstyle, that goes to the heart even now, and which must have told with a wonderfully stimulating effect upon his Kidderminster hearers. In the pulpit he was raised above the scholastic medium of thought and definition on which his mind was otherwise apt to dwell. As a "dying man," face to face with "dying men," he became vehemently practical. The flame of an overpowering conviction burning in his own soul, communicated life and ardour to all his words. His sermons are certainly digressive and tedious according to our modern notions. But we must remember that what would now be intolerable tedium, was not only borne cheerfully, but expected and welcomed in his age. The thoughts of all men of the time, at least of all that Baxter was likely to address, were intensely theological. What now seem to many mere abstractions, were to his generation living realities,-forces moving men to fight and die. Discussions, whose irrelevancy offends us, and digressions over which we weary, were instinct with meaning to his audiences. Prolixity, which we contemplate with a shudder, may have excited in them enthusiasm. A vanished charm must have lain in division and subdivision-in the mere ringing, in varied cadences, of the same note of exhortation, alarm, or consolation. Beyond doubt, there was in all this something peculiarly consonant to an age in which, while there was a pervading and keen excitement about religion, there was evidently much

ignorance and dulness of religious apprehension. In no respect is the age more remarkable. The very rapidity with which sects arose on all hands, shows how narrowness of religious intelligence mingled with excitement of religious feeling.

The key to much of the characteristic literature of the time lies in this peculiar combination. A time of intense faith, with little speculative or historical enlightenment, was necessarily one of endless religious controversy and sermonising. Men who were moved to the depth of their hearts by religious convictions-the interest of whose life was centred in the character of their theological belief-and yet who had only very dim and confused ideas of the past course of Christian opinion and history, were necessarily cast afloat on the preaching of the time to feed their religious cravings. Shut within their own limited sphere, the conflicting tenets around them acquired a novelty and supposed potency which made them subjects of ever-renewing attraction; and the sermons, which were almost their only means of theological instruction, could scarcely be too long, so greedily did they thirst after a knowledge which was to them of such vital moment. While we may object, therefore, to the length and verbosity of these sermons, and mourn over a dulness which seems to argue in us a lost faculty of attention, we may yet understand how the very elaborateness and digressive impertinences of their structure constituted, in their own time, a chief source of their influence.

But we must also remember that many of Baxter's sermons, as we have them, are really expansions of what he preached, intended for being read rather than being heard. The Saints' Rest itself, which in its complete shape is an elaborate treatise, in four parts, filling

a goodly octavo, was originally written as a sermon, and the Reformed Pastor equally so. We must judge Baxter's preaching, therefore, rather from parts of such treatises than from the whole; and it is easy to trace in them all places where the preacher only or mainly is to be recognised-passages of rapid and overpowering practical energy, in which every word is lit with the passion of concentrated oratory, and which hurry the reader with something of the same glow of feeling which they must have kindled in those who heard them. Such passages tell more than anything else what Baxter's oratory must have been, when he was in "the vigour of his spirits." Some, like Howe, may have excelled him in grandeur and elevation of conception, or in pathetic tenderness of feeling, as in The Redeemer's Tears over a Lost World; others, like Flavel, surpassed him in piquancy and pith of idea, and homely expressiveness of language, acting on the hearer like a series of unexpected surprises, always stimulating and rewarding attention; but none approached him in sweep and fulness of emotion, and in that sustained and prolonged rush of fiery appeal, earnest pleading, entreaty, or rousing alarm which constitute the most characteristic elements of pulpit eloquence. Baxter communes soul to soul with his hearers; every other interest is withdrawn; no colouring medium of fancy or of mere literary effect distracts the impression; only the Gospel, in the urgency of its claims or the pricelessness of its treasures, is made to fill the mind and heart. It is this fulness of the Gospel animating every sermon, and the conscious responsibility of proclaiming it-of "beseeching man in Christ's stead to be reconciled to God"-that gives to his highest flights that mixture of awe and passion, of rapture and yet of

sense and reality, which makes him unequalled as an evangelical preacher.

Baxter's labours at Kidderminster were continued till the eve of the Restoration. With his preaching and pastoral visits, and clerical disputations, it might have been supposed that his time would have been fully occupied. But in addition to all these labours, he published a great variety of treatises during this period. Having once entered upon the field of authorship, his pen never rested. He wrote a treatise against infidelity, one on Christian Concord, and another on Universal Concord; also disputations on the Sacraments and on Church Government. His Call to the Unconverted, and his Reformed Pastor, with many other tracts on special doctrines, also belong to the same period. And not only did he write of Christian concord, but he prosecuted zealously various proposals of union among the Presbyterians, Independents, and Episcopalians, and even the Baptists. His views on this subject drew him into controversy with Dr Owen, who, though much less flexible in his notions, both theological and ecclesiastical, yet exceeded our divine in calm judgment and practical temper. These proposals one and all failed, no less than the more famous ones under higher auspices, in which he afterwards engaged.

But Baxter had aspirations also of another kind in those days-aspirations which show how far his Christian zeal ranged above the level of his time, and anti

* His Unreasonableness of Infidelity, directed against Clement Writer, of Worcester, who professed to be one of the sect of Seekers, but was either, says Baxter, a "juggling Papist or an infidel."-" An archheretic, a fearful apostate, an old wolf, a subtle man, a materialist and moralist," says Edwards, in his Gangræna. Baxter, in his later years, wrote two additional treatises in defence of the Christian religion, one of them against Lord Herbert's De Veritaté.

cipated the triumphs of a later missionary Christianity. He was one of the most active in providing the means for Elliot, the apostle of the Indians, to carry on his great work in America. He maintained a corresponddence with this devoted missionary, entered most heartily into his plans, and expressed himself with a mingled wisdom and enthusiasm on his difficulties and aims, well deserving of study even now. "The industry of the Jesuits and friars, and their successes in Congo and Japan, do shame us all save you," he says. Perhaps no career would have better suited Baxter himself than one like Elliot's, in which his fervid and untiring zeal, his evangelical energy, and his impulses to independent movement and government, would have had free and unbounded scope.

The death of Cromwell, and the accession and resignation of his son Richard, found Baxter still at Kidderminster. It is remarkable that, while he looked upon the government of the father with unfavourable and even bitterly hostile feelings, he regarded the government of the son with a friendly interest. The mild respectability of Richard's character, his domestic virtues, his respect for the clergy and "the sober people of the land," as Baxter calls them, attached him, as well as many others, and made them readily submit to his assumption of power. "Many sober men that called his father no better than a traitorous hypocrite, did begin to think that they owed him subjection; which, I confess, was the case with myself." In this expression of opinion we.can see already the commencement of the schism between the great body of the nation, who were tired of contention, and who hated the idea of military rule, and the soldiery of the Commonwealth, who had virtually governed