Introduction

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. HEBREWS 4:9

There is a line about preaching that has been quoted in more sermons than almost any other in the English language. Its author said he preached as a man who could never be sure of preaching again, and as a dying man to dying men. Most people who repeat it could not tell you who said it. It was Richard Baxter, and it was not a rhetorical flourish. He wrote it as a plain description of his own circumstances. He was ill for most of his adult life, expected to die young for about fifty years, and buried the town he loved under an Act of Parliament. The urgency in his preaching was not manufactured. He genuinely did not expect to be there the following week.

A parish that changed

He is remembered for two things, and they belong together. The first is what happened at Kidderminster, a rough Worcestershire weaving town where he arrived in 1641 to find, by his own account, a parish largely ignorant of the gospel and given to drink. When he left, some twenty years later, the place had been transformed — so thoroughly that visitors came to see it, and the change was still spoken of a century afterwards. Whole streets sang psalms on their way home from work. He had to build galleries in the church five times. The second is how he did it, because the method was startlingly unromantic. He preached twice a week. And he set aside two full days every week to sit down with families in his parish, one household at a time, and go through the Christian faith with them personally — about fourteen families a week, some eight hundred families a year. He did it with his assistant, methodically, for years. That is the whole secret, and it is why his book on ministry has never gone out of print.

The other half of him

But Baxter is not merely the patron saint of diligent pastors, and a book that presented him that way would miss what he actually cared about. His most famous work is about heaven. The Saints’ Everlasting Rest was written in 1647, at thirty-one, while he lay gravely ill far from home and from his books, fully expecting to die. He wrote it, he said, for himself — a dying man’s meditations on where he was going. It became one of the best-loved books of its century, and it turned him from a country minister into a household name. The two halves explain each other. Baxter worked as he did because of where he believed people were going. He gave himself to catechising illiterate weavers because he thought each of them would exist for ever. Take away the rest and the labour makes no sense; take away the labour and the rest becomes sentiment.

How this book is arranged

Eighteen short chapters set out his teaching, beginning with the breadth of spirit that made him unusual, moving through his doctrine of heaven and the practice of heavenly meditation, then to conversion and justification, then to the pastoral work for which he is best known, then to the ordinary Christian disciplines — family religion, self-examination, the use of time — and finally to suffering, unity and dying well. Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. Baxter would have approved and probably added more. He had an almost impatient conviction that truth which stops short of practice is worse than useless, and his great practical work — A Christian Directory — consists of nearly a million words of direct instruction on how to live. Read one chapter a day, or one a week. Stop at the application points. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own. One note on the text. Baxter wrote a seventeenth-century English that many readers find heavy going. Throughout this book his teaching is summarised in modern prose rather than quoted, so that the argument comes through without the thicket. Readers who go on to the originals should be warned that the sentences are long and the pace is unhurried; that is the century, not the man.

One more thing must be said at the outset, and it is better said plainly. This is not a book of hero-worship, and Baxter is a particularly poor candidate for it. He was contentious. He spent an extraordinary proportion of his life in controversy — with bishops, with Independents, with Quakers, with Antinomians, with fellow Presbyterians — and he could not let an argument alone. He wrote around a hundred and forty books, many of them polemical, and he admitted late in life that he had written too much, too quickly, and too sharply. His doctrine of justification was widely judged to be a departure from the Reformed teaching of his own party, and the controversy over it outlived him by two centuries. Chapter six sets out what he held and where the objections lie. The reader should weigh it carefully rather than accept it on the strength of his other virtues. And his political judgment was, by his own reckoning, imperfect. He served as a chaplain in the parliamentary army and afterwards regretted much of what that side did. He helped bring about the Restoration and was then ejected by it. He was, as one modern historian has put it, a man who managed to fall out with almost every party in church and state, generally on principle and sometimes on temperament. Baxter knew this about himself. One of the most valuable things he ever wrote is a passage in his autobiography reviewing how his mind had changed with age: he had grown less confident of his own judgment, less impressed by his own learning, more charitable towards those who differed from him, and more convinced that the essentials of Christianity are fewer and plainer than controversialists suppose. It is a remarkable piece of self-knowledge from a man who had spent decades arguing. So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Where Baxter is faithful — and on the work of the ministry, the reality of heaven, the duty of personal instruction and the breadth of Christian charity, he is faithful indeed — receive it gladly. Where he presses beyond what is written, mark it, set it aside, and lose nothing.

A final word about the reader this book assumes. Baxter wrote for English weavers in a market town during a civil war, and for ministers scattered across a country tearing itself apart over church order. He is read now in places he never heard of, by Christians whose circumstances have nothing in common with his. The reason is that he wrote about what does not change: that people die, that they must be told the truth before they do, that ministers are answerable for those in their care, and that the ordinary household is where religion is either made real or quietly abandoned. Those matters are already waiting wherever this book is opened, and into whatever language it is carried.