A Dying Man to Dying Men

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7

A badly educated boy. Richard Baxter was born on the twelfth of November, 1615, at Rowton in Shropshire, in his maternal grandfather’s house. His parents were Richard and Beatrice Baxter; his father had gambled away much of the family’s small estate before his conversion, and money was tight. His education was, by his own bitter account, wretched. The village had a succession of teachers who were ignorant, drunk, or both. He never went to university — a fact that his opponents used against him all his life and that he never entirely got over. What he had instead was an appetite. He read everything he could obtain, taught himself theology, philosophy and medicine, and became one of the most learned men in England by sheer application. He was later described as the chief of the English Protestant schoolmen, which is a considerable thing to say of a man with no degree. His conversion came through books rather than preaching — a devotional volume that came into the house by accident, and afterwards the writings of the English Puritans. He dated his real awakening from that reading and never forgot it, which is one reason he spent the rest of his life pressing books into people’s hands.

Kidderminster. He was ordained deacon by the Bishop of Worcester in Advent 1638, kept a school at Dudley, and served briefly as curate at Bridgnorth. In 1641 he was invited to Kidderminster, a weaving town of some two thousand people in Worcestershire. The previous incumbent was reportedly incompetent and the parish neglected. Baxter was twenty-five. Then the country collapsed into civil war. He left the town, served as chaplain to the garrison at Coventry and afterwards to Colonel Whalley’s regiment in the New Model Army, where he spent his energies arguing against the sectarian opinions spreading among the soldiers. He came to regret a good deal about those years. In 1647 his health broke completely. He was taken in by friends at Rouse Lench, far from his library, and lay for months expecting to die.

It was there, with almost no books to consult, that he wrote the bulk of The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. He did not die. He returned to Kidderminster in 1647 as vicar, and stayed fourteen years.

What he did there. The ministry at Kidderminster became the most celebrated parish work in English history, and it is worth stating what it actually consisted of. He preached twice weekly, plainly, aiming at the conscience rather than at admiration. He and his assistant then devoted two whole days each week to personal instruction — summoning the families of the parish in turn, sitting down with each household, examining what they understood of the Christian faith, and teaching them individually. They worked through roughly fourteen families a week and covered the parish in a year. He organised the local ministers into an association that crossed the Presbyterian, Independent and Episcopalian divisions, so that discipline and catechising could be practised in common. He wrote continuously. He gave away a large part of a modest income. And the town changed. On his arrival, he reckoned, perhaps one family in a street showed any serious religion; when he left, there were streets where nearly every family did. He was careful to add that he claimed no credit for it and could name plenty of towns where better men had laboured and seen nothing.

Restoration and ejection. The monarchy was restored in 1660, and Baxter — who had worked for it — went to London as one of the king’s chaplains. He was offered the bishopric of Hereford and declined it. He asked for nothing except permission to return to Kidderminster, and was refused. At the Savoy Conference in 1661 he was the principal spokesman for the moderate Puritan party, and drew up a revised liturgy in a fortnight in the hope of a settlement broad enough to hold the moderates inside the national church. The hope was disappointed; there was no real appetite for compromise on the other side. The Act of Uniformity took effect on the twenty-fourth of August, 1662. Around two thousand ministers who could not subscribe were ejected from their livings on that day. Baxter, seeing what was coming, had already preached his farewell sermon in London the previous May. He was forty-six, and he never held a parish again.

Margaret. In September 1662, weeks after the ejection, he married Margaret Charlton. He was forty-seven and she was twenty-six, and the marriage astonished everyone, including a good many people who had assumed he would never marry at all. By every account it was extraordinarily happy. She was intelligent, decisive and devout, managed their affairs, and pressed him into ventures he would not have attempted alone. They lived through nineteen years of harassment, fines and forced removals together. She died in 1681, aged forty-five. Baxter, heartbroken, wrote an account of her life and character within weeks. It is one of the most affecting things in seventeenth-century English — a widower’s honest portrait of a woman he plainly considered his superior in several respects, published while the grief was raw.

Persecution. The years after 1662 were spent in and around London under a legal regime designed to make nonconformist ministry impossible. Baxter was harassed continually: forbidden to preach, fined, his goods distrained, his books seized, and moved from lodging to lodging. He was imprisoned briefly in 1669 for holding a conventicle. The serious blow came in 1685, when he was seventy and infirm. He was charged with sedition for supposed reflections on the bishops in his Paraphrase on the New Testament, and tried before Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys. The trial was a disgrace. Jeffreys abused him from the bench, called him an old rogue who had poisoned the world with his Kidderminster doctrine, and would not let his counsel speak. Baxter was fined a sum he could not pay and imprisoned for some twenty-one months in Southwark. He was released in 1686, and lived to see the Toleration Act of 1689 give nonconformists legal breathing room at last.

The end. His last years were spent in Charterhouse Square in London, still writing, still preaching when permitted, and in continual pain from ailments he had catalogued with a physician’s precision for half a century. He died on the eighth of December, 1691, aged seventy-six. Asked near the end how he was, he is said to have answered that he was almost well. He left around a hundred and forty published works, a parish that remembered him for generations, a manual of pastoral ministry that is still set for theological students, and a book about heaven written by a man who had spent fifty years expecting to arrive there shortly.