Chapter 33

ECHOES OF YESTERYEAR

ON personal grounds alone, it would be a thousand pities if the name of Richard Baxter were to fade into oblivion. The older biographies of Baxter stressed the circumstance that he was a great divine; the later writers make it clear that he was a great human. He dearly loved his little joke; he had a keen eye for a pretty girl; he was very fond of a keenly contested and exciting game; he revelled in a good square meal. Baxter’s love story is as dainty, as delicate and as beautiful as any such idyll in our literature.

 On the eve of his departure for Scotland-a notable adventure in those days – Boswell consulted Johnson as to the books he should take with him. ‘Tell me, sir,’ he asked, ‘which of Baxter’s books should a man read?’ ‘Read any of them,’ replied the doctor instantly, ‘they are all good!’ Baxter’s young wife – he was old enough to be her father when he married her – would scarcely have concurred in Dr. Johnson’s judgment. At least she would have insisted on adding a rider to the effect that, good as they were, they might have been very much better. For young Margaret, who was unconscionably proud of the dignified and stately scholar who worshipped the very ground she trod, was always telling him that he wrote far too much. ‘She thought,’ says Baxter, ‘that I would have been wiser to have written fewer books and to have put better work into each of them.’ Although she was little more than a girl, and had no training or experience that would qualify her as a critic in so profound a realm, she was indisputably right. Baxter says thousands of excellent things; but he does not say them attractively, while the passages that were written carefully and at leisure stand as ample vindication of Margaret’s verdict.

 The best instance of this is to be found in the Autobiography. ‘Many years ago,’ said Dean Stanley, in unveiling the beautiful statue of Baxter that adorns the scene of his historic work at Kidderminster, ‘many years ago, on one of the few occasions on which I had the pleasure of meeting Sir James Stephen, the famous professor of history at Cambridge University, he recommended me, with peculiar emphasis and solemnity, to read the two chapters with which Baxter closes the first section of his Autobiography. He begged me to do it at once; and, that very night, I followed his advice and have ever since publicly and privately advised other students to do the same.’ In those two notable chapters, Baxter, writing in the mellow softness and measured calm of advancing age, contrasts his ideas in youth with his more mature outlook upon life now that his beard is turning grey. It is an amazing document, pitilessly penetrating and transparently honest, in which he spares himself no castigation and no self-exposure. If all his works had been conceived and executed on this lofty level, Dr. Johnson’s counsel to Boswell would have been tinged with still greater fervour.

 His father’s ambition was that he should become a courtier, and, at the age of eighteen, he set out for Whitehall with a letter of introduction to Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels. A month at the court of King Charles the First sufficed to fill him with ineffable disgust; and, Christmas intervening, he set out for home. That winter was a phenomenal one. England was arctic; the roads were buried deep in frozen snow. Riding back to Shropshire, Baxter met a loaded waggon; and, to make room for it, spurred his horse up the bank. The horse slipped, the girths broke, and Baxter was thrown under the waggon. When the rim of the wheel was almost touching the skin of his forehead, the horses suddenly stopped. His miraculous escape powerfully impressed his mind, and he felt that his life, so marvellously preserved, should be devoted to some high end. His thoughts turned to the ministry.

 His desire was granted him. He became a minister; and the noble statue, of which the people of Kidderminster are so justly proud, still testifies to the authority that, three centuries ago, he wielded in the town. A glance at the monument and a casual perusal of his books, help us to appreciate the resistless appeal that he must have made to those who, actually looking into those flashing and eloquent eyes, capitulated unconditionally to the charm of his smile, the gentleness of his humour, the cogency of his reasoning and the force of his tense and virile personality. He became, in his own lifetime, a beautiful tradition.

 But even if the Kidderminster episode be entirely eliminated, a colourful and dramatic pageant still remains. In 1665, the Plague year, Baxter was fifty. London was about as large a city as Adelaide is now. From eight to ten thousand people were dying in the metropolis every week. Burial was out of the question. The bodies were stacked up in the churchyards and in open places set apart for the purpose. The country was horrified and nobody went near London unless absolutely compelled by imperative necessity to do so. But Baxter went, and, like some ancient prophet risen from the dead, preached to the stricken people the vitalizing message that burned like a fire in his bones. When he heard the stories that were coming from across the Atlantic of the cruelties being afflicted by the Red Indians on the homes of the pioneer settlers, his first thought was of the transformation of the red men. Whilst everybody else was screaming for vengeance, Baxter pleaded that some steps should be taken for the evangelization and regeneration of the people of the wigwams. When he saw that his wife, although so much younger than himself, must predecease him, he wrote, as a gift to her, a hymn that now appears in the hymnaries of almost all the churches — ‘Lord, it belongs not to my care’ -and, as a sign of her acceptance, she signed the manuscript. She died at forty-five; and he spent the ten lonely years that remained sighing for reunion with his lovely Margaret.

By Dr. F. W. Boreham