Representative Nonconformists ^^^^ ^ ,v. PRINCETON, N. J. BX 5206 .G76 1879 c.l Grosart, Alexander Balloch, 1827-1899 . Representative nonconformists REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/representativenoOOgros WITH THE MESSAGE OF THEIR LIFE- WORK FOR TO-DAY. I. John Howe: Intelleclual Sanctity. II. Richard Baxter: Seraphic Fa-vour. III. Samuel Rutherford: Devout Affection. IV. Matthew Henry : Sanctified Common-Sense. BY the rev, ALEXANDER B.^GROSART, LL.D. (Edin.), F.S.A. (Scot.), ST. George's Presbyterian church, blackburn, Lancashire; AUTHOR OF "the prince OF LIGHT AND PRINCE OF DARKNESS IN CONFIICT,' " JESUS, MIGHTY TO SAVE," " SMALL SINS," "THE LAMBS ALL SAFE," "HELPER OF JOY," "the KEY-BEARER," "JOINING THE CHURCH," "hymns," ETC.; EDITOR OF "FULLER worthies' library," " CHERTSEY WORTHIES* LIBRARY," ETC. HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. MDCCCLXXIX. THE SPRING LECTURE OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF ENGLAND FOR 1879. Belivered in the College, Guildford Street, London. INTRODUCTION. T N his funeral sermon for Dr. William Bates, John Howe — the greatest of our four Representative Nonconformists — in his splendid summing-up, announces his purpose thus : — " The little I shall say of him shall be, not by way of history, but of character."* This admirably expresses my own motif in these Lectures. I trust that in my Lives of Dr. Richard Sibbes, Thomas Brooks, and many other of the Puritan Divines, as well as in my Fuller Worthies' Library and Chertsey Worthies' Library — to name * Works, vol. vi., p. 294. VI INTRODUCTION. only these — sufficient proofs have been given that when called for I have not grudged any expenditure of pains or research or toil, towards getting at the facts of the Lives in hand, or elucidatory of the Works. But in the present case it does not at all come within my province to tell the external story of any of my Worthies. I assume that the Life itself is in each .case less or more familiar to my Readers. This is surely not unreasonable, seeing that there are readily accessible such authorities as these : — (a) John Howe. — Life by Henry Rogers, author of " The Eclipse of Faith," etc., etc., I vol. 8vo., 1863 (also original edition) : Calamy : Hunt : Dr. James Hamilton : Christophers, etc., etc. (j6) Richard Baxter. — Life by William Orme (editor of " Practical Works "), I large vol., 8vo, 1830: Reliquiae INTRODUCTION. vii Baxterianae (folio) and numerous Memoirs, Essays, etc., etc. (y) Samuel Rutherford. — Life by Thomson in his " Letters," 2 vol. cr. 8vo, 1836: by Dr. Andrew A. Bonar, prefixed to " Letters," 2 vols. 8vo, 1863: Wodrow : McCrie, etc., etc. (8) Matthew Henry. — Life by Sir J. B. WILLIAM.S, Knt, and numerous others introductory to editions of the " Com- mentary," and of his miscellaneous works. Besides these, there are the equally accessible Histories of the Later Puritans and Nonconformists, in which all our qua- ternion fill considerable space. From these and kindred sources any one seeking to master the facts of the several Lives, or who wishes critically to determine their historical-literary, literary-historical place among leading Nonconformists and in relation Vlll INTRODUCTION. to Churchmen, will have himself to blame if he do not draw ample materials, as well for their Biography as for their part in the chief movements of their time. My present commission (as my choice) is wholly different. As addressing in the first instance young men — students and others — and my fellow-ministers and fellow-workers, my main design is from SELECTED CHA- RACTERISTICS of the Life and Life-work of these Representative Nonconformists to incite and quicken to higher and nobler service of The Master in our day and generation. This being so, I am perfectly at ease under the fore- shadow of blame, on the ground that what is wanted is presentation of facts and letting them make their own impression. One naturally answers, ' Wanted by whom } ' Equally at ease am I in anticipation of being charged with ' improving ' Howe and Baxter, Rutherford and Henry — as the old Divines called their reading of lessons from INTRODUCTION. ix special events and circumstances. To draw SUCH LESSONS and to drive them home into heart and conscience is my purpose and endeavour. In order to this I am — neces- sarily as I think — discoursive and discursive. If any one chooSe to fling stones at me as ' didactic,' ' hortatory,' ' moralizing,' and so on : so be it. I shall not like the stone- flinging, but shall bear it. I believe the didactic and hortatory to be effective in their own place. I believe them both to be urgently demanded to-day. For the loss is that except here and there, Facts and characteristics if simply told do not leave the impression which they might and ought. A bullet will not strike or kill without gunpowder and fire. I cherish a hope that in these Lectures there is some pointblank shot and some magnetic force. So far as I know my own heart, my animus is not polemical, but if possible to do some good in the way of practical X INTRODUCTION. stimulus, of rousing, of winning to study and re-study, and to emulation of these Worthies among our forefathers. And so I turn to our four Representative Nonconformists.* * It is deemed well to explain thaf most of the illustrative quotations throughout, were not read but rcsei"ved for the printed book, from the limited time available. CONTENTS. Introduction — quotation — motif o( the Lectures — 'character' not external story — accessible authorities — 'improving,' etc. — intentionally hortatory and didactic — practical usefulness in stirring to higher service . . . Pages v. io x. I. JOHN HOWE : Inevitable impression — portraits — incident at Whitehall — ap- pointed domestic chaplain to Cromwell — 'noble presence' ■ — advantage of — ^description of Dr. Bates — heredity — meanly-housed souls — noble form and falsehood — Shake- speare quotations — the Platonism of Spenser and Milton — quotations from — A FIRST present-day truth and duty — Christians to-day urged to fashion and transfigure their very look — evils of the opposite — Whittier — Andrevif Fuller — Dr. Robert S. Candlish — Hovi'e a fellovir-disciple with John Smith, Dr. Henry More, Dr. Ralph Cudworth — expression of face a beatitude — of grace not of birth — Phineas Fletcher — George Herbert — an over-looked inci- dent — controversy with Thomas Larkham, of Tavistock — rash, ill-informed, pestiferous zeal, hot of temper — heart- change — controlling grace — contrast of "bitter words" to and of Larkham with after-words — Stillingfleet — Psalm cxli. 5 — a second present-day truth — ' conversion ' a reality and universal need — Christ unique (note) — modern Scientists unscientific and uncritical herein — A third pre- xii CONTENTS. SENT-DAY TRUTH— the every-day life of Howe —" notional knowledge" worthless— faith transforms the character — beliefs must enter into the life — "Meditation" — Intuition — Ratiocination — intellectual sanctity to be striven for — be "partakers of Divine nature" — the wonder and glory of man's destiny to be ' like God ' — character makes a minis- ter's 'preaching' his power — A fourth present-day TRUTH — habitual reverence — Milton's word-portrait of Pre- sident Bradshaw — a living message to the Scientists of to-day — quotations from Howe — awe and its opposite — "petulant and irreverent liberty" — spurious reverence — Socinus and what can only be known by the Scriptures — sarcasm — the "Divine simplicity," misconceptions of — Tennyson's cry for "more reverence" — Dr. Darwin — Tyndall — Huxley — a "rectified frontier" — large ideas of the legitimate sphere of 'hard thinking' — A fifth present- DAY truth — right and lawful to think and even speculate —A SIXTH PRESENT-DAY TRUTH— impassioned appeal for Christ-like lives — the most attractive of all evidence — rebuke of Atheists — "higher criticism" — ^just disdain — a SEVENTH PRESENT-DAY TRUTH — exalted conception of man — argument from what man is, being a Christian, to what God is — the problem — 'was,' not 'is' — 'is' or 'was' — restitution — quotations from Howe — Christianity recognizes and addresses our reason, conscience, moral nature, and counts on capacities of response — great passages from Howe on the ruined temple of man's soul, and the fitness of God's departure from it — summary — man re-made in God's image — man, though fallen, responsive to truth and grace — AN EIGHTH PRESENT-DAY TRUTH — 'application' and appeal after argument or exposition — quotation from the " Redeemer's Tears wept over Lost Souls" — revival of this coveted — points ' left out ' in Life and Work — Robert Hall's estimate of Howe for himself " as a minister "— our confirmation — Rev. S. W. Christophers — the "good man" — Edward Young . . . Pages I lo lo^. CONTENTS. xiii II. RICHARD BAXTER: Epithets of Bede and Hooker — the ' /loly Baxter ' — Essayist — Orme — Coleridge — Howe — Calamy — Macaulay — Tulloch — Trench — first present-day truth and duty — the VOLUME OF HIS BEING, AND PRODIGIOUS VITALITY — Grainger — physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual — ubiquity and 'uncanny' omnipresence — Society for Propagation of the Gospel — the Slave Trade — Sir James Stephen and Brougham — tireless energy — Burns — writings — enormous difference — heir-looms — appeal to ministers and others now — SERAPHIC FERVOUR — 'liturgical' — modern fastidiousness — horror of vulgarity — ultra-refinement — A SECOND PRE- SENT-DAY TRUTH and DUTY — SOUGHT THE GOOD OF 'THE COMMON people' — preaching and books — creator of popu- lar Christian literature— contrast with George Herbert — remarkable quotation from Sir James Stephen — successive 'practical' books — their value as literature — style — Arch- bishop Trench — a third present-day truth — faith IN the human conscience — Savonarola — Whitfield — no academical training — Sir James Stephen — addressed the conscience — needed to-day — to be combined with sympathy — the tenderness and humanity of Baxter — quotations — Dr. Bates — Orme — declarative preaching — urgent want of to-day — not ' informing ' merely, but ' transforming' — scholarship — revision of Authorized Version — results — quotations ex- emplifying Baxter's preaching — a fourth present-day truth AND duty — THE USE MADE OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE BY Baxter — a tribute to the English Bible— a lustrous story — A FIFTH PRESENT-DAY TRUTH — SCHISM of the Church of England in its attitude toward Nonconformists — John Howe — 'meetings' — actual results — longing for a change — "Vale- diction," poem by Baxter. , , Pages 107 to 193. XIV CONTENTS. III. SAMUEL RUTHERFORD: Rutherford not a " household word " like the others— by-ways not high -ways of history and literature — one small "bush burning but not consumed " — the Letters, Rotterdam, 1664 — ■ other writings — characterized — controversial writings con- demned for their bitterness and narrowness — John Good- win — Buckle — John Milton — Professor Masson — at Westminster Assembly — widened views and estimates — FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE — imperfect enunciations of it — • Dr. Andrew A. Bonar — an edition more perfect — Crom- well — the Letters' popularity far and near— Baxter — LovE — TOPLADY — RoMAINE — HeRVEY — RiCHARD CeCIL — WiLBERFORCE — THOMAS CHALMERS — ErSKINEOF LINLA- THEN — a possible misuse of the Letters — Song of Solomon • — enfeebling the moral nature — present-DAY TRUTHS AND DUTIES — I. ThE LORD JeSUS AS A LIVING PERSON IS ALL IN ALL — the Person not the Book — ' bodily presence ' — 'personal reign' — Napoleon — II. The Second ap- pearing OF THE Lord Jesus is longed for — the ' blessed hope ' — its certainty — but not as millenarians teach — criticism of Dr. Bonar— III. The work of Christ is put in the foreground — no mere 'asides' — central — 'imputed righteousness' — correction of preva- lent mistakes — righteousness. — IV. Personal holiness js strenuously aimed at and spiritual declen- sion mourned — human and divine side — "take more pains " — imperfect realization of Rutherford — spiritual decay — lamentation over the state of the Church and world — protest — V. Consolation to the afflicted is rich and full — Fetched from the Bible — personal experience — consolation not spiritual coddling — the Letters broadly regarded — their message for to-day — the power and influence of Letter-writing — ancient and modern Letters — the New Testament Letters— opportunities — occasions — "go and do likewise" — H.T.White — Adelaide Procter. Fag;esi<)^ 10262. CONTENTS. XV IV. MATTHEW HENRY: ^anrlififJr €amicaarx-^tnu. Philip Henry — of 'The Ejected' — Thomas Baker — Matthew Henry a 'child of many prayers' — the 'Flight into Egypt' — home-training — education — at Gray's Inn — theology — in- vited to preach at Nantwich by Mr. lUidge — at Chester — settlement there— activity — exposition of the entire Bible — removal to London — annual visit to Chester— death : — his ' Commentary ' his supreme achievement — minor writings — NO Commentary has had such a large and sus- tained CIRCULATION — Trapp — Clarke — Scott — Gill — a living sale — its significance and value— the circulation IS RELIGIOUS not LITERARY — its spiritual character its attraction — a grandmother — Kinross-shire — a ' good man ' there — multiply by the aggregate — at the bottom of the Revival under Wesley and Whitfield — kept the ' lamp alive' when Presbyterianism lapsed into Arianism — (ke one avail- able Commentary on the whole Bible — its fine Catho- licity — no sectarianism or controversies — willing to be held for 'old-fashioned ' — thecentral controlling thing, sanctified common-sense, l8th and 1 6- 1 7th centuries — mostuncommon of all sense — John Foster on Henry — speaking of him now speaks for himself — examples of sanctified common- sense — quotations — secular employments — earthly and heavenly — communion with God and duties — temptation — "no child" — complaints to God not of GoA — communion and prayer — Abraham's sin, imitated by Isaac — "curious questions " — infirmities — family-differences — over-strictness at home — constancy and obstinacy — over-doing — design of Holy Scripture — explaining everything — robes of service — the Church — "A String of Pearls" of quotations from the Commentary — another " String of Pearls " — other charac- teristics, with illustrative quotations— I. Brevity and Wisdom — II. Pungency and Ingenuity — III. Savouriness and Quaint felicities of wording — mere gleanings — any other from a different standpoint find as many more — the place of the xvi CONTENTS. Commentary among forces in the religious life of England, and elsewhere — Hunt — Lecky — the Author's intention to supplement 'learned' commentaries — Bp. Patrick — Pool — prayerfulness — " Homer nods" (foot-note). Fagis 263 tc 346. Conclusion— many other equally illustrious representative NONCONFORMISTS — why Presbyterians selected — closing remarks — practical appeals for a higher life and nobler service — longing for union — ultimate triumph Pages 346 to 357. Appendix A. : Spenser's Hymn . Pages 358 to 360. Appendix B. : Thomas Larkham and Howe ; and notice of an earlier controversy hitherto overlooked. Pages 2,61 toyj6. Appendix C. Opponents of Rutherford Page 377 to 380. JOHN HOWE: I *'Do not puffer yourselves to be insensibly seized by a mean and sordid sloth. Set your thoughts awake with vigorous diligence, give not out before you have well begun. Resolve, since you have a thinking power about you, you will use it to this most necessary purpose ; and hold your thoughts to it. See that your minds do not presently tire and flag ; that you be rationally, peremptorily, and soberly obstinate in this pursuit ; yield not to be diverted. Disdain, having minds that can reach up to the Great Original and Author of all things, that they should be confined to this dirty earth, or only to things low and mean." — The Living Templcj Pt. II., c. iii. *'Let such as have not been used to think of anything more than what they could see with their eyes, and to whom reasoning only seems difficult because they have not tried what they can do in it, but use their thoughts a little ; and by moving them a few easy steps, they will soon find themselves as sure of this as that they see, or hear, or understand, or are anything."— lOiil, Pt. I., c. ii. JOHN HOWE, M.A., FELLOW OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD. Born at Loughborough, Leicestershire, May 17, 1630 : Died at London, April 2, 1 705 : Buried in Parish Church, All- LIallo\os, Bread Street. *" I "^HE inevitable impression left on a capable, "considering,"* and modest reader of the Life and Works of JoilN HoWE is, that he must have been a man of exceptionally noble presence, and of co-equal intellect. I wish, in the outset, TO ACCENTUATE THE FORMER. I have gone over and over to the * "Considering" — a favourite word with Howe, e.g., " The continual mixture of good and evil in this pre- sent state of things . . . does naturally prompt a considej-ing mind to the belief and hope of another " (Works, by Rogers, vol. i., p. 13). " The supposal of a not unusual asyndeton, would, without the help of magic, have relieved a considering reader" {Ibid., vol. v., p. 169), et frequenter. 4 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. Williams' Library to study and re-study his portrait there ; while at home I have found myself similarly drawn to Sir Peter Lely'.s equally authentic one, as engraved by F. HoU for Hewlett.* I never have been thus occupied without enrichment, or without a deepened sense of his greatness and sanctity. It actual- izes to me — next to Milton's — the world-known saying of "the human face divine." Henry Rogers — his amplest Biographer — thus puts it :— " Howe's external appearance was such as served to exhibit to the greatest advantage his rare intellectual and moral endowments. His stature was lofty, his aspect commanding, and his manner an impressive union of ease and dignity. His countenance — the expression of which is at once so sublime and so lovely, so full both of majesty of thought and purity of feeling — is best understood by the portrait. It is (to use the language of Gregory Nyssa in reference to Basil) ^Xtufia t6vw rijr •^vxrjs (VTfivonevov, 'a countenance attuned to harmony with the mind.'"t Calamy, who knew him well, tells us that — * Works, 3 vols., 8vo. (Tegg). i Life, by Rogers, p. 318. JOHN HOWE. 5 "As to his person, he was very tall and exceeding graceful. He had a good presence, and a piercing but pleasant eye ; and there was that in his looks and car- riage, that discovered that he had something within that was uncommonly great, and tended to excite veneration." * That the living face was an arrestive one, is proved by the well-known, and happily, well-authenticated incident, whereby he became the Domestic Chaplain of OLIVER Cromwell : " one of those trifling incidents, as men are wont to consider them, but on which Divine Providence seems to delight in suspending the most important events." t His already-quoted Biographer — following Calamy — thus narrates it :— " At the close of 1656, or in the beginning of 1657, some important business brought him to London. On the last Sabbath of his stay there (and it is worthy of remark that he had already been detained beyond the period he had assigned for his return), curiosity led him to the Chapel at Whitehall. The name of the preacher who attracted him thither is unknown. Crom- well was present ; and as ' he generally had his eyes everywhere ' (an expression of Calamy's) the noble and * Ibid. t Ibid.,^. 37. 6 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. expressive physiognomy of Howe soon fell under his notice. Nor was this to be wondered at ; an observer of human nature, far less sagacious than Oliver Cromwell, might have discerned in the lineaments of Howe's face, the indications of no common character. As soon as service was concluded, a message was despatched to inform Howe that the Protector desired to speak with him. If surprised at such an extraordinary summons, he must have been still more surprised to hear the Pro- tector (who had already concluded from his appearance that he was a minister) request him to ' preach at White- hall Chapel on the following Lord's Day.' Howe, whose modesty recoiled from a proposal which other and more ambitious men would have exulted to embrace, endea- voured to excuse himself Cromwell, with that peremptori- ncss which ever characterized him, told him ' that it was in vain to think of excusing himself, for that he would take no denial.' Howe, who did not know much of the arts of a courtier, and probably would have disdained to practise them, pleaded with much simplicity, that 'he had despatched all the matters which had brought him to London, that he was now anxious to return home, and that he could not be detained longer without serious inconvenience.' ' Why,' rejoined the pertinacious Oliver, 'what great injury are you likely to sustain by tarrying a little longer ' To this Howe — who, in the spirit of a true pastor, considered the welfare of his flock far more important than the favour of the Protector, their esteem as the highest honour, and their love as his most grateful reward — replied, that his people were very kind to him ; that they would be uneasy at his protracted absence ; JOHN HOWE. 7 that they would think he neglected them, and that he but little valued their esteem and affection.' 'Well,' said Cromwell, ' I will write to them myself, and will under- take the task of procuring them a suitable substitute.' This he actually did ; and Howe, being thus relieved from his scruples, or rather not knowing how to persist in opposing the wishes of one whose requests, like those of kings, were little less than commands, consented to the Protector's proposal. But after he had preached one, Cromwell in the same manner insisted upon a second and third sermon, and prevailed by the same pertinacity as before ; and at length, after much private conversation, told him that ' nothing would serve him but Howe must remove to London, and become his domestic chaplain, and that he would take care that the people at Torrington should be supplied to their satisfaction.' Howe exerted himself to the utmost to escape such an unwelcome honour ; but Cromwell, who, as Calamy truly observes, ' could not bear to be contradicted after he had once got the power into his hands,' would listen to no denial. At length, therefore, Howe, who was assured that he would have the means of doing great service to religion in the Protector's household, the whole arrangements of which were to be submitted to himself and a reverend colleague, was induced to consent. He accordingly removed with his family to Whitehall, where some of his children were born."* * Life, as before, pp. 37-40. In loco Rogers effectively disposes of Palmer's blundering account — afterwards cancelled by himself— in the " Nonconf Memorial," s.?i. 8 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. This incident is suggestive in many ways ; and one would greatly wish to recover the letter that Cromwell wrote to Torrington.* I give it, however, mainly to confirm our opening remark on Howe's noble presence. It was unquestionably an immense advantage to him to have such a temple for his soul. His own fine words of another at once admi- rably enforce the advantage, and unconsciously describe himself. In the celebrated funeral sermon for silver-tongued Dr. BATES, he thus introduces his ' character ' : — " First, to take notice of, what must with every one come first in view ; namely, his sclf-rccoinmoiding aspect, composed of gravity and pleasantness, with the graceful mien and comeliness of his person. That was said upon no slight consideration of the nature of man, from unbnbed common estimate, that whatever a man's virtuous endowment be, it is the more taking and acceptable as coming e piilcliro corporc, ' from a handsome well-formed body.' God had designed him to circumstances and a station not obscure in the world, and had accordingly formed him with advantage, * Several such letters of Cromwell are preserved. See Carlyle, s.n. JOHN HOWE. 9 so that his exterior and first aspectable part, might draw respect. And though the treasure to be lodged there, was to be put into an earthen vessel, yet even that was \\Tought incliore Into, of finer or more accurately-figured and better-turned clay. He was to stand before kings. . . . His concern lay not only with mean men, though he could tell also how to condescend to the meanest. His aspect and deport- ment was not austere, but both decently grave and amiable, such as might command at once both rever- ence and love ; and was herein not a lying, but the true picture of his mind. I may to this purpose borrow his own words concerning one . . . whose fragrant memory will long survive the age he lived in. . . . Of him the Doctor says, ' A constant serenity reigned in his countenance, the visible sign of the Divine calm in his heart ; the peace of God that passes all understanding.' ... Of whom could this have been more fitly said than, intitato Jioinine, of Dr. Bates? How rarely should we see a countenance so constant and so faithful an index of an undisturljed, composed mind ! Through that, if we looked into this, how rich furniture of the inner man should we perceive and admire I " * I have dwelt thus at length and lingeringly, on "the first aspectable part" of Howe, because I find in it A LIVING MESSAGE FOR US TO-DAY. * Works, as before, vol. vi., p. 294-5. 10 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. First of all, in the fact that John Howe in- herited his "noble presence" — from his illus- trious and venerable father, and in all probability a long ancestry— I am summoned to remember that we inherit and transmit form and feature. We cannot sunder a man from his ancestry. There is a vast deal more of suggestion than some apprehend, in the Scriptural expression, "received by tradition ( inherited) from your fathers" (i Peter i. i8). Even in such a thing as this of noble (and equally of ignoble) pre- sence, there is a strange, mysterious heredity and "visiting" to the third and fourth genera- tion ; and a "shewing of mercy" more transcen- dent still. Parents would do well to ponder this. Further : over-against the " noble presence " of Howe, I do not forget that some of the noblest souls have been meanly housed. It is the tenant that has ' enfamoused ' the house. What would a valuator name for some of England's supremest 'mighties" and worthies' houses, viewed simply as brick and mortar JOHN HOWE. II The shekinah is the glory. Take for example the house inhabited by the soul that the world calls Socrates : what have you ? A bald head, flat nose, fleshy lips, a stout and rather ungainly figure. Or, take Paul. I do not know, but I im- agine for myself the writer of " Fought the good fight" as a little hook-nosed, gray, old man, with no look of majesty, but the reverse, as he dips his pen in the ink-bottle and writes that grand letter, ere he dies, to " Timothy, my dearly beloved son." That is the man of whom his detractors said, " His bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible." Those who have no " bodily presence " may gratefully recall this. Once more : I must indicate — without dwell- ing on it — that noble presence or form maybe associated with falsehood and baseness. Beside homely Socrates stands Alcibiades, with the form and beauty of an Apollo, admiring the good, but hopelessly following the bad. Shake- speare knew man, — as scarcely another ever has done, — and does not he say } — 12 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. " O what may man within him hide, Though angel on the outward side." — Measure for Measure, iii. 2. And again — "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose : . . . O what a goodly outside falsehood hath." — Merchant of Venice, i. 3. This must never be forgotten, else we sliall be deceived manifoldly and sorrowfully. Beyond these elements and details, I must broaden-out a more fundamental thing still, in (to return on quoted words) " the constant serenity that reigned in his countenance, the visible sign of the Divine calm in his breast ; the peace of God that passes all understanding." I am heretic enough to believe in the Platon- isni of Spenser and Milton. I regard it not as idle Pleasures of Imagination, but as a subtle reality that to a measureless extent we hold in our own keeping and fashioning this body of ours and its immortal inhabitant. "So" — to select one consummate stanza from as dulcet a piece of music as our language possesses — Spenser's Hymn in Honour of Beauty : — JOHN HOWE. " — — So every spirit, as it is most pure And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer bodie doth procure To habit in, and is more fairely dight With chearefull grace and amiable sight : For of the soule the bodie forme doth take ; For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make.''* Similarly Milton in Comus, tells how " oft converse with heavenly habitants" will " Begin to cast a beam on th' outward shape, The unpolluted temple of the mind, And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence Till all be made immortal." I know of none whose pictured face so ex- quisitely and perfectly and grandly fulfils the "fine phrenzy" of the earlier and later poet. I add grandly, because with surpassing love- liness there is a majesty that beauty alone does not express. I do not tarry to discuss either the fact or the speculation. Mv PURPOSE IS A PRACTICAL ONE. I would urge that while only a comparatively elect few are dowered with such a presence as cannot escape men's notice, * See Appendix A. for full quotation. 14 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. but, whether alone or in the street, magnet-like draws attention, and compels another and an- other look, and the question, 'Who is that?' we yet have all something — more than we think — to do with the fashioning and tempering and mellowing (so to say) of our face. That is — as I take it — the soul informs and transforms feature and expression, until whatever the soul comes to be — by God's grace — these reflect and interpret it. It is no common beatitude when by our very face — its look and light — we bring sunshine and purity and something of a celes- tial air with us. Contrariwise, how very many ministers of the Gospel — in all the Churches — and private Christians, by their "vinegar aspect," their austere, rigid, PROFESSIONAL bearing, or by a religious simper and artificial, reedy, whining voice, repell hearts that are yearning to unburden themselves I How very many have so hardened their facial muscles and the hang of their lips, into sour, or peevish, or irritable and sanctimonious expression, and de-naturalized their tones and mode of speak^ JOHN HOWE. ing and intercourse with their fellow-men, that unreality is stamped on them ! Age and care corrugate the brow and place crow-feet about the eyes, and pinch and tan soon enough and surely enough, without our co-operation. So that we ought to conserve this body of ours, so " fearfully and wonderfully made," and bring out, not obliterate ; beautify, not deform ; en- noble, not demean ourselves. I like to call up two grandmothers who, in a serene old age — well-nigh the completed century — had ruddy apple-cheeks and a light of hope that paled your mythical saint's mythical nimbus. Let there be within the heart the peace, the calm, the joy, the " good hope " that belong to us as we are Christians, — when behind the (mere) name, Christ by His Spirit has re-made us after His own likeness, — ^and let us strenu- ously and vigilantly watch against artificiality, and our very face shall be wrought into con- formity. Whittier, of America, in a delight- ful little poem has painted for us just such a face : — 1 6 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. " Sweet promptings unto kindest deeds Were in her very look ; \Vc read her face, as one who reads A true and holy book." It is told of Andrew Fuller — who cer- tainly was as plain and un-intellectual-looking as almost any of like eminence — that in the pulpit a light of unearthly glory seemed some- times to suffuse and make beautiful his rugged and homely features as he pleaded in prayer with God for men and with men for God in his great sermons. I was told at Kettering that the little children ran across the streets to catch his benignant look or to feel the soft pressure of his great hands on their young heads. 1 myself can testify that the slight, not to say deformed, body of Dr. Robert Candlish dilitated into grandeur and his face flashed as with inward brightness — as though some invisible star burned within, — when with bearing-down and incomparable power, he expounded and applied some deep saying of his beloved Lord JOHN HOWE. 17 or some subtle argument of St. Paul. Thus roused and lifted above himself, that quaint and almost weird face, with its alp of forehead and elf-locks, wore to me a strange pathetic beauty, as the great preacher — and I never have heard a greater — in passion sprung of compassion — after marvellous penetrativeness of insight and argument, drove home Divine warning and Divine remonstrance, and wistfully entreated his fellow-men to be "reconciled " to God in Christ. The soul therefore, I reiterate, can and does transform and transfigure the face into a re- semblance of itself; and I must hold it obli- gatory on us to verify the line that "Soul is forme, and doth the bodie make." The whole facts of his Life, and the entire teaching of his Works, will satisfy any one who takes the (well-spent) pains to master them, that John Howe was not the "inward friend" (his own words) merely, but a fellow- disciple with John Smith, and Dr. Henry 2 1 8 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. More, and Dr. Ralph Cudworth ; and that he deUberately and devoutly aimed at restoring in himself the lost harmony between body and soul, and to incarnate — if I may dare to appropriate the stupendously-appropriated word — his Christianity in his look and every-day life. Granted, that most of us can only follow such as John Howe with far-off footstep ; none the less is it duty and privilege to follow. Do any demur to the possibility of attainment whereby the inward " Divine calm," peace, holiness, joy, are made visible and readable I have within my personal knowledge not a few who in relatively humble spheres thus demonstrate the reality of that better and richer change than the poet's sea- change, wrought in the face by sanctity of character ; and the longer I live, and the more I observe, the profounder is my conviction that a serene, beaming, happy face is a witness for Christ and Christianity far beyond spoken words. On the other hand, I am persuaded — JOHN HOWE. 19 and I risk repetition to emphasise it — that many good ministers of the Gospel and private Christians httle know the damage they do by the expression they have suffered their face to assume, and the tone they have allowed their voice to take in speaking of religion. Do let us, at whatever cost, get rid of every- thing that can be pronounced PROFESSIONAL. I have the more readily and fully stated and illustrated this, because the ultimate serenity and "beauty of holiness," and "de- lighting in God," and "patience in expectation of future blessedness" in John Howe, were the OUTCOME OF DISCIPLINE— BODILY, INTEL- LECTUAL, MORAL, AND SPIRITUAL — OF GRACE, NOT OF NATURE, OF GRADUAL HARD-CON- TESTED CONQUEST AND ATTAINMENT, NOT OF BIRTH OR NATIVE TEMPERAMENT. This still further makes the life and character of John Howe bear a living message for us to-day ; and I must therefore dwell on it. It has been my privilege to make this good in the case of two worthies of England, 20 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. concerning whom anything of struggle or antagonism with the Spirit of God had not before been suspected. I refer to PlllNEAS Fletcher, the poet of "The Purple -Island " and " LocustjE " ; and GEORGE HERBERT, the " sweet singer " of " The Temple." As I show in their Memoirs incontestably, these ultimately meek, sweet, gentle, most meet followers — in the language of THOMAS Dekker— of Him, " The first true Gentleman that ever breathed," had many and many "spiritual conflicts" be- fore they laid down their weapons of rebellion and yielded their wills to their Divine Lord's (as He Himself in Gethsemane).* It has been my good fortune similarly to discover an incident in the early ministerial life of John Howe, that goes to establish the * Fuller Worthies' Library edition of the Poems of Phineas Fletcher, 4 vols., vol. i. ; and the same of George Herbert, and also in the Aldine edition of the Poems. « JOHX HOWE. 21 same conflict and victory in him. Seeing that neither Calamy, nor Hunt, nor Rogers, nor Dr. James Hamilton, nor Christophers, nor any of his biographers, chanced to be aware of this incident, it seems expedient to re-tell it. It turned up in a very unlikely place, to wit, in the "Diary of the Rev. Thomas Larkham, M.A., Vicar of Tavistock "* — a saintly and notable man in various ways. Turning to page twenty-three of this little book, these entries are found : — "Jan. 16 [1656], being the day of the eclipse of the sun, Mr. John Howe, minister of Great Torrington, had been to preach here at Tavistock : who most fiercely lashed at me in his sermon about the imprope-r obedience of such as were truly gracious. I wrote to him that I would make good what I had preached the next lecture day, etc. ; against which time there was great riding and sending to gather the ministers of the county together, in hope that I should have been swallowed up." "Jan. 23. — I preached upon the same text i\Ir. Howe preached on the week before ; and after sermon a conference in the parish church ; * Privately printed (50 copies) by Rev. William Lewis (1871). 22 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. and in the afternoon among the ministers in private. I acknowledge thankfully God's hand over me. We all parted lovingly at the last." The excellent editor of the ' Diary ' was unable to shed any light on these entries ; but on reading them I recalled a curious mention of the incident by Larkham in his very remarkable quarto on " The Attributes of God Unfolded and Applied " [1656], — one of the rarest of later Puritan books. Summarily — for I must not venture to give it here in full — the matter in debate was whether the Lord spoke in human though un-sinning weakness in His prayer, " If it be possible let this cup pass from Me," as Larkham maintained, or whether He so prayed of His Divine nature. The lecturer vindicates his position super-abundantly, and easily convicts Howe " and the brethren " of unripe scholarship, and of unacquaintance with the consensus of theological and phi- lological opinion. But the element of the debate with which we have now to do is its spirit on Howe's side. Larkham having JOHN HOWE. 23 thus vindicated his interpretation turns on Howe, as one of his young neighbour minis- ters — "I am bold to say young," he inter- calates, "because I had a gown on my back and Universitie degrees before he could read English long" — and in tart sharp phrase re- bukes his "ignorance and malice" in the " mightie dust " that j," in divers places " of the county he had raised, charging him with " blasphemie," and "inveigling many credulous ministers " into a belief that he had taught that " Christ at that time had not a jot of grace," which he uncompromisingly avouches was " a lewd and loud ly." He further speaks with much more of the fortiter than the siiai'iter of Howe's "unworthy carriage," and retorts on his " odd divinity " and foolish claim to be of "the mighty doctors," and his "for- ward and peremptory " presumption, instead of 'tarrying at Jericho until his beard were grown.' Then follow keen Juts at his "superabundant knowledge " (or pride rather), and pestiferous "prattle," and unworthy "wandering up and 24 REPRESENTATIVE NONCOAEORMISTS. down to reproach, and backbite, and defame, and abuse brethren and neighbours." He adds : — " I am told my neighbour will answer me if I write, etc. I had rather he would have saved me the trouble of this unpleasing task, by seeing his faultiness and acknow- ledging his errours."* The narrative from which I have fetched these " bitter words " must be read no doubt aim grano salis ; for it is plain the scholarly old Puritan was roused, and held a drastic and vehement pen. But after every deduction, we have in this incident MATTER-OF-FACT. For Thomas Larkham was a true, devout, consecrate " minister of the Gospel," with a conscience sensitive and tender as an inviolate child's ; and we have "line upon line" and testimony upon testimony to prove that he was of the most choice and chosen men of his century — a man of God who in Old England and New England alike, — for he was one of the * See Appendix B., for the full Narrative, and notice of Larkham ; also of an earlier controversy. JOHN HOWE. 25 persecuted fugitives to New England — in pros- perity and adversity, and cruel and wanton persecution for his Nonconformity — remained faithful to his Lord. I believe him, therefore, to have been incapable of the slightest devia- tion from the truth. I accredit his narrative as if on oath. Thus sanctioned, the incident is to my mind extremely significant. At first it may be it will give a shock to find such accusing and contemptuous and nevertheless righteous words spoken to and of John Howe. But the shock will be beneficial if the oc- casion of it be rightly regarded and turned to right account. Larkham was right and sound theologically, and Howe ill-informed and rash- spoken and evilly precipitate and mistaken in his zeal, I must hold ; and PROLONGED AS WAS THE "RIDING UP AND DOWN" AND ENGAGING OF OTHERS IN OPPOSITION TO Larkham, it cannot be thought of AS a spurt, but declarative of cha- racter. Consequently the incident reveals that John Howe, in what he grew to be, was 26 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. made, not born ; that he was debtor to grace ; that naturally he was imperious, "fierce," touched of pride and the meaner thing vanity, arrogant and impetuous of temper, and so was subdued, over-mastered, only by the sub- duings and over-masterings and sanctifying grace of The Spirit. For my own part, I am free to confess that just as with Bible worthies, I like this humanizing of John Howe infinitely better than the "faultless monster" of his Bio- graphers' unbroken eulogy. It is satisfying to know that Howe did not ' stand ' to his hasty and shallow fault-finding. This is evidenced by his absolute silence throughout his numerous writings on it. It is noteworthy also that he himself had to pass through a like ordeal with Larkham, when, but for the chivalrous defence of Andrew Marvell, he had been covered with obloquy in the controversy concerning God's prescience of the sins of men. How deep and controlling was the change that passed over Howe's entire temper and JOHN HOWE. 27 conduct appears by his after-calm, his large charity, his gracious thinking of the very best of his opponents, and the hard arguments in soft words of his many controversial books. I know not that in the language there is a finer example of self-mastery than his treatise- letter "written out of the country to a person of quality in the City who took offence at the late sermon of Dr. Stillingfleet, Dean of St. Paul's, before the Lord Mayor." Still- ingfleet had turned his back upon himself, and forgetful of his " Irenicum " had abused the Nonconformists with a vulgar ribaldry that might well have turned milk of human kindness to gall, and stung Howe into use of his tremendous gift of sarcasm. His every feeling was outraged; but he did not answer the fool according to his folly. It will do us good to read and re-read this ' Letter.' I must here make room for a specimen of it, as follows : — " For the qualifying of your own too great resentment and offence, I would have you consider how good 28 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. reason you have to believe that this blow came only from the (somewhat misgoverned) hand of a pious and good man. Be it far from you to imagine otherwise. If you think he was to blame for intimating suspi- cions of their sincerity whom he opposes, make not yourself equally blameable by admitting hereupon any concerning his : which would argue a mean narrow spirit, and a most unwarrantable fondness of a party, as if all true religion and godliness was bound up in it. "And if it look unlovely in your eyes to see one of so much avowed latitude and enlargedness of mind, and capable upon that account of being the more universally serviceable to the Christian Church, for- saking that comprehensive interest, so far as to be engulfed into a party upon a private and distinct basis, consider what effect the same thing would have in yourself And never make his difference with you in this matter a reason to yourself of a hard judgment concerning him ; who can, you must consider, differ no more from us than we do from him. " Believe him, in the substance of what he said, to speak according to his present judgment. Think how gradually and insensibly men's judgments alter, and are formed by their converse, that his circumstances have made it necessary to him to converse most for a long time, with those who are fully of that mind which he here discovers ; that his own real worth must have drawn into his acquaintance the best and most valuable of them, and such for whom he might not only have, a kindness, but a reverence ; and who, therefore, must JOHN HOWE. 29 have the same power and influence upon him, to con- form his sentiments to tlieir own. " We ourselves do not know, had we been by our cir- cumstances led to associate and converse mostly with men of another judgment, what our own would have been. And they that are wont to discover most confi- dence of themselves, do usually discover most ignorance of the nature of man, and how little they consider the power of external objects and inducements to draw men's minds this way or that. Nor, indeed, as to matters of this nature, can any man be confident that the grace of God shall certainly incline him to be of this or another opinion in future in these matters ; because we find those that we have reason to believe have great assistance of Divine grace are divided about them, and go not all one way." * One must go back on an old Psalm for fit words to describe conduct of controversy in this manner : — " Let the righteous smite me it shall be a kindness : and let him reprove me ; it shall be an excellent oil, which shall not break my head : for yet my prayer also shall be in their calamities " (Psalm cxli. 5). It is pleasing to learn that Stillingfleet — like Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury, Works, as before, vol. v., pp. 250-251. 30 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. later — was deeply touched with his oppo- nent's considerateness and gentleness. Except Robert Hall under the dissecting-knife of John Foster there is no such thorough exposure of the inconsequential reasoning and bHnd preju- dices and unscholarly forgetfulness of another, as Howe's ' Letter ' on Stillingfleet's unhappy Sermon. But throughout, and throughout his controversial writings, he never for a moment forgets that he is a Christian gentleman. This could not be affirmed earlier, or in relation to Larkham. I think that this revelation concerning John Howe speaks to us to-day personally, and more widely. Personally, it ought to be a priceless incentive to us that he who early "spake unadvisedly " and harshly and per- sistently of a Father in Christ, became — and, as it would seem, from the date of the incident — "meek and lowly," judicially calm and charitable. We have in the ultimate character of John Howe, through long years to a ripe old age (seventy-six years) a type, as JOHN HOWE. 31 I have named him, of INTELLECTUAL SANC- TITY. That is, we have in him a brain of no ordinary mass and power, a large, strong, forceful nature, with " holiness to the Lord " inscribed on every faculty and acquirement. I put stress on this ; and I LOOK MORE WIDELY, AS I HAVE INDICATED. For the phenomenon presented in John Howe is something very different in kind, and not mere degree, from that change in conversion that takes place in a man who has debased and polluted himself. Such a man's conversion — and I prefer the plain old word — is a lifting of him, as it were, from the Prodigal's swine- troughs, is a cleansing of flesh and spirit comparable with the most absolute cleansing that we can conceive. There is joy in heaven over one such sinner. " God forbid " that I should seek to lessen either the blessedness or the wonder or the love of it. But it is of the last importance that we keep a firm grasp of the Biblical teaching that conver- sion is a necessity of EVERY MAN. 32 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. John Howe at once confirms and ex- emplifies this. It needed that The Spirit of God should go in and down to the roots of his being ; it needed that his imperial intellect and lofty self-consciousness should be laid hold of and 'changed'; it needed that he should surrender himself to the keeping of the all- holy and hallowing One. Conversion out of fleshly dominion (" publicans and harlots") may in the first thought be more palpable and de- monstrative, more convincing of preterhuman interference ; but conversion from intellectual sovereignty to sanctity, and to humility when be- fore the ' spirit ' was haughty, vain, unsubdued, is more precious and carries profounder insignia. Hence that perspective of message for to- day that I have asserted in all this. I must affirm as against all who ignore or mock or deny the fundamental facts on which the doc- trines of the Bible rest in this matter of UNIVERSALLY-NEEDED CONVERSION, that it is alike unscientific and uncritical to so deal with the myriad-fold experience and attestation of JOHN HOWE. 33 men like John Howe. Here at least is no fanatic or (so-called) vulgar enthusiast, or raw, uneducated, untrained man. Here is a man of admittedly supreme intellectual calibre, a scholar of both Universities — as poor Robert Greene pathetically wrote himself — of ripe and rich culture, of commanding position and in- fluence, lettered and travelled, and the familiar associate of the highest in highest contemporary circles ; and he is the first to admit that what- ever he had of self-rule, of government of will and " passions " and affections, of tranquillity of heart, of serenity of conscience, of ability to live out his Christianity, he dated from that spiritual experience which is named conversion. Multiply such testimony by millions ; and does it not proclaim that Scientism to be a paradox of self-contradiction which puts out of court such facts and experience and testimony } For if one set of facts and experiences is to be held as verified and incontestable because the five senses (or some of them) attest them, why flout this other set of facts and experiences, 3 34 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. verified equally by something higher and subtler than mere sense, and illustrated by after-lives ; which after-lives are in corre- spondence with the revelation and teaching of the Bible. Human nature is a wider thinsf than your sectarian Scientist knows; and it argues to my mind a shallow philosophy that depreciates or ignores everything outside of what the ten fingers can touch. Assuming that God is, it is an inevitable corollary that He has access to these natures of ours — corporeal, mental, spiritual — that in Howe's phrase, He is " conversable with man " — and it is the wisest philosophy that accepts the facts of Christian experience freely as it accepts other facts. I do not in all this ask your Scientist, or moral or metaphysical philosopher, to become a theologian. I am quite aware that modern " science " (whatever intellectual faculties it may call into exercise) rests on its own proper basis, which is that of sense. " Science " — in our pre- sent use of the word — I know, receives nothing which does not rest ultimately on the evidence JOHN HOWE. 35 of the senses, and "knows" only the "natural." It cannot take cognizance, I remember, of the spiritual. It knows nothing qua science of the spiritual. It does not know God. It will never by all its " searching " with the most deft and delicate instruments, come upon that awful, mysterious ESSENCE. What we expect from science (with reference to the soul and this matter of "conversion") is just what we expect of a blind man in the matter of colour ; do not let a blind man deny colour, and do not let a scien- tific man deny, much less mock at, conversion because it is inappreciable by his five senses. Says the Scientist, surrounded by his retorts, and microscopes, and spectrum-analysis prisms and so forth, " I have never come upon spirit ; ergo I do not believe in spirit." We answer — " Quite so ; and you never will come on spirit." " Canst thou by searching find out God " (Job xi. 7), comes to be with your Scientist= Who can by touching, tasting, smelling, find Him out till you have exhausted all that can be done by the noblest of the senses or any scientific ex- 36 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. tension of the senses. I take my stand on the transformation that took place in John Howe. I say there is a Fact as real and actual as any in all your science ; and I must demand that such a fact be not ignored, but accepted and fairly dealt with.* I have now to notice another element of Howe's ultimate character, that seems to me of vital interest for us to-day. We have gone back on the laying of the foundation ; we have now to see how the superstructure was raised. Theoretically, perhaps all professing Christians avouch that their ' knowledge ' of Divine truth is to be reduced to practice, i.e., THAT WE are INFORMED THAT WE MAY BE TRANSFORMED. * En passant — in a mere sentence as being aside from our main inquiry— it is of the unique things in Jesus Christ that nowhere is ' conversion ' affirmed or impHed in Him. That which is the centre of the hves of His servants — e.g. Paul — is left cut in His life. This is in accord with His claims as " God manifest in the flesh," but in discord if you hold Him to be Man only. So we contrast with Paul's and others' urgent requests for the prayers of friends on their behalf, the absolute absence in Christ of any such request. JOHN HOWE. 37 But how all too many practically treat the Christ-like life as a beautiful but impossible ideal. It is to the praise of John Howe that with all his humility and lowliness, he regarded his Christianity as of worth to him only in the measure that it went to make him day by day a truer, nobler, holier, more serviceable man. No one can study either his Life or Works without feeling that he habitually lived as under the great Taskmaster's eye. He ' walked,' He 'communed' with God. His 'meditation' and ' contemplation ' were irradiated with the light of the "comprehensive and all-pervading excellence" that is in God and that God is. His visions of ' Virtue ' had the purity of Plato, but superadded the holiness of the Holy One, the One Holy. His gaze up to the face of Christ was that he might be transformed " by the Spirit of the Lord." His "delighting in God " was his highest intellectual pleasure. It was also his intensest passion to be like God," to be made a "partaker of Divine nature" (as the Bible fearlessly tells us we may : 2 Peter 38 REPRESENTA TIVE NONCONFORMISTS. I. 4). Few soared so high in speculation within Bible-laid limits. Fewer " went out and in " among his fellow-men with so penetrative a practical influence on his life of the truths he discovered and of the graces he received. All that went to his daily life, whether of bright or dark, of joy or suffering, of "good hope" or fear, brought so many summonses for expansion and maturing of his own character. He had no rest until lost instincts were restored. He compacted graces into habits. He coveted to be on this hither side what might take the impress of immortality. What we pursue in other paths he pursued steadily, systematically, prayerfully, with the one end in view of attaining that moral and spiritual beauty and sanctity which the Gospel of Jesus Christ is designed to create. Enlarged and touched with his own grandeur is his conception of the Christian life. It was a sorrow to him wherever he fell short of it. He mourned in " secret places " over any jarring note in the music that body and soul in harmonious unison ought to give out. JOHN HOWE. 39 Trebonius uncovered in the presence of his schoolboys in consideration of possibiHties : I bare my head before the actuaHtics of attain- ment, the INTELLECTUAL SANCTITY of John Howe. I would now briefly illustrate this from his Works. In his " Treatise on Delighting in God " he thus speaks of faith: — " Faith is a part of homage paid to the authority of the great God, which is to be estimated sincere according as it answers the end for whicli the things to be believed were revealed. That end is not to beget only the nature of those things, as truths that are to be lodged in the mind, and go no further, — as if they were to be under- stood true only that they might be so understood ; but that the person miglit accordingly have his spirit formed, and might shape the course of his whole conversation ; therefore is it called ' the obedience of faith ; ' and the same word which is wont to be rendered 'unbelief sig- nifies disobedience, obstinacy, unpersuadableness ; being from a theme which (as is known) signifies to persuade. So that this homage is then truly given to the eternal (}od, when His revelation is complied with and submitted to, according to the true intent and purpose of it ; which that it may be, requires that His Spirit urge the soul with His authority, and overpowers it into an awful subjection thereto ; the soul being so disjointed by the apostasy, that its own faculties keep not (in reference to the things of 40 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. God) their natural order to one another, further than as a holy rectitude is renewed in them by the Holy Ghost. Therefore is it necessary that the enlightening communi- cation which He transmits into it be not only so clear as to scatter the darkness that beclouded the mind, but so penetrating as to strike and pierce the heart, to dissolve and relax its stiff and frozen organs, and render it capable of a new mould and frame. In order whereto, ' God, Who,' at first, ' commanded the light to shine out of dark- ness,' is said to have 'shined into the hearts ' of them He renews, ' to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ' (2 Cor. iv. 6)."* Again : in discussing the " revolving in one's own mind the notions that belong to religion, without either the experience or the design and expectation of having the heart and conversa- tion formed according to them," he thus vividly warns such : — " The more any one doth only notionally know in the matters of religion, so as that the temper of his spirit remains altogether unsuitable and opposite to the design and tendency of the things known, the more he hath lying ready to come in judgment against him ; and if, therefore, he count the thing excellent which he knows, and only please himself with his own knowledge of them, it is but like case as if a man should be much delighted * Works, as before, vol. ii., pp. 27-8. JOHN HOWE. 41 to behold his own condemnation written in a fair and beautiful hand ; or, as if he should be pleased with the glittering of that sword which is directed against his own head, and must be the present instrument of death to him : and so little pleasant is the case of such a person in itselt, who thus satisfies his own curiosity with the concernments of eternal life and death, that any serious person would tremble on his behalf, at that wherein he takes pleasure, and apprehend just horror in that state of the case where he draws matter of delight."* Once more : in the " Living Temple " he is discussing imagined 'manifestations' of God in order to convince the gainsayers, and shewing that they would lead to " a constant and com- fortless restraint from any free and ingenuous access to God or conversation with Him — wherein the very life of religion consists," and he thus proceeds : — "And then, to what purpose doth the discovery and acknowledgment of the Deity serve ? insomuch as it is never to be thought that the existence of God is a thing to be known only that it may be known : but that the end it serves for is religion — a complacential and cheerful adoration of Him, and application of ourselves, with at once both dutiful and pleasant affections towards Him."t * Ibid., p. 125. t Ibid., vol. iii., p. 152. 42 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. Of ' Meditation ' he thus writes : — " Solemnly set yourselves at chosen times to think on God. Meditation is of itself a distinct duty, and must have a considerable time allowed it among the other exercises of the Christian life. It challenges a just share and part in the time of our lives ; and He in whom we are to place our delight is, you know, the prime and chief object of this holy work. Is it reasonable, that He who is our life and our all should never be thought on, but now and then, as it were by chance and on the bye ? ' My meditation of Him shall be sweet.' Doth not that imply that it was with the Psalmist a designed thing to meditate on God, — that it was a stated course.-' Whereas it was become customary and usual to him, by ordinary practice, to appoint times for meditating on God, his well-known exercise (which is supposed), he promises himself satis- faction and solace of soul therein. Let your eyes herein, therefore, ' prevent the night-watches.' Reckon you have neglected one of the most important businesses of the day if you have omitted this, and that to such omissions you owe your little delight in God. Wherein, therefore, are you to repay yourselves, but by redeeming this great neglect ?"* Deeper still is his ever-recurring ' mag- nifying' of the rapture of intellectual-spiritual thought of God and with God, and his fore- Ibid., vol. ii., p. 227. JOHN HOWE. 43 feeling of intuition. I can but now glean a few scattered sentences on this — e.g. of the " Act of vision or intuition itself." " How great the pleasure will be that accrues to the beloved from the sight of God's face is very much to be estimated from the nature of the act, as well as the excellency of the object. Inasmuch as every vital act is pleasant, the most perfect act of the noblest faculty of the soul must needs be attended with highest pleasure. It is a pleasure that most nearly imitates Divine PLEASURE. And everything is more perfect, AS IT MORE nearly APPROACHES DiVINE PERFECTIONS."* Then he characteristically ascends to the very "third heaven," and expatiates as though already "out of the body," on intuitional as distinguished from ratiocinative knowledge : — " Here is no need of a busy search, a tiresome inda- gation, — the difficulty whereof makes the more slothful rather trust than try — a chaining together of consequences. The soul hath its clothing, its vestment of light, upon as cheap terms as the lilies theirs ; doth ' neither toil nor spin ' for it ; and yet Solomon, * in all the glory ' of his famed wisdom, was not arrayed like it. This knowledge saves the expense of study ; is instantaneous, not succes- * Ibid., vol. i., p. 93. 44 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. sive. The soul now sees more, at one view, in a moment, than before in a hfetime ; as a man hath a speedier and more grateful prospect of a pleasant country, by placing himself in some commodious station that commands the whole region, than by travelling through it. It is no pains to look upon what offers itself to my eye. Where there is a continued series of consequences, that be naturally connected, the soul pleasingly observes the con- tinuity ; but views the whole length of the line at once (so far as its limited capacity can extend), and needs not discuss every particle severally in this series of truths, and proceed gradatim from the knowledge of one truth to another ; in which case only one at once would be present to its view. It sees things that are connected, not because they are so : as a man conveniently placed in some eminent station, may possibly see, at one view, all the successive parts of a gliding stream : but he that sits by the water's side, not changing his place, sees the same parts, only because they succeed ; and those that pass make way for them that follow, to come under his eye."* Again : " Now, when the grace ot God super- venes, [it] doth exalt and sublimate nature." f And deeper: — "Surely it is of equal necessity to the soul's blessedness, to partake the glory of God, as to behold it ; as well to have the Divine * Ibid.., pp. 95-6. t Ibid., Funeral Sermon for Bates, vol. vi. JOHN HOWE. 45 likeness impressed upon it, as represented to it."* Then searchingly and culminatingly- - " It [the soul] must therefore be ' all glorious within,' have the Divine nature more perfectly communicated, the likeness of God transfused and wrought into it. This is the blessed work begun in regeneration ; but how far it is from being perfected, we may soon find by considering how far short we are of being satisfied in our present state> even in the contemplation of the highest and most excel- lent objects. How tasteless to our souls are the thoughts of God ! How little pleasure do we take in viewing over His glorious attributes, the most acknowledged and ador- able excellences of His being ! And whereunto can we impute it but to this, that our spirits are not yet sufficiently con-naturalized to them Their likeness is not enough deeply enstamped on our souls. Nor will this be ' till we awake ; ' when we see better we shall become better : ' when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.' But do we indeed pretend to such an expectation ? Can we think what God is, and what we are in our present state, and not confess these words to carry with them an amazing sound, *we shall be like Him ' ? How great a hope is this ! How strange an errand hath the Gospel into the world ! How admirable a design — to transform men and make them like God ! Were the dust of the earth turned into stars in the firmament, were the most stupendous poetical trans- formations assured realities, what could equal the *■ Ibid., vol. i., p. 6i. 46 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. greatness and the wonder of this mighty change ? Yea, and doth not the expectation of it seem as presumptuous as the issue itself would be strange ? Is it not an over- bold desire? too daring a thought? a thing unlawful to be affected, as it seems to be attained. ... It is a matter therefore that requires some disquisition and explication."* Across well-nigh two hundred years I would have John Howe's INTELLECTUAL SANCTITY * Ibid., vol. i., p. 62. With all this aspiration and anticipative joy Howe held in highest honour ratioci- nation. Thus he says : " To the altogether unlearned it will hardly be conceivable, and to the learned it need not be told, how high a gratification this employment of his reason naturally yields to the mind of a man ; when the harmonious contexture of truths with truths, the apt coincidence, the secret links and junctures of coherent notions are clearly discerned ; when effects are traced up to their causes ; properties lodged in their native subjects ; things sifted to their principles. What a pleasure is it, when a man shall apprehend himself regularly led on, though but by a slender thread of dis- course, through the labyrinths of nature ; when still new discoveries are successfully made, every further enquiry ending in a further prospect, and every new scene of things entertaining the mind with a fresh delight ! " — Ibid., p. 94. JOHN HOWE. 47 stir us : I would have his holy indignation with mere " notional knowledge " and orthodoxy of creed apart from the Divine life, be as a fire in our bones to startle us into a recognition that mere ' knowledge ' severed from being, mere scholarliness, mere culture, will not suffice be- neath the eyes of fire. I would have us emulate his strenuous as robust sequestering of himself daily for thought and meditation, not mere book-reading ; I would have us breathe this ampler air and ascend to those serener regions of principles and to God Himself ; above all, I would press upon all who preach, or who teach others, to seek a deepening sense of their own personal need of what is preached and taught ; a sense of need like hunger for our necessary food (Job xxiii. 12), and of humiliation and sorrow in so far as we find ourselves failing to work into the substance of our ordinary lives the knowledge we have attained and the insight that has been given, and sadness of heart that only fitfully there comes on us the joy, the delight — a joy with something of 48 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. passion in it ("My soul breaketh for the longing which it hath unto Thy judgments at all times " :) in the word which we preach and teach that once we had. We sing, " Oh for a closer walk with God." Let us get that. We pray, "Make us like unto Thyself." Let us wrestle for that. We are summoned to " adorn " the doctrine. We are charged to "commend" Christ. I shall not have recalled the beautiful ex- emplar of John Howe in vain, if but readers here and there, lay it to heart and seek to REPRODUCE THEIR CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE IN THEIR DAILY LIVES. Faith, belief may be extremely orthodox or sound ; but if it do not ennoble, purify, sanctify, as St. James says, " Can that faith save him } " Our religion must compact itself into habits, and not dis- perse itself in mere impulses and sporadic emotion; must replace in the soul its primary instincts, whereby it becomes as natural to hate sin as to shrink from pain ; must, to be true and worthy, bring us into daily, hourly, JOHN HOWE. continuous communion with God ; must, in short, become ' Habitual Godliness.' I feel constrained to add here, that in the CHARACTER which John Howe by self-disci- pline and the grace of God exhibited before the world, — consistent not merely with itself, but with the great Law of Life, — must be sought the secret of his power in the pulpit. I am growingly convinced that — with CHARACTER i.e., with a consistent life to back it — a minister's preaching is his power. There is in our day a great deal of talkee-talkee in useless (so-called) visitation, and 'nice' funny platform speeches devout ^havering'' (to use a Scotch expressive word), etc., etc. I wish to lead back thought to the POWER of one who like John Howe stands up in his pulpit and tells out what he has meditated and prayed over, and when he speaks what he knows and testifies what he has seen. It is treason to truth and the God of truth for a moment to stand in doubt of the power, undecaying and unspent, of such preaching. 4 so REPRESENTATIVE AONCONEORMISTS. Passing now onward, I would notice another specific characteristic of Howe that appears to me of surpassing value for us to-day. I refer to his HABITUAL REVERENCE. I think of him always as reproducing later that immortal portrait — more grandly taken than any even in Clarendon — by Milton of President Brad- shaw in his " Second Defence of the People of England." I turn to it and read a por- tion : — " At last, when he was entreated by the Pariiament to preside on the trial of the King, he did not refuse the dangerous office. To a profound knowledge of the Law, he added the most comprehensive views, the most generous sentiments, manners the most obliging and the most pure. Hence he discharged that office with a propriety almost without a parallel ; he inspired both respect and awe ; and, though menaced by the daggers of so many assas- sins, he conducted himself with so much consistency and gravity, witli so much presence of mind and so much dignity of demeanour, that he seems to have been pur- posely destined by Providence for that part which he so nobly acted on the theatre of the world. And his glory is as much exalted above that of all other tyrannicides, as it is both more humane, more just, and more strik- ingly grand, judicially to condemn a tyrant, than to put him to death without a trial. In other respects there JOHN HOWE. 51 was no forbidding austerity, no moroseness in his man- ner ; he was courteous and benign ; but the good character which he then sustained, he with perfect con- sistency still sustains, SO THAT YOU WOULD SUPPOSE THAT NOT ONLY THKN, BUT IN EVERY FUTURE PERIOD OK HIS LIFE, HE WAS SITTING IN JUDGMENT UPON THE King." The entire facts of Howe's life, and the entire tone (so to say) of his writings, impress the Reader with his never-ceasing sense of the Divine Presence, and of the awe and reverence due to Him in discussing anything appertaining to His Being, Nature, Word, or Works. His extraordinary treatise (for it is a treatise and facile princeps before all others) on the Trinity, and that on " The Reason- ableness of God's Prescience of the Sins of Men with the Wisdom and Sincerity of His Counsels, Exhortations, and whatsoever other means He uses to prevent them," demonstrate that his intellect qjia intellect was of the highest order, and that it was congenial to him to ' intermeddle ' with at once the most exalted and the deepest and most 52 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. abstract problems. They show that he had metaphysical affinities and aptitudes of an almost unique type. He inevitably soars to the h.\g\i-est region of principles ; but it is not merely to " consider " (his favourite word), but to worship. The darkness from excess of light is sacred, venerable to him ; for he knows The Presence behind it. He equally descends into the deepest depths ; but his plummets are the " written Word " and his own many-sided consciousness. In height or depth he remembers before Whom he is. Hence to him a wayside flower or an insect partakes of its Creator's awfulness. I think that in this John Howe's character and Works bring AN URGENT MESSAGE FOR TO-DAY ; a message that it were good if our Scientists laid to heart. Here is an example of how he addressed such, and nothing could be more prescient for present-day use. He is confuting the "over-bold and adventurous in- truders into the deep and most profound arcana of the Divine nature," more especially that JOHN HOWE. 53 baseless " simplicity " ascribed to God's nature whereby " Trinity " is pronounced unscientific, unphilosophical, and impossible. He has all respect for genuine " observing " and lowly- minded " science and philosophy," but a fine scorn for hasty, evil-tongued, presumptuous dogmatists, be their names however famous and their authority within certain lines, how- ever weighty. And so he writes thus : — " It would be an over-officious and too meanly servile religiousness, to be awed by the sophistry of presump- tuous scholastic wits into a subscription to their con fident determinations concerning the being of God ; that such and such things are necessary or impossible thereto, beyond what the plain undisguised reason of things or His own express Word do evince. To imagine a sacredness in their rash conclusions, so as to be afraid of searching into them or of examining whether they have any firm and solid ground or bottom ; to allow the Schools the making of our Bible or the forming of our Creed, WHO LICENCE AND EVEN SPORT THEMSELVES TO PHILOSOPHIZE UPON THE NATURE OF God WITH AS petulant and irreverent a LIBERTY AS THEY WOULD UPON A WORM OR ANY OF THE MEANEST INSECTS, — while yet they can pronounce little with certainty even concerning that, — hath nothing in it either of the Christian or the man. It will become 54 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. as well as concern us, to disencumber our minds, and release them from the entanglements of these unproved dictates, whatsoever authority they may have acquired only by having been long and commonly taken for granted. The more reverence we have of God, the less we are to have for such men as have themselves ex- pressed little."* Further : — "I only wish these things might be considered and discussed with less confidence and peremptory deter- mination ; WITH A GREATER AWE OF WHAT IS DiVINE AND SACRED ; and that we may more confine ourselves to the plain word of Scripture on this matter, and be content therewith. I generally blame it on the Soci- nians, who appear otherwise rational and considering men, that they seemed to have formed their belief of tilings not possible to be known but by the Scriptures, without them ; and then think they are, by all im- aginable arts and they care not what violence (as Socinus himself hath in effect confessed), to mould and form them according to their preconceived sense. Com- mon modesty and civility, we would have thought, should have made Schlictingius abstain from prefacing and continuing that as a running title to a long chapter : Articnlus Evangelicortim de Trinitatc cunt sensn coni- viuni piignat ; engrossing common sense to himself and his party, and reproaching the generality of Christians, as not understanding common sense ! They should * Ibid., vol. v., pp. 83-4. JOHN HOWE. 55 take upon them less, and not vaunt, as if they were the men, and wisdom must die with them."* More specifically : — " I bcHeve few would have thought [this author] to see the less clearly, if he had been content to see for himself, not for mankind ; and if he had not talked at that rate as if he carried the eyes of all the world in his pocket, they would have been less apt to think he carried his own there. Nor had his performance, in this writing of his, lost anything of real value, if in a discourse upon so grave a subject [as the Trinity of the Godhead] some Icpiditics had been left out, as that of Diilcinca del Toboso, etc." f Finally here, with passionate emotion : — " I judge human, and even all created, minds very incompetent judges of the Divine simplicity. We know not what the Divine nature may include consistently with its own perfection, nor what it must, as necessary thereto. Our eye is no judge of corporeal simplicity. In darkness it discerns nothing but simplicity, without distinction of things : in now dusky light the whole horizon appears most simple, and everywhere like itself : in lighter light we perceive great varieties, and much greater if a microscope assist our eye. But of all the aerial people that replenish the region (except rare ap- * Ibid., vol. v., p. 112. '\ Ibid., pp. 112, 113. 56 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. pearances to very few), we see none. Here want not objects, but a finer eye. It is much at this rate with our minds on beholding the spiritual sphere of beings, most of all the uncreated, which is remotest and farthest above out of our sight. We behold simplicity : and what do we make of that ? vast undistinguishable vacuity ; sad, immense solitude : only this at first view ! If we draw nearer and fix our eye, we think we appre- hend somewhat, but dubiously hallucinate ; as the self- cured blind man did, when he thought he saw men like trees. But if a voice which we acknowledge Divine, speak to us out of the profound abyss, and tell us of grateful varieties and distinctions in it ; good God ! shall we not believe it ? or shall we say we clearly see that or not, which only wc do not see This seems like omewhat worse than blindness ! " * Surely I do not err in pronouncing all this as vital for us to-day I re-address them to the Scientists of our time. Their awelessness, their utter lack of recognition of reverence as a factor of human nature, their glib and flip- pant talk with no slightest touch of wonder, no sense of mystery, no suspicion of limits and boundaries to human capacity, no concession of possibilities and realities that you cannot * Ibid., p. 1 20. JOHN HOWE. 57 pronounce on through the five senses, no word of veneration for the Book that as a mere book stands in the van of all literatures, no trust of universal Christian experience and testimony, — is a pain to those of us who welcome all genuine, patient, non-generalizing observation, as holding it sure that Christianity and the Bible have nothing to fear from anything that can be shown /f de. That it is suffices to make us accept it and wait. Apart altogether from dogmatic beliefs, it is to impoverish human nature to rob it of reve- rence ; it is to vulgarize it to fashion it into that awelessness that walks and smirks and chatters in a cathedral as in the common street ; it is worse than Wordsworth's " botanizing on a mother's grave :" for your Agnostic, having killed God, has not a tear or pang for so stupendous a tragedy as ' God dead,' and botanizes on His awful grave. Indeed I fancy that he goes a stage beyond the * botanizing,' and puts the dead God's crown on his own slant- browed head, and sits down as if it were the most 58 REPRESEiYTA TIVE NONCONFORMISTS. natural thing in the world, on his vacant throne. But need I guard myself by saying that it is not Science (in its true sense) that is atheistic — only " The Fool " ? The Laureate's demand needs to sink into the national heart : — " Let knowledge grow from more to more, But MORE OF REVERENCE in US dwell ; That mind and soul, according well. May make one music as before." — In Meinoriam : Introduction. I venture to say that such scientific observa- tion of the habits of animals, birds, insects, and flowers as that of Dr. Charles Darwin — slowly and with long patience and beautiful modesty carried on through a lifetime, and tentatively put on record — is priceless to me. I do not pronounce on his theory of Evolution ; but I can pronounce on the wealth of inesti- mable data being accumulated by him, and on his spirit. I nowhere meet in his books the mock, the scoft'", the sneer, the shallow gibes on Christianity of Tyndall and, though not so flagrantly and with neutralizing admissions, JOHN HOWE. 59 HuxleJ^ It is an outrage on MANKIND to so jeer and ridicule what has gone to build up the wisest, truest, noblest, holiest men and women of our race, and achieved such results through The Book as makes this nineteenth century the magnificent heritage it is. The humility, the modesty, the reverence, the awe, the sense of being ever in the shadow of God, present all through Howe's Life and Works, I should like to find in present-day controversies, whether religious or scientific. We theologians and Christians have been imperiously warned off scientific ground. We refuse; for we, too, as men of education and culture, have the apparatus and the " five senses " with which Scientists work : while Scientists qua Scientists — i.e., in so far as they are non-Christian — have not our apparatus and our — as we believe — divinely restored nature and access to God. It is about time that there were rectification of frontier ("a scientific frontier") far nearer and in far more momentous regions than Afghanistan — a rectification that shall shut the Scientist's 6o REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. mouth on what he does not know, and write folly and sectarianism on that "science" that limits evidence to sense, and turns metaphysic and all philosophy into physiology — anatomizing a gut-string in search of Mozart's Requiem in it — and that pursues investigation with aweless and reverenceless dogmatism. That John Howe, while thus filled with awe and reverence for all awful and reverend, had no narrow conception of the sphere within which it is right and lawful to THINK and even speculate, all his Works attest. With him not Ignorance, but ripest Knowledge is the mother of devotion. This is a fifth pre- sent-day TRUTH. Let one great passage in "The Living Temple" establish this: — "But though it would be both an ungrateful and in- significant labour, and as talking to the wind, to discourse of religion with persons that have abjured all seriousness and that cannot endure to think ; and would be like fighting with a storm, to contend against the blasphemy and outrage of insolent mockers of whatever is sacred and divine ; and were too much a debasing of religion to retort sarcasms with men not capable of being talked with in any other than such (that is, their own) language : JOHN HOWE. 61 yet it wants neither its use nor pleasure to the most composed minds, and that are most exempt from waver- ing herein, to view the frame of their religion, as it aptly and even naturally rises and grows up from its very foundations ; to contemplate its first principles, which they may in the meantime find no present cause or inclination to dispute. They will know how to con- sider its most fundamental grounds, not with doubt 01 suspicion, but with admiration and delight ; and can, with a calm and silent pleasure, enjoy the repose and rest of a quiet and well-assured mind, — rejoicing and contented to know to themselves, when others refuse to partake with them in this joy, — and feel all firm and stable under them whereupon either the practice or the hopes of their religion do depend. "And there may be also many others, of good and pious inclinations, that have never yet applied themselves to consider the principal and most fundamental grounds of religion, so as to be able to give or discern any tolerable reason of them. For either the sluggishness of their own temper may have indisposed them to any more painful and laborious exercise of their minds, and made them to be content with the easier course of taking everything upon trust and imitating the example of others; or they have been unhappily misinformed that it con- sists not with the reverence due to religion, to search into the grounds of it : yea, and may have laid this for one of its main grounds, that no exercise of reason may have any place about it : or perhaps, having never tried, they apprehend a greater difficulty in coming to a clear and certain resolution herein than indeed there is. Now 62 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. such need to be excited to set their own thoughts a- work this way, and to be assisted herein. They should therefore consider who gave them the understandings which they fear to use ? and can they use them to better purpose or with more gratitude to Him who made them intelligent, and not brute creatures, than in labour- ing to know, that they may also by a reasonable service, worship and adore their Maker ? Are they not to use their very senses about the matters of religion ? ' For the invisible things of God, even His eternal power and Godhead, are clearly seen,' etc. And their faith comes by hearing. But what? Are these more sacred and divine, and more akin to religion, than their reason and judgment, without which also their sense can be of no use to them herein ? Or is it the best way of making use of what God has revealed of Himself by whatsoever means, not to nitderstand what He hath revealed? It is most true indeed, that when we once come clearly to be informed that God hath revealed this or that thing, we are then readily to subject (and not oppose) our feeble reasonings to His plain revela- tion ; and it were a most insolent and uncreaturely arrogance, to contend or not yield Him the cause, though things have to us seemed otherwise. But it were as inexcusable negligence not to make use of our understandings to the best advantage ; that we may both know that such a revelation is Divine, and what it signifies after we know whence it is. And any one that considers, will soon see it were very unseasonable, at least, to allege the written Divine re- velation as the ground of his religion, till he have JOHN HOWE. 63 gone lower, and foreknown some things (by-and-by to be insisted on) as preparatory and fundamental to the knowledge of this.'' * Let us not be afraid then to THINK and KNOW everything thinkable and knowable. Another present-day truth and duty is Howe's WISTFUL AND IMPORTUNATE PLEADING WITH MEN THAT THEY SHALL SO BE AND DO THAT THE WORLD SHALL BE COMPELLED TO PAY HOMAGE TO CHRISTIANITY. For combined elo- quence and weight of thought, clear-cut reasoning and insight, there are few continuous passages so memorable as his rebuke of Atheists on the one hand, and appeal, on the other, to Christians to be nobly Christian. I dare not withhold it, though it be long : — " To these, the discussion of the notion we have pro- posed to consider, will be thought a beating the air, an endeavour to give consistency to a shadow ; and if their reason and power could as well serve their purpose as their anger and scorn, they would soon tear up the holy ground on which a temple is set, and wholly subvert the sacred frame. * Ibid., vol. iii., pp. 25-7. 64 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. " I speak of such as deny the existence of the ever blessed Deity, or (if they are not arrived to that express and formed misbelief) whose hearts are inclined and ready to determine, even against their misgiving and more suspicious minds, ' there is no God ; ' who, if they cannot as yet believe, do wish there were none ; and so strongly, as in a great degree to prepare them for that belief : that would fain banish Him, not only out of all their thoughts, but the world too ; and to whom it is so far from being a grateful sound, that ' the tabernacle of God is with men on earth,' that they grudge to allow Him a place in heaven; at least, if they are willing to admit the existence of any God at all, do say to Him, ' Depart from us ; ' and would have Him so confined to heaven, that He and they may have nothing to do with one another ; and do therefore rack their impious wits to serve their hypothesis either way ; that under its protection they may securely indulge themselves in a course, upon which they find the appre- hension of a God interesting Himself in human affairs would have a very unfavourable and threatening aspect. " They are therefore constrained to take great pains with themselves, to discipline and chastise their minds and understandings to that tameness and patience, as contentedly to suffer the razing out of their most natural impressions and sentiments. And they reckon they have arrived to a very heroical perfection, when they can pass a scoff upon anything that carries the least signification with it of the fear of God ; and can be able to laugh at the weak and squeamish folly of those softer and effeminate minds, that will trouble themselves with any thoughts or cares how to please and propitiate a Deity : and doubt JOHN HOWE. 6S not but they have made all safe, and effectually done their business, when they have learned to put the ignominious titles of frenzy and folly upon devotion, in whatsoever dress or garb ; to cry ' canting ' to any serious mention of the name of God, and break a bold, adventurous jest upon any of the most sacred mysteries or decent and awful solemnities of religion. "These content not themselves to encounter this or that sect, but mankind ; and reckon it too mean and inglorious an achievement to overturn one sort of temple or another ; but would ' down with them ' all, even ' to the ground.' " And they are in the reason and justice to pardon the emulation which they provoke, of vieing with them as to the universality of their design ; and not regret it, if they find there be any that think it their duty to waive awhile serving the temple of this or that party, as less consider- able, to defend that one wherein all men have a common interest and concernment : since matters are brought to that exigency and hazard, that it seems less necessary to contend about this or that mode of religion, as whether there ought to be any at all. " What was said of a former age, could never better agree to any than our own, ' that none was ever more fruitful of religions, and barren of religion or true piety.' It concerns us to consider, whether the fertility of those many doth not as well cause, as accompany, a barrenness in this one. And, — since the iniquity of the world hath made that too suitable, which were otherwise unseemly in itself, to speak of a temple as a fortified place, whose own sacredness ought ever to ha^■e been its sufficient fortifica- 5 66 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. tion, — it is time to be aware, lest our forgetful heat and zeal in the defence of this or that outwork, do expose (not to say betray) the main fortress to assault and danger : whilst it hath long been, by this means, a neg- lected, forsaken thing, and is more decayed by vacancy and disuse than it could ever have been by the most forcible battery, so as even to promise the rude assailant an easy victory. Who fears to insult over an empty, dispirited, dead religion ? which, alive, and shining in its native glory (as that temple doth, which is compacted of lively stones 'united to the ' living corner stone'), bears with it a magnificence and state that would check a profane look, and dazzle the presumptuous eye that durst venture to glance at it obliquely or with disrespect. The temple of the living God, manifestly animated by its vital presence, would not only dismay opposition, but command venera- tion also, and be its own both ornament and defence. Nor can it be destitute of that presence, if we ourselves render it not inhospitable, and make not its proper in- habitant become a stranger at home. If we preserve in ourselves a capacity of the Divine presence, and keep the temple of God in a posture fit to receive Him, He would then no more forsake it than the soul a sound and healthy body, not violated in any vital parts ; but if he forsakes it once, it then becomes an exposed and despised thing. And as the most impotent, inconsiderable enemy can securely trample on the dead body of the greatest hero> that alive carried awfulness and terror in his looks ; so is the weak-spirited atheist become as bold now, as he was willing before, to make rude attempts upon the temple of JOHN HOWE. 67 God, when He hath been provoked to leave it, who is its life, strength, and glory." Parallel with this is another equally noble passage, and the counsel in which in many instances it should be our wisdom to follow, rather than be timorously and feverishly trou- bled and combative over every new assault of the " Higher Criticism " (so-called). I must also give it : — " How highly shall he oblige them, that can furnish out a libel against religion ; and help them, with more artificial spite, to blaspheme what they cannot disprove ! And now shall the scurrilous pasquil and a few bottles work a more effectual confutation of religion, than all the reason and argument in the world shall be able to coun- tervail ! This proves too often the unhappy issue of misapplying what is most excellent, in its own kind and place, to improper and uncapable subjects. " And who sees not this to be the case with the modern atheist, who hath been pursued with that strength and vigour of argument, even in our own days, that would have baffled persons of any other temper than their own, into shame and silence ; and so as no other support hath been left to irreligion than a senseless stupidity, an obsti- nate resolvedness not to consider, a faculty to stifle an * Ibid., vol. iii., p. 18-20. 68 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. argument with a jest, to charm their reason by sensual softnesses into a dead sleep, with a strict and circumspect care that it may never awake into any exercise above the condition of dozed and half-witted persons ; or, if it do, by the next debauch, presently to lay it fast again ! So that the very principle fails in this sort of men, where in reasoning we should appeal and apply ourselves ; and it were almost the same thing to offer arguments to the senseless images or forsaken carcases of men. It belongs to the grandeur of religion to neglect the impotent assaults of these men, as it is a piece of glory, and bespeaks a worthy person's right understanding and just value of himself, to disdain the combat with an incompetent or a foiled enemy. It is becoming and seemly that the grand, ancient, and received truth, which tends to and is the reason of the godly life, do sometimes keep state, and no more descend to perpetual janglings with every scurrilous and impertinent trifler, than a great and re- doubted prince would think it fit to dispute the rights of his crown with a drunken, distracted fool or a madman. "Men of atheistical persuasions, having abandoned their reason, need what will more powerfully strike their sense, — storms and whirlwinds, flames and thunderbolts, things not so apt immediately to work upon their understanding as their fear, and that will astonish that they may con- vince : that the great God make himself ' known by the judgments which He executes.' ' Stripes are for the backs of fools,' as they are justly styled that say in ' their hearts. There is no God.' But if it may be hoped any gentler method may prove effectual with any of them, we are rather to expect the good effect from the steady, JOHN HOWE. 69 uniform course of their actions and conversation, who profess reverence and devotedness to an Eternal Being, and the correspondence of their way to their avowed principle, — that acts on them agreeably to itself, and may also incur the sense of the beholder, and gradually invite and draw his observation, — than from the most severe and necessitating argumentation that exacts a sudden assent. " At least in a matter of so clear and commanding evidence, reasoning many times looks like trifling ; and out of a hearty concernedness and jealousy for the honour of religion, one would rather it should march on with an hcroical neglect of bold and malapert cavillers, and only demonstrate and recommend itself by its own vigorous, comely, coherent course, than make itself cheap by dis- cussing at every turn its principles : as that philosopher, who thought it the fittest way to confute the sophisms against motion only by walking. " But we have nothing so considerably objected against practical religion, as well to deserve the name of a sophism (at least no sophism so perplexing in the case of religious as of natural motion) ; jeers and sarcasms are the most weighty convincing arguments. And let the deplorate crew mock on. There are those in the world that will think they have, however, reason enough to persist in the way of godliness ; and that have already laid the foun- dation of that reverence which they bear to a Deity, more strongly than to be shaken and beaten off from it by a jest." * Ibid., vol. iii., pp. 21-23. 70 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. As the co-relative of his conception of God, John Howe had an exalted conception of man. This is A SEVENTH PRESENT-DAY TRUTH. His discussion of the Trinity and all his cognate discussions of the Being and Attri- butes and Providence of God, rest on a two- fold solid basis of fact — viz., what he discerns in himself as he is a man, and what he finds himself as he is a Christian. He is fearless in arguing from what man is (being a Christian) to what God is : from how man (being a Christian) wills, chooses, does, to what God wills, chooses, does. He never forgets for a moment that by God's own Word this is among the certainties that man WAS made "in the image of God." I emphasize ' was : ' for the problem is not ' Given man as he is — the old Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, and the modern English- man, Frenchman, Hindoo, Turk, etc. — required to find what God is;' but 'Given man as he is as a Christian or restored to what he was, argue to what God is.' Man as he is JOHN HOWE. 71 is not = man as he was. That tremendous factor Sin — a fact of universal human nature, not of Christianity merely — has come into disastrous operation throughout the whole realm of man's being. Ere therefore we can legitimately argue up to God we must take into account the change that has been wrought in the creature's being. Man as he is is not the answer to the question, WJiat is MAN ? Man as he is is man fallen, disordered and defiled, not in his "natural state" but in a state utterly ' un-natural,' ' de-natural.' In man as he is we find untruth, unrighteous- ness, selfishness, fear, remorse, the deepest and most perplexing contradictions and anta- gonisms. Here is Howe's putting of man- kind's " universal revolt and apostasy from God " :— " Every man's own reflection upon the vitiated powers of his own soul would soon, as to himself, put the matter out of doubt; whence each one's testimony concerning his own case would amount to a universal testimony. No man that takes a view of his own dark and blinded mind, his slow and dull apprehension, his uncertain, 72 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. staggering judgment, roving conjectures, feeble and mis- taken reasonings about matters that concern him most ; ill inclinations, propension to what is unlawful to him and destructive, aversion to his truest interest and best good, irresolution, drowsy sloth, exorbitant and ravenous appe- tites and desires, impotent and self-vexing passions, — can think human nature, in Jiiin, is in its primitive integrity, and so pure as when it first issued from its high and most pure Original."* Yet, rightly dealt with, this so strangely disordered being yields us knowledge con- cerning God. An organ tells about the man who devised it. Even though, having been injured by bad usage, it sends out most discordant sounds, and instead of playing out a consistent piece of music, gives forth only wild shrieks and screeches, along with tones that go to our soul — we can infer much about the contriver. And if we had knowledge that the instrument is not as it was when it came from the maker's hand, but has been spoiled, we would be able to tell more about the inventor still. So precisely with man as Ibid., vol. iii., pp. 290-91. JOHN HOWE. 73 he is. We do not take the ' is ' of man and argue direct to the ' is ' of God. We dare not treat man as if he were now " the image of the invisible God," but the image marred and in some cases scarcely recognisable. Yet is there a great deal more told of God through even fallen man than timorous theologians and preachers recognize. Two great sayings — one from the Old Testament and the other from the New Testament — occur to me : Psalm ciii. 13, "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him." There human pity is the manner and argu- ment of Divine pity. St. Matthew vii. 1 1 : "If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him." We have here the explicit recognition of man's " evil " ; and yet evil though he be, he shews us some- thing of God, only with a "How much more" that no mind can estimate. I fear that in their dread of un-orthodoxy, in their quiver- 74 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. ing alarm at any whisper of heresy, all the churches are faulty in refusing the help reached out by this so great fact that man was made "in the image of God," and its blessed counterpart that a Christian man is re-made in the same image — as Paul puts it (Eph. iv. 24), " which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." Howe exults in this Divine and gracious restoration, and is never weary in working up and up from what man is by the " new birth " to what God is, and from what God is to what man is destined to be. Worthy to be written in letters of gold is this Paschal-like summary in " The Vanity of Man as Mortal " :— " The truest notion we can yet have of the primi- tive nature and capacity of man, is by beholding it in its gradual restitution." More full, and yet condensed in its thinking, is his argumentative statement of the " image of God " in " The Blessedness of the Righteous," as thus: — "There are some things to be found in the blessed God, not so incommunicable and appropriate, but that His JOHN HOWE. 75 creatures may be said to have some participation thereof with Him, and so far, to be truly like Him. This parti- cipation cannot be univocal; as the nature of a living creature in general is equal in men and brutes: so it is a self-evident principle, that nothing can be common to God and an inferior being. Nor is it only an equivocal, —a participation of the same name, when the natures signified thereby are altogether diverse ; but analogical, inasmuch as the things spoken, under the same names, of God and the creature, have a real likeness and con- veniency in nature with one another : and they are in God, primarily; in the creature, by dependence and deri- vation: in Him, essentially, as being His very essence; in them, but as accidents (many of them) adventitious to their beings; and so, while they cannot be said to be the same things in them as in Him, are fitly said to be His likeness. " This likeness, as it is principally found in man among all the terrestrial creatures, so hath it in man for its seat and subject, his soul or spiritual part. The effects of Divine wisdom, power, goodness, are everywhere visible throughout the whole creation; and as there is no effect but hath something in it corresponding to its cause (wherein it was its cause), so every creature doth some way or other represent God: some in virtues, some in life, some in being only. The material world represents Him, as a house the Builder; but spiritual beings, as a child the Father. Other creatures (as one fitly expresses it) carry His footsteps; these, His image; and that, not as drawn with a pencil, which can only express figure and colour, but as represented in a glass, which imitates 76 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. action and motion. To give the pre-eminence, therefore, in this point to the body of man, was a conceit so gross, that one would wonder how it should obtain, at least in the Christian world." * Still more fully and forcibly and persuasively, after explaining and illustrating how "vital" and " intimate " the " image of God " is, through " restitution," he thus expatiates : — "An image connatural to the spirit of man ; not a thing alien and foreign to his nature, put into him purposely, as it were, to torment and vex him; but an ancient, well- known inhabitant, that had place in him from the begin- ning. Sin is the injurious intruder; which therefore puts the soul into a commotion, and permits it not to rest while it hath any being there. This image calms it, restores it, works a peaceful, orderly composure within ; returns it to itself, to its pristine blessed state ; being re- seated there as in its proper, primitive subject. "For though this image, in respect of corrupted nature, be supernatural, in respect of institute and undefiled nature, it was, in a true sense, natural; as hath been demonstrated by divers of ours against the Papists, and, upon the matter, yielded by some of the more moderate among themselves. At least it was connate with human nature, consentaneous to it, and perfective of it. We are speaking, it must be remembered, of that part of the * Ibid., vol. i., pp. 65-66. JOHN HOWE. 77 Divine image that consists in 7noral excellencies ; there being another part of it, as hath been said, that is, even in the strictest sense, natural. "There is nothing in the whole moral law of God — in conformity whereunto this image did ab origine consist — nothing of what he requires from man, that is at all de- structive of his being, prejudicial to his comforts, repug- nant to his most innate principles : nothing that clashes with his reason or is contrary to his interest; or that is not, most directly, conservative of his being and comforts, agreeable to his most rational principles, subservient to his best and truest interest. For what ' doth God the Lord require,' but fear and love, service and holy walk- ing, from an entire and undivided soul? What, but what is good ; not only in itself, but for us ; and in respect whereof, His law is said to be holy, just, and good .'' " And what He requireth. He impresseth. This ' law, written in the heart,' is this ' likeness.' " How grateful then will it be, when after a long extermi- nation and exile, it returns and repossesses the soul, is recognised by it, becomes to it 'a new nature,' yea, even a Divine ; a vital living law, ' the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus ! ' What grievance or burden is it to do the dictates of nature ? actions that easily and freely flow from their own principles ? and when blessedness itself is enfolded in those very acts and inclinations 1 How infi- nitely satisfying and delightful will it be, when the soul shall find itself connaturalised to everything in its duty, and shall have no other duty incumbent on it than to be happy! when it shall need no arguments and exhortations 78 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. to love God, nor need be urged and pressed, as hereto- fore, to mind Him, to fear before Him ! when love, and reverence, and adoration, and praise, when delight and joy, shall be all natural acts. Can you separate this in your own thoughts from the highest satisfaction? "* Again, and pregnantly, of Law as a gauge of man's departure from God, thus : — " And how far he is swerved from what he was is easily conjecturable, by comparing him with the measures which show what he should be. For it cannot be conceived for what end laws were ever given him, if, at least, we allow them not the measures of his primitive capacity, or deny him ever to have been in a possibility to obey. Could they be intended for his government, if conformity to them were against or above his nature Or were they only for his condemnation or for tJiat, if he was never capable of obeying them ? How inconsistent were it with the good- ness of the blessed God, that the condemnation of His creatures should be the first design of His giving them laws ; and with His justice, to make His laws the rule of punishment to whom they never could be the rule of obedience and duty ; or with His wisdom, to frame a system and body of laws that should never serve for either purpose, and so be upon the whole useful for nothing ? The common reason of mankind teacheth us to estimate the wisdom and equity of lawgivers by the suitableness of their constitutions to the genius and temper of the * Ibid., vol. i., pp. 113-114. JOHN HOWE. 79 people for whom they are made ; and we commonly reckon nothing can more slur and expose government than the imposing of constitutions most probably impracticable, and which are never likely to obtain. How much more incongruous must it be esteemed, to enjoin such as never possibly could ! Prudent legislators, and studious of the common good, would be shy to impose upon men under their power, against their genius and common usages (neither alterable easily), nor to any advantage. Much more absurd were it, with great solemnity and weighty sanctions, to enact statutes for brute creatures ! And wherein were it more to purpose to prescribe unto men strict rules of piety and virtue than to beasts or trees, if the former had not been capable of observing them, as the latter were not ? " * I wish to follow in the footsteps of John Howe. In view of the sentimentalisni and ritualism and making visible of things that are best left invisible ; in recollection of our actual dealing in pulpit and platform and current literature, whereby appeal is made to feeling, * Ibid.,vo\. iii., pp. 298-9. Cf. Works, vol. i., pp. 14, 15 (" Blessedness of the Righteous "), for most eloquent and deeply-thought statement of man's " capacities " and the inconceivableness of God implanting longings and aspira- tions without corresponding objects. Our limits forbid further quotation. 8o REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. sentiment, aesthetic nature, I re-assert as a present-day truth that Christianity recognizes and addresses our reason, our conscience, our moral nature. I would proclaim afresh that that is an anti-Biblical and anti-Christian teaching that so makes sin the master that nothing remains in man capable of response to his God. I affirm that, fallen though man be, he remains God's divinest work, God's nearest likeness, God's most homogeneous creature. I reverence man because he is man. I stand in awe of man's grandeur as I see the value God has put on him. I refuse to demean and deteriorate his nature. I grasp gratefully and adoringly the fact that it is I the man who become the Christian ; that the restitution is of what I was ; and that the lowliest believer bears, nay, in a sense is, "the image of God." It were unpardonable to omit in any Lecture on John Howe, his magnificent as pathetic, sublime as heart-shattering description of the ruined temple of man's soul, and the fitness of God's departure from it. As they will splen- JOHN HOWE. 8i didly close our consideration of his HABITUAL REVERENCE, and related characteristics, I give them at this point.* * My quotations thus far, and these, will speak to the exaggerated nonsense of Henry Rogers and others on Howe's style as unformed and obscure. I have no wish — quite the reverse — to undervalue the service rendered by Henry Rogers in his edition of Howe's Works for the Religious Tract Society (6 vols., 8vo., 1863). It was a great gift to all who value noble and devout thinking. But the good man pothered and pottered so long over the punctuation and involute sentences of Howe, that he came to imagine his own labours of transcendent magnitude and importance. It was, perhaps, well to revise the punc- tuation, and to remove the Scripture texts and quotations generally to foot of pages ; but after all Howe is "strong meat " for men, not milk-and-water for babes, and no one who has liking for Howe finds any difficulty worth naming in reading him just as he himself gave his books to the world. I protest against Rogers's preposterous hyper- statement of Howe's unformed style, punctuation, italics, etc. Need I add that, while enforced to say these things, I yield to none in gratitude for Henry Rogers's manifold gifts to our best literature .'' It seems expedient to vindicate Howe's style, as mere style, against such misdirected criticism, by a few examples taken ad apcrturam libri, as thus : — Satisfaction and Desire.—" For this satisfaction is the soul's rest in God ; its perfect enjoyment of the 6 82 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. He is pleading with men to yield to the persuasions of the Spirit of God, and reinstate most perfect good ; the expletion of the whole capacity of its will ; the total filling up of that vast enlarged appetite ; the perfecting of all its desires in delight and joy. Now delight or joy (for they differ not, save that the latter word is thought something more appropriate to reasonable nature) is fitly defined, — the rest of the desiring faculty in the thing desired. Desire and delight are but two acts of love, diversified only by the distance or presence of the same object ; which, when it is dis- tant, the soul, acted and prompted by love, desires, moves towards it, pursues it ; when present and attained, delights in it, enjoys it, stays upon it, satisfies itself in it, according to the measure of goodness it finds there. Desire is, therefore, love in motion; delight is love in rest: and of this latter — delight or joy — Scripture evidently gives us this notion, — ' He will rejoice over thee with joy ' (unto which is presently added as exe- getical), 'he will rest in His love:' which 'resting' can be but the same thing with 'being satisfied.'" "Being satisfied." — "And so doth this 'being satisfied ' not only generally signify the soul to be at rest, but it specifies that rest ; and gives us a distinct account of the nature of it : as, that it is not a forced- violent rest ; such as proceeds from a beguiled igno- rance, a drowsy sloth, a languishing weakness, or a desire and hope of happiness, by often frustrations, baffled into despair, — to all which, the native import JOIIX HOWE. 83 God on the throne of their hearts. He grounds this on God's great offers to return. He then and propriety of that word ' satisfaction ' doth strongly repugn. But it discovers it to be a natural rest ; I mean, from an internal principle. The soul is not held in its present state of enjoyment by a strong and violent hand ; but rests in it by a connaturalness there- unto : is attempered to it by its own inward constitu- tion and frame. It rests not as a descending stone, intercepted by something by the way that holds and stops it, else it would fall further ; but as a thing would rest in its own centre ; with such a rest as the earth is supposed to have in its proper place ; that, ' being hung upon nothing,' is yet unmoved, — pondcr- ihus librata suis, — equally balanced by its own weight every way.'' Incommensurate End. — "Now, who can think the satisfying of these lusts the commensurate end of man ? Who would not, upon the supposition of no higher, say with the Psalmist, ' Wherefore hast thou made all men in vain?' To what purpose was it for him to live in the world a few years upon this account only, and so go down to the place of silence What is there in the momentary satisfaction of this mortal flesh ; in his pleasing view of a mass of treasure, which he never brought with him into the world, but only heaped together, and so leaves not the world richer or poorer than he found it ; what is there in the applause and admiration of fools, as the greater part always are ; 84 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. portrays the " desolate temple " of the human soul without God. A hush of awe may well that we should think it worth the while for man to have lived for these things ? If the question were put, ' Wherefore did God make man ?' who would not be ashamed so to answer it : 'He made him to eat, and drink, and take his pleasure, to gather up wealth for he knows not whom ; to use his inventions, that each one may become a talk and wonder to the rest ; and then, when he hath fetched a few turns upon the theatre, and entertained the eyes of beholders with a short scene of impertinences, descend, and never be heard of more?' What ! that he should come into the world furnished with such powers p.nd endowments for this ! It were a like case, as if one should be clad in scarlet to go to plough, or curiously instructed in arts and sciences to tend hogs." Real Worth. — " Though it do not vaunt, will show itself ; and while it doth not glare, yet cannot forbear to shine" (vol. i., p. 428). Calm. — " That we endeavour for a calm indtffereiicy and dispassionate temper of mind towards the various objects and affairs that belong to this present life. There are very narrow limits already set, by the nature of the things themselves, to all the real objective value that such things have m them ; and it is the part of wisdom and justice to set the proportionable bounds to all the thoughts, cares, and passions, we. will suffer to stir in our minds in reference to them. Nothing is a more JOHN HOWE. 85 come over our spirit as we read and re-read the portrayal : — evident acknowledged character of a fool, than upon every slight occasion to be in a transport. To be much taken with empty things betokens an empty spirit. It is a part of manly fortitude to have a soul so fenced against foreign impressions, as little to be moved with things that have little in them ; to keep our passions under a strict rein and steady command, that they be easily retractable and taught to obey ; not to move till severe reason have audited the matter, and pronounced the occasion just and valuable : in which case the same manly temper will not refuse to admit a proportionable stamp and impress from the occurring object. For it is equally a prevarication from true manhood to be moved with everything and with nothing : the former would speak a man's spirit a feather, the latter a stone. A total apathy and insensibleness of external occurrents hath been the aim of some, but never the attainment of the highest pretenders ; and if it had, yet ought it not to have been their boast, as upon sober thoughts it cannot be reckoned a perfection. But it should be endeavoured that the passions, which are not to be rooted up, because they are of nature's planting, be yet so discreetly checked and depressed that they grow not to that enormous tall- ness as to overtop a man's intellectual power, and cast a dark shadow over his soul." Reluctant Dying. — " Who could ever by their love of this bodily life, procure it to be perpetuated } or by 86 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. " That He hath withdrawn Himself and left this His temple desolate, we have many sad and plain proofs before us. The stately ruins are visible to every eye, that bear in their front, yet extant, this doleful inscrip- tion : Here God once Dwelt. Enough appears of the admirable frame and structure of the soul of man to show the Divine presence did sometime reside in it ; more than enough of vicious deformity to proclaim He is now retired and gone. The lamps are extinct, the altar overturned ; the light and love are now vanished, which did the one shine with so heavenly brightness, the other burn with so pious fervour. The golden candlestick is displaced and thrown away as a useless thing, to make their dread of mortality, make themselves immortal? Have not others, in all former ages, loved the body and this world as much ? and what is become of them ? Hath not death still swept the stage from generation to generation, and taken all away, willing or unwilling ? To have all my good bound up in what I cannot keep, and to be in a continual dread of what I cannot avoid, — what can be more disconsolate? How grievous will it be to be torn out of the body ! not to resign the soul, but have it drawn forth, as a rusty sword out of the sheath; a thing which our utmost unwillingness will make the more painful, but cannot deter ! " (vol. vi., pp. 166-7). The Reader will be richly rewarded by turning to the following :— i. 80, 437, 454 ; ii. 74-5, 97, 133, 193, 223, 237, 305, 377-8, 383, 389, 412-3, 421-2, 424, 427 ; iii. 22, 168-9, 274, 387-8. JOHN HOWE. 87 room for the throne of the Prince of Darkness. The sacred incense, which sent rolhng up in clouds its rich perfumes, is exchanged for a poisonous, helHsh vapour ; and here is, ' instead of a sweet savour, a stench.' The comely order of this house is turned all into confusion ; the beauties of holiness into noisome impurities ; the house of prayer to a den of thieves, and that of the worst and most horrid kind ; for every lust is a thief, and every theft sacrilege : continual rapine and robbery is com- mitted upon holy things. The noble powers which were designed and dedicated to Divine contemplation and delight, arc alienated to the service of the most despicable idols, and employed unto vilest intuitions and embraces ; to behold and admire 'lying vanities,' to indulge and cherish lust and wickedness. What have not the enemies ' done wickedly in the sanctuary ' ? How have they broken down the carved work thereof, and that too ' with axes and hammers ; ' the noise whereof was not to be heard in building, much less in the demolishing this sacred frame. Look upon the fragments of that curious sculp- ture which once adorned the palace of that great king ; the relics of ' common notions,' the lively prints of some undefaced truth, the fair ideas of things, the yet legible precepts that relate to practice. Behold ! with what accuracy the broken pieces show these to have been engraven by the finger of God, and how they now lie torn and scattered, one in this dark corner, another in that, buried in heaps of dirt and rubbish ! There is not now a system, an entire table of coherent truths to be found, or a frame of holiness, but some shivered parcels ; and if any, with great toil and labour, apply 88 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. themselves to draw out here one piece and there another, and set them together, they serve rather to show how exquisite the Divine workmanship was in the original composition, than for present use to the excellent pur- poses for which the whole was first designed. Some pieces agree and own one another ; but how soon are our inquiries and endeavours nonplused and superseded ! How many attempts have been made, since that fearful fall and ruin of this fabric, to compose again the truths of so many several kinds into their distinct orders, and make up frames of science or useful knowledge ; and after so many ages, nothing is finished in any one kind ! Sometimes truths are misplaced, and what belongs to one kind is transferred to another, where it will not fitly match ; sometimes falsehood inserted, which shatters or disturbs the whole frame. And what is, with much fruitless pains, done by one hand, is dashed in pieces by another ; and it is the work of a following age to sweep away the fine-spun cobwebs of a former. And those truths which are of greatest use, though not most out of sight, are least regarded ; their tendency and design are overlooked, or they are so loosened and torn off that they cannot be wrought in, so as to take hold of the soul; but hover as faint ineffectual notions that signify nothing. Its very fundamental powers are shaken and disjointed, and their order towards one another confounded and broken ; so that what is judged considerable, is not con- sidered ; what is recommended as eligible and lovely, is not loved and chosen. Yea, the ' truth which is after godliness,' is not so much disbelieved as hated, ' held in unrighteousness,' and shines as too feeble a light in that JOHN HOWE. 89 malignant 'darkness which comprehends it not.' You come, amidst all this confusion, as into the ruined palace of some great prince, in which you see here the fragments of a noble pillar, there the shattered pieces of some curious imagery ; and all lying neglected and useless amongst heaps of dirt. He that invites you to take a view of the soul of man, gives you but such another prospect, and doth but say to you, ' BEHOLD THE DESOLA- TION ! all things rude and waste.' So that should there be any pretence to the Divine presence, it might be said, if God be here, why is it thus? The faded glory, the darkness, the disorder, the impurity, the decayed state in all respects of this temple, too plainly show the great Inhabitant is gone." Of the fitness of the Divine departure he tlius with solemn state and music speaks : — " Now what could be expected to ensue upon all this, but that he should be forsaken of God ? That the blessed presence be withdrawn, that had been so despitefully slighted, to return no more. " No more ; till at least a recompense should be made Him for the wrong done, and a capacity be recovered for His future converse ; namely, till both His honour should be repaired, and His temple ; till He might again honour- ably return and be fitly received. " But who could have thought in what way these things should ever be brought to pass ? That is, neither could * Ibid., vol. iii. pp. 306-9. 90 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. His departure but be expected, nor His return but be above all expectation. " To depart was what became Him, a thing, as the case was, most Godlike or worthy of God, and what He owed to Himself. It was meet so great a MAJESTY, having been so condescendingly gracious, should not be also cheap, or appear unapprehensive of being neglected and set at naught. "It became Him, as the self-sufficient Being, to let it be seen He designed not man His temple, for want of a house : that having of old ' inhabited His own eternity,' and having now the ' heavens for His throne, the earth His footstool,' He could dwell alone, or where He pleased else in all His great creation ; and did not need, where He was not desired. That of the cynic was thought a brave saying, when his malcontented servant turned fugi- tive and left him : ' It were an unworthy thing Manes should think he can live without Diogenes, and that Diogenes cannot without Manes.' How much better would it suit with the real self-fulness of a Deity, where nothing of this kind can look like an empty hollow boast. " It was becoming of His pure and glorious holiness not to dwell amidst impurities, or let it be thought He was a ' God that took pleasure in wickedness ; ' and most suitable to His equal justice to let them who said to Him> ' Depart from us,' feel that they spake that word against their own life and soul ; and that what was their rash and wilful choice is their heaviest doom and punishment. " It was only strange, that when He left His temple He did not consume it ; and that not leaving it, without JOHN HOWE. 91 being basely expulsed, He hath thought of returning without being invited back again. " Yea, and whatsoever was necessary thereto, is de- signed by His own so strange contrivance and done at His own so dear expense ; His only begotten Son most freely consenting with Him, and in sundry capacities sustaining the weight and burden of this great under- taking." Those of us who have to 'preach' the Gospel, or who have in any way to ' teach ' out of The Word, will advantage ourselves by acting on the two-fold fact thus so invariably asserted by Howe — Man re-made in God's image : Man though fallen, capable of response to truth and grace. What bearing-down power, what urgency, what tenderness, what overwhelming wistfulness it gave to John Howe's preaching, I would send the Reader to his Works to dis- cover. There he is ever found dealing with Essentials.t * "Works of John Howe," vol. iii., p. 311-312. t " Essentials." He acted on his own aphoristic princi- ples, — " We know that generally by how much anything is more disputable, the less it is necessary or conducible to the Christian life. God hath graciously provided that 92 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. I would close with one other characteristic that has for those to whom I mainly write a what we are to live by should not cost us so dear. And, possibly, as there is less occasion of disputing about the more momentous things of religion, so there may be somewhat more of modesty and awe in reference to what is so confessedly venerable and sacred — though too many are over-bold even here also — than so foolishly to trifle with such things. Therefore more commonly, where that humour prevails, men divert from those plainer things with some slighter and superficial reverence to them, but more heartily esteeming them insipid and jejune because they have less in them to gratify that appetite, and betake themselves to such things about which they may more plausibly contend : and then, what pitiful trifles oftentimes take up their time and thoughts ; questions and problems of like weighty importance, very often, with those which, the above-named author * tells us, this disease among the Greeks prompted them to trouble themselves about ; as, what number of rowers Ulysses had.' which was written first, the Iliad or the Odyssey? etc. So that, as he saith, they spent their lives very operosely doing nothing : their conceits being such that if they kept them to themselves they could yield them no fruit ; and if they published them to others, they should not seem thereby the more learned, but the more troublesome ; to this purpose he truly speaks. And is it not to be resented that men should sell away the solid * Sen de Brev. Vit. JOHN HOWE. 93 living message still, and is an EIGHTH PRESENT- DAY TRUTH. I have in my mind his PRACTICAL strength and vital joy, which a serious soul would find in substantial religion, for such toys ! Yea, and not only famish themselves, but trouble the world and embroil the Church with their impertinences ! If a man be drawn forth to defend an important truth against an injurious assault, it were treacherous self-love to purchase his own peace by declining it ; or if he did sometimes turn his thoughts to some of our petty questions, that with many are so hotly agitated, for recreation sake, or to try his wit and exercise his reason, without stirring his passions to the disturbance of others or himself ; it were an innocent divertisement, and the best purpose that things of that nature are capable of serving. But when contention becomes a man's element, and he cannot live out of that fire ; strains his wit and racks his invention to find matter of quarrel ; is resolved nothing said or done by otheis shall please him, only because he means to please himself in dissenting ; disputes only that he may dispute, and loves dissension for itself ; — this is the unnatural humour that hath so unspeakably troubled the Church and dispirited reUgion, and filled men's souls with wind and vanity, — yea, with fire and fury. This hath made Christians gladiators, and the Christian world a clamorous theatre, while men have equally affected to contend, and to make ostentation of their ability to do. " And surely as it is highly pleasurable to retire one-self, so it is charitable to call aside others out of this noise and throng; to consider silently, and feed upon the known 94 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. APPLICATION OF ALL HE PREACHES AND TEACHES. Let one example out of abundant illustrate, from "The Redeemer's Tears Wept over Lost Souls": — " That thou mayst, and not throw away thy soul and so great a hope, through mere sloth and loathness to be at some pains for thy life, let the text, which hath been thy directory about the things that belong to thy peace, be also thy motive, as it gives thee to behold the Son of God weeping over such as would not know those things. Shall not the Redeemer's tears move thee? O hard heart ! consider what these tears import to this purpose : — First, They signify the real depth and greatness of the misery into which thou art falling. They drop from an intellectual and most comprehensive eye, that sees far and pierces deep into things,— hath a wide and large prospect, takes the compass of that forlorn state into which unreconcilable sinners are hastening in all the horror of it. The Son of God did not weep vain and causeless tears or for a light matter ; nor did He for Him- self either spend His owner desire the profusion of others' tears : "Weep not for me, O daughters of Jerusalem," etc. He knows the value of souls : the weight of guilt, and agreed things of our religion, which immediately lead to both the duties and delights of it." * • " The Blessedness of the Righteous," To the Reader — vol. ii, pp. 5-7. Cf. also vol. iii., p. 156. JOHN HOWE. 95 and how low it will press and sink them ; the severity of God's justice and the power of His anger, and what the fearful effects of them will be when they finally fall. If thou understandest not these things thyself, believe Him that did, — at least believe His tears. Secondly, They signify the sincerity of His love and pity, the truth and tenderness of His compassion. Canst thou think His deceitful tears? His, who never knew guile ? Was this like the rest of His course ? And remember that He who shed tears, did, from the same fountain of love and mercy, shed blood too ! Was that also done to deceive 1 Thou makest thyself some very considerable thing indeed, if thou thinkest the Son of God counted it worth His while to weep, and bleed, and die, to deceive thee into a false esteem of Him and His love. But if it be the greatest madness imaginable to entertain any such thought, but that His tears were sincere and inartificial, the natural, genuine expressions of undissembled benig- nity and pity, thou art then to consider what love and compassion thou art now sinning against, what bowels thou spurnest ; and that if thou perishest, it is under such guilt as the devils themselves are not liable to, who never had a Redeemer bleeding for them, nor, that we ever find, weeping over them. " Thirdly, They show the remedilessness of thy case if thou persist in impenitency and unbelief till the things of thy peace be quite hid from thine eyes. These tears will then be the last issues of even defeated love, — of love that is frustrated of its kind design. Thou mayst perceive in these tears the steady, unalterable laws of heaven, the inflexibleness of the Divine justice, that holds thee in 96 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. adamantine bonds, and hath sealed thee up, if thou prove incurably obstinate and impenitent, unto perdition ; so that even the Redeemer Himself, He that is mighty to save, cannot at length save thee, but only weep over thee, drop tears into thy flame, — which assuage it not, but (though they have another design, even to express true compassion), do yet unavoidably heighten and increase the fervour of it, and will do so to all eternity. He even tells thee, sinner, ' Thou hast despised My blood : thou shalt yet have My tears. That would have saved thee, — these do only lament thee lost ! ' " But the tears wept over others as lost and past hope, why should they not melt thee, while as yet there is hope in thy case ? If thou be effectually melted in thy very soul, and looking to Him whom thou hast pierced, dost truly mourn over Him, thou mayst assure thyself the pro- spect His weeping eye had of lost souls did not include thee. His weeping over thee would argue thy case for- lorn and hopeless ; thy mourning over Him will make it safe and happy. That it may be so, consider further, that,— " Fourthy, They signify how very intent He is to save souls, and how gladly He would save thine, if yet thou wilt accept of mercy while it may be had. For if He weep over them that will not be saved, from the same love that is the spring of these tears would saving mercies proceed to those that are become willing to receive them. And that love that wept over them that were lost, how will it glory in them that are saved ! There His love is disappointed and vexed, crossed in its gracious intend- ment ; but here, having compassed it, how will He 'joy JOHX HOWE. 97 over thee with singing, and rest in His love!' And thou also, instead of being involved in a like ruin with the unreconciled sinners of the old Jenisalcni, shalt be enrolled among the glorious citizens of the new, and triumph together with them in eternal glory ! "* These appeals and ' applications' of previous reasoned-out truths, I am again old-fashioned enough to wish to see revived. I shall take occasion in bringing RICHARD BAXTER before my Readers, to enforce this. But in relation to the sermons of John Howe — as in kind to those of Jonathan Edwards — the heart of their power is to be found in their thick-coming, eager, intense driving-home on every hearer the doctrine that has been proved. I desiderate for to-day more of Howe's scholarly exegesis and INTELLECTUAL setting forth of the thought the inspired words clothe ; and I emphatically covet for every preacher within all the Churches, more of direct, personal, present pressure on acceptance of whatever teaching is fetched * " Howe's Works," vol. ii., p. 342-4. 7 98 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. from God's Word. To huddle up, as is so often done nowadays, an essay-like sermon or sermonctte, or some pretty piece of sentence- making, with the merest pretence of ' appli- cation/ is a poor discharge of our august office, and a poor account of our God-given oppor- tunity in being face-to-face with dying yet undying fellow-men. I must leave the half untold of what might be told of Life and Works. It were not difficult to vindicate a potential influence alike in State and Church for John Howe, and pleasing to dwell on his ' inward ' association with the foremost of his contemporaries, demonstrative of how great a space and place he filled in that great century. BAXTER reverenced him ; OWEN loved and honoured him; ANDREW Marvell held him to be of the greatest of the sons of men. Materials abound to illustrate his fidelity and yet considerateness of reproof in highest places. His books reveal modest but genuine scholarship and wide culture. His Letters re- main to show with how touching sympathy JOHN HOWE. 99 he ministered to the mourning and despondent. His cahii, dignified, conscience-ruled Noncon- formity has been an inspiration to Nonconfor- niisls.* His end was 'peace,' and glory begun on earth. Looking to his Works, I may be blameworthy for not having given more pro- minence to his substantive contributions to the highest metaphysic. I regard his " Living Tem- ple " and companion treatises — apart from their pricelessness as " Companions for the Devout Life " — and his Letters on the Trinity and its cognates, as furnishing special answers to pre- sent-day unbeliefs and disbeliefs. He antici- pates these; for he breaks in their own hands and within their own standing-ground, the weapons of warfare lifted up against the exist- ence of God and Revelation. The possibility of that existence he argues with unapproachable philosophic power, and not without jets of merited sarcasm and play of grave humour. * Ct. vol. v., pp. 233-4, 100 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. I must perforce pass over these and other things.* * I must here give one specimen of his lighter-touched yet most masterly thinking — the lightness only that of the foam on the surface of abyssmal depths — as thus, on " matter." " A capacity of an immortal state j that is, that his nature is such that he may, if God so please, by the con- current influence of His ordinary power and providence, without the help of a miracle, subsist in another state of life after this, even a state that shall not be liable to that impairment and decay that we find this subject to. More is not as yet contended for ; and so much, methinks, none should make a difficulty to admit, from what is evidently found in him. For it may well be supposed that the admitting of this, at least, will seem much more easy to any free and unprejudiced reason, than to ascribe the operations before instanced in, to alterable or perishable matter, or indeed to any matter at all : it being justly presumed that none will ascribe to matter, as such, the powers of ratiocination or volition ; for then every par- ticle of matter must needs be rational and intelligent, — a high advance to what one would never have thought at all active. And how inconceivable is it, that the minute particles of matter, in themselves each of them destitute of any such powers, should, by their mutual intercourse with one another, become furnished with them; that they should be able to understand, deliberate, resolve, and choose, being assembled and duly disposed in counsel JOHN HOWE. Robert Hall said to Henry Rogers " that as a minister, he had derived more benefit together, but apart, rest all in a deep and sluggish silence ! Besides, if the particles of matter, howsoever modified and moved to the utmost subtilty or tenuity, and to the highest vigour, shall then become intelligent and rational, how is it that we observe not, as any matter is more subtile and more swiftly and variously moved, it makes a discernibly nearer approach, proportionably, to the faculty and power of reasoning ; and that nothing more of an aptitude or tendency towards intelligence and vv isdom is to be perceived in an aspiring flame or a brisk wind than in a clod or a stone? If to understand, to define, to distinguish, to syllogize, be nothing else but the agita- tion and collision of the minute parts of rarified matter among one another, methinks some happy chemist or other, when he hath missed his designed mark, should have hit upon some such more noble product, and by one or other prosperous sublimation have caused some tem- porary resemblance, at least, of these operations. Or, if the paths of nature, in these affairs of the mind, be more abstruse, and quite out of the reach and road of artificial achievement, whence is it that nature herself, — that is vainly enough supposed by some to have been so happy as, by some casual strokes, to have fabricated the first of human creatures, that have since propagated themselves — is grown so effete and dull as never since to hit upon any like effect in the like way ; and that no records of any time or age give us the notice of some such creature I02 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. from John Howe, than from all other divines put together." I can well believe this. For he stands alone in his INTELLECTUAL SANCTITY ; and it is magnetic. "As a minister," I feel in reading Howe that I breathe a more heavenly atmosphere than in any other divine in the sprung out of some Epicurean womb of the earth, and elaborated by the only immediate hand of nature, so disposing the parts of matter in its constitution that it should be able to perform the operation belonging to the mind of man ? " But if we cannot, with any tolerable pretence or show of reason, attribute these operations to any mere matter, then there must be somewhat else in man to which they may agree, that is distinct from his corruptible part, and that is therefore capable, by the advantage of his own nature, of subsisting hereafter, while God shall continue to it an influence agreeable to its nature, as He doth to other creatures. And hence it seems a modest and sober deduction, that there is in the nature of man at least a capacity of an immortal state." * * Works of John Howe," vol. i., p. 401-2. Cf ibid.., pp. 56-7, of "apprehension" of God [= perception] as distinct from comprehension. See also iii., pp. 28, 36, 37-8> 139. 177 ; V. 85, 94-5. On possibilities, see iii., 144-5, 202 ; V. 88, 93. JOHN HOWE. 103 whole range of our theological literature. His own purity and unearthliness are interfused with his words. Ilis words connaturalize mind and heart with holiness. He so lifts up to serene heights, or rather from the very Alps of thought so elevates you that instinctively you are sent on your knees to adore, as before the apocalypse of stars in new-revealed skies. " As a minister," he awes me by the grandeur he im- parts to my office, and by the blessed responsi- bilities he urges. For harmoniously-balanced and affluent variety of faculty, for disciplined and transfigured capacities, for grace-ruled sere- nity and sensitiveness of conscience, for poten- tiality throughout, I can think of no single man once to be named with JOHN HowE. "As a minister," for .stimulus, for aspiration, for fresh consecration, for deepening of belief in the power of the Gospel and in God's fulness of redeeming love in Jesus Christ so that evcrj- lost soul meets a self-elected doom, for quicken- ing to urgency and pathos of entreaty — and all based on an intellect and a moral nature that 104 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. might have served for ten ordinary men, and a scholarship and general culture that were noticeable even in his age — I know no works so absolutely supreme as those of John Howe.* I agree with the Rev. S. W. CHRISTOPHERS in his " John Howe's Charge, Home and Church," that JOHN HowE has self-described his own mature character in his "good man." * It is pleasing to find Howe quoting with "pious" and " holy " before the name, George Herbert, at least three times. More noteworthy still, I have marked a ' finely-appreciative reference to Shakespeare, thus : — "At length he says, ' The butt-end of this hypothesis,' etc., — I like not that phrase the worse for the authors sake of whom it seems borrowed, whose memory greater things will make live, when we are forgot " (A View of the late considerations addressed to H. H. about the Trinity : Works, vol. v., p. 173). The reference is to Richard III., ii. 2, " the butt-end of a mother's blessing." There is a Shakespeare touch of pride in "this England" in his Epistle-dedicatory of the " Living Temple " to Lord Paget : — " Hereby you have dignified England, in letting it be seen what it can signify in the world, when it is so happy to have its interests managed by a fit and able hand" (Works, iii., p. 3). JOHN HOWE. With this I conclude my inadequate but I trust inciting Lecture on this foremost of Non- conformists : — " The life of a good man is under the sweet command of one Supreme Goodness, and Last End. This alone is that living form and soul which, running through all the powers of the mind and actions of life, collects all together into one fair and beautiful system, making all that variety conspire into perfect unity. . . . This is the best temper and composedness of the soul when, by a conjunction with our chief Good and Last End, it is drawn up into a unity and consent with itself ; when all the faculties of the soul, with their several issues and motions, though never so many in themselves, like so many lines meet together in one and the same centre. . . . When religion enters into the soul it charms all its restless rage and violent appetite, by discovering to it the universal foun- tain-fulness of one Supreme Almighty Goodness ; and, leading it out of itself into a conjunction therewith, it lulls it into the most undisturbed rest and quietness on the lap of Divine enjoyment, where it rests with full con- tentment, and rests adequately satisfied in the fruition of the infinite, uniform, and essential Goodness and Loveliness." * * "Homes of Old English Writers," i vol. (Haughton) — A very chatty and in some respects brilliant book. There are occasional churchy bits, but substantially it is finely catholic. In the paper on Howe one incidental io6 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. One word — in retrospect — from the Poet (Young) :— " How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, How complicate, how wonderful is man ! How PASSING WONDER He who made him such ! " gibe is a childish and unworthy anachronism. He speaks of Cromwell's " devotional muscles . . . always under control " (p. 230). RICHARD BAXTER: " I, who bow not to the priest Lean, or fed to sleekness, Bend to one who holds of Christ Wisdom, love, and meekness. When his intercession mild Hushed the critic's psean : He had caught a gentle tone From the Galilean." Thr Master : P/tssiim Flcnvers (1854). " Take courage, Heart I For here below What are such things but idle show ; Whose whole worth in thyself doth dwell Created by thy magic-spell ; According as thou turn'st to good Or evil use, Time's changeful mood : So, like the wind the eagle's wings, 'Twill lift thy soul to higher things Than those whereon the eye doth rest, Or make thee level with the beast Who lives but unto time and earth, Whereof his food and joys have birth. Hut thou that draw'st from such mean source Only the body's brief-lived force, Should'st not submit thy soul thereto But to its service these subdue." Henry Ellison : Mad Motnents, vol. i., pp. 295-6. When Boswell asked Dr. Johnson what works of Richard Baxter he should read, he answered, " Read any of them, for they are all good." ** Baxter's face I think still more striking than Howe's. Where it used to hang in Dr. Williams' librarj-, over the fireplace, I could have almost thought that it changed like a flame as I looked at it, and seemed to flicker with ten- derness and with all kinds of delicacy of life."— Dr. Charles Stanford, to the Lecturer. RICHARD BAXTER: Seraphic Fervour. Borit at Eaton Coitstanty)tc, Shropshire, \2th November, 1615 : Died at London, %th December, 1691 : buried in Christ Church, London. HE epithets, 'Venerable' for Bede, and 'Judicious' (by whicli I suppose 'judicial' is meant) for HoOKER, are not more irreversible down the ages, than is that of ' Holy ' applied to Richard Baxter. "The holy Baxter," says an able anonymous Essayist, " is just the ver- dict which a seraph, ' full of eyes within and without,' might be expected to pronounce after having deliberately reviewed the whole history and work of the sage of Kidderminster."* Coleridge — like William Orme before him — * Prefixed to " Practical Works," 4 vols., large 8vo. (Virtue), 1838. no REPREHENrAriVE NONCONFORMISTS. was struck with the unearthliness and hoHness of his character ; and in relation to the great posthumous foHo " Reliquiae Baxtcrianae," says " I would almost as soon doubt the Gospel's verity as Baxter's veracity." It were easy to ad- duce multiplied testimonies having the same burden, — from HowE and Calamy onward to Lord Macaulay and Principal Tulloch, and the present Archbishop of Dublin (Trench) in his noticeable lecture on the " Saint's Ever- lasting Rest : " * but I do not feel that it is needed. Such a man may well be taken as a Representative NoNCONFORMisT.t The first thing that strikes me in studying the character and multitudinous Works of Baxter — and that I would note and illustrate — is, THE * " Companions for the Devout Life." t Baxter's prolonged and earnest efforts for ' Unity ' among all who held the same fundamental truths and principles, tempt to a thorough discussion of them, more particularly their inherent elements of failure. But neither this, nor other prominent things in his Life, may I now notice. In the present Lecture, and in all, I fix on characteristics likely to be j^ractically useful to-day. RICHARD BAXTER. Ill VOLUME OF HIS BEING AND HIS PRODIGIOUS VITALITY. It was a penetrative criticism of Grainger's Portraits, in apology for his brief notice, that " men of his size are not to be drawn in miniature." Intellect, moral nature, affections, force, power of work, actual achieve- ment — all were on the largest scale. There are some one meets with, who have a restless and irritating vitality ; and as a consequence they do everything loudly — know nothing of seclusion and silence — everything with fuss and cdgedness, and rasping to one's patience. These arc your small men who imagine themselves — big — giants of circumstance who sooner or later are shewn as what they arc — pigmies. In Baxter the vitality that I name ' prodigious ' informed a man of such a size, such height and depth and breadth as the word ' gigantic ' alone can describe. So that his movements were intense yet de- liberate, aggressive but reflective, eager never- theless clear-eyed, and while splendidly daring, preceded by devoutest asking of higher help 112 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. than his own. In his physical constitution naturally weak, and tainted from the outset with consumptive tendencies, and later, worn and valetudinarian, he so conquered the body, so made it serve not rule, that he did twenty ordinary men's work as an author alone ; while outside of that was a ceaseless, tireless activity and ministry in Church and State, much more resembling the activity we think of in a seraph than an infirm mortal. He projected his own prodigious vitality into his century, and interpenetrated every movement for good in England, No one familiar with the Men and Books of Baxter's period can have failed to be arrested with his almost ' uncanny ' omni- presence wherever in England men were aiming high for the nation's or the world's welfare. In the most unlikely and unexpected places and ways his personality turns up, and his directing brain and enkindling heart and inexhaustible energy. From the King to the House of Commons, from his Highness the Lord Protector to the Army, from the RICHARD BAXTER. "3 Noble to the obscure village- Curate, from workers at home to workers " in the planta- tions," from the men of the Universities to the ignorant, — by spoken words, by preached sermon, by printed books, by ' catechizing ' and fellowship meetings, by ' Commendatory Epistle,' by an ubiquitous correspondence, by journeyings hither and thither, by generous givings, by audiences with whoever might help forward a desired object or who seemed to hinder it, by days and nights of fasting and prayer — this one man touched, I believe, more of his fellow-countrymen and fellow-men than any other of his contemporaries who can be named in the same breath. I stand in admiration — in its old sense — I am awed by the quantity of being in him, and the pro- digiousness of his vitality, as I come every- where on proof upon proof that RICHARD Baxter, in virtue of " the life of God " that was in him, wielded a controlling force throughout, comparable with gravitation in the physical world. It is no exaggeration to 8 114 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. affirm that this one man drew more hearts to the great Broken Heart than any single Englishman of any age. Two simple facts may at this point be stated as illustrative of the BREADTH of this illus- trious man. First — the Church of England is indebted to Richard Baxter for procuring the Charter of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. He was then ' ejected ' by his mother-Church, in which he had refused a mitre ; but none the less earnestly did he seek to obtain this charter for that Church.* His * " At Acton, a personage of no mean importance watched over the ecclesiastical discipline of the parish. ' Dr. Ryves, rector of that church and of Hadley, dean of Windsor, and of Wolverhampton, and chaplain in ordi- nary to the King,' could not patiently endure the irregu- larities of his learned neighbour. The Dean, indeed, officiated by deputy, and his curate was a raw and igno- rant youth, and Baxter (an occasional Conformist) was a regular attendant on all the sacred offices. But he refused the Oxford oath, and at his domestic worship there was sometimes found more than the statutable addition to the family circle [' five ']. Such offence de- manded expiation. He was committed to Clerkenwell RICHARD BAXTER. "5 ' field ' was ' the world,' and his correspondence with John Eliot, the Apostle of the Indians^ shows that, far ahead of modern Missions, he saw their possibility and urgent need. Second — Richard Baxter was among the first, if not the very first Englishman, to speak fearlessly out on the Slave-Trade. Lord Brougham (it is believed) gratefully recalled this to our cen- tury in the Edinburgh Rcvieiv. Here are our Worthy's presciently-sympathetic words, with their introduction : — " The Slave Trade was very early — indeed almost from its first appearance— denounced in the strongest terms by many wise and good men in this country. The pious and fearless Richard Baxter was one of the first to express his disapprobation. ' They,' he said, writing in 1673, 'They gaol, and when at length discharged from it was com- pelled to seek a new and more hospitable residence. He had his revenge. It was to obtain, through the influence of one of his most zealous disciples, the charter which incorporates the Church of England Society for the Pro- pagation of the Gospel, — a return of good for evil for which his name might well displace those of some of the saints in the calendar." — SiR James Stephen, Ed. Rev. Ixxii., 199, 200. ii6 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. who go as pirates and take away poor Africans to make them slaves and sell them, are the worst of robbers, and ought to be considered as the common enemies of man- kind ; and they who buy them, and make use of them as mere beasts of burden, are fitter to be called demons than Christians.'"* That this vitality of Baxter was unspendable, — if I may coin a word, — let another simple matter-of-fact attest. It poured itself into well- nigh two hundred separate books, larger and lesser ;t and nevertheless, alongside of all this writing — never once employing an amanuensis, and only for the pulpit, shorthand notes — as I have emphasized, he was doing day by day work for his Divine Master that drew on the same vitality measurelessly. For Richard Baxter, in a far other sense than Robert Burns, gave a ' slice of his constitution ' to all whose good he sought. His mental, moral, * Edinburgh Review, vol. Ixxix., p. 400, on Bandinel's "History of the Slave Trade," 1843. See also Reliq. Baxt. s. V. t See my full Bibliographical List along with reprint of his long lost " What we must do to be saved." RICHARD BAXTER. 117 and spiritual being was so seraphically fervent that he could not hold briefest interview, or write hastiest letter, or furnish a preface to some humble fellow-worker's book, without givin^^ forth not merely light, but fire, and that seven times heated. In the pulpit he was a John Knox, rather than a serene and august John Howe ; and his books — more particularly those called 'practical' — were very much, in other form, what he had preached. As a corollary to this, be it recalled that through the full hundred and fifty years and upwards that have elapsed since his death, there never has been a day that some of his books have not been ' about our Father's business.' Such a thing as ' out of print ' were a solecism applied to Richard Baxter. Even in his own lifetime the editions were almost count- less, and I fear uncounted and un-accounted to him, by his publishers ; while in Germany, and Holland, and France, his successive books were eagerly welcomed. The Fathers and Founders of New England sent over for them with ii8 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. loving messages. I found in Massachusetts and Scotland-like Connecticut, old copies of "The Saint's Everlasting Rest " and " Call to the Unconverted," and " Gildas Salvianus," and others, treasured as family heir-looms among the best in these States. So, too, away down in the South — in Virginia and the Carolinas and in the West Indies. It is surely worth while our pondering this prodigious vitality of one slight and physically infirm man, of whom it has been said that his life was one long disease and suffering. I am reminded hereby of a jotting from some for- gotten book: " Rabia, a devout Arabian woman, being asked in her last illness how she endured the extremity of her sufferings, made answer, ' They who look upon God's Face, do not feel His Hand.'" I have named this prodigious vitality of Richard Baxter first, that I might, through it, SPEAK A MESSAGE TO MY READERS, ESPE- CIALLY TO MY FELLOW-MINISTERS, AND YOUNG MEN ENGAGED IN ANY WORK FOR RICHARD BAXTER. 119 THEIR Lord. I do not forget many noble spirits housed in very frail tabernacles, who notwithstanding are doing marvellous service. These ' bruised reeds ' who still give forth celestial music, or, unmetaphorically, consume themselves with toil, I profoundly revere. Far be it from me to hint of blame in their case. I recall abundant apostolic tender counsels to those who are strong. (Cf. 2 Cor. xiii. 9.) But it seems to me — looking beyond the really infirm — that there is sorrowfully too much coddling and sparing of ourselves, and giving way to the body's sluggishness and self-seeking. I do not think that there ought to be so very many ministerial ' sore throats,' or such frequent lying aside. Perhaps one secret of much of this is, that we spend a great deal of our vital force in doing a thousand- and-one little nothings, that yield no result. We may give out our electricity in great sparks — as lightning leaps from the thunder- cloud ; but you may also lose it from a thousand pin-points and leave yourself help- 120 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. less. I would caution against this restless activity in doing little nothings, and so mis- spending precious force that is demanded for higher and nobler and substantive work. My Worthy's vitality and unslackened service — spite of his body and certes not from his body (O ye materialists !) — seem to me to put many of us to burning shame ; seem to me to appeal to us to get, at whatever cost, something of Richard Baxter's intensity, or, as I have designated it, seraphic fervour. I use the word ' seraphic ' advisedly : for it is not to be disassociated from the fervour, neither the fervour from it. I regard the designation as peculiarly apt, seeing that seraph ministering is not mere active service, but active service in sacred work, in what con- cerns the public worship of God, ' liturgical spirit ' being nearer to the original word, Baxter was pre-eminently a ' liturgical spirit,' as speaker, writer, worker. He did all as in presence of " Him Who is invisible." I like to vivify my conception of the angels or seraphs by musing 'on their lowly willinghood to do the RICHARD BAXTER. 121 meanest service as they 'hearken to His Word.' I glow with aspiration as I catch a vision of a mighty angel, Gabriel or Michael, before the Throne ; but my heart is melted as I read of , angels praising God for the Saviour born, or hushing the sorrows and terrors of the women at the sepulchre, or carrying the ransomed spirit of the beggar, — whose poor wasted corpse lay at the rich man's gate, — up and up on their lustrous wings. And so with RICHARD Baxter, — I am stirred again and again into intellectual thought- fulness by not a few of his metaphysical-theo- logical treatises — over-subtle, even hair-splitting, yet rich with out-of-the-way lines of inquiry and speculation, — but tears come unbidden, and my heart leaps to my throat as I discover the tireless willinghood of this man to be helpful — with help drawn from God — wherever he possibly could be, with no standing on dignity, or well- won position, or patronizing airs, or plea of ill-health, or of pre-occupation. His fervour bore him through all, and fused all his activities. How pathetic in the light of this, is the sub-title 122 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. of the ' Saint's Everlasting Rest,' — " written by the author for his own use in the time of his languishing, when God took him off from his public employment." One inevitably thinks of St. Paul, working so wonderfully, and for ever on his 'journeyings ' for Christ, yet all the time having to bear about such a body — a body that "showed the dying of the Lord Jesus." Richard Baxter was the Paul of his century in manifold ways. I venture to ask that we shall interrogate ourselves to-day whether there be not a miser- able self-consciousness in the pulpits and Sunday-schools of all the Churches, whereby Preachers and Teachers seem afraid to let loose the vitality — Divine if it be " of grace " — that is in them. I must avouch that in my judgment, (so-called) refinement and culture and scholarliness are sorry substitutes for such heart-warm, passionate because compassionate, utterances as the multitudes heard from Richard Baxter, whether at loved Kidderminster or St. Margaret's. I can make allowances for RICHARD BAXTER. 123 dread of what is termed vulgarity, and enthu- siasm, and fanaticism. I can, in a sort, sym- pathize with that fastidious reserve that dare not ' lift up the voice,' or startle the occupants of cushioned pews. I know it is a terrible thing to some — admittedly gentlemanly and scholarly and really men of God ; for I do not for a moment question the equal genuineness of their Christianhood — to have their pulpit-bands awry, or their pulpit-gowns tossed — I limit myself, as a Presbyterian, to Presbyterian pulpit-gear — something shocking to find forehead or cheek or lip perspiring. But, as (mainly) addressing ministers of the Gospel, and students and young men, I feel constrained to pronounce all that a profound mistake. Essays are not sermons. Ethical or philosophical disquisitions are not messages. Symphonious elocution is not preaching, but saying. The secret of Richard Baxter's prodigious vitality was his seraphic fervour. We urgently need more of it ; more and still more. Without fervour there is no vitality ; without vitality, no power. Above all, 124 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. without fervour there is no sympathy, no electric laying hold of the people, no sending home of " Thus saith the Lord." I do not see how a Preacher or Teacher can hope to fire his hearers if he be not himself fired. I do not believe that it is possible — humanly speaking — to make men realize the momentousness of the truths declared unless these truths rouse and agitate the speaker himself, ay though men should call it ' frenzy.' It is far from my wish to lessen the amount of pains taken to inform and cultivate and dignify candidates for the ministry and other service. But I am increas- ingly convinced that if God's ' Kingdom ' is to ' come ' by the preaching of the Word, the gospel of salvation, the Preachers must stand prepared not only to be in earnest, but to show it ; not only to declare ' the whole counsel of God,' but by manner and bearing and tone, manifest that it is their own ' all in all,' and that they believe that everlasting issues, for weal or doom, are suspended on acceptance and rejection. I summon all of us to work RICHARD BAXTER. "5 not in frost but in fire, not only every sermon, but every phrase, shaped in the glow of a Divine heat. It was because Richard Baxter was the most earnest man in England of his cen- tury, that he wrought such work for God, and informed, with his own prodigious vitality, generations of men. I covet for to-day, I covet specially for my own beloved Church, his seraphic fervour, I want to stir all whom I can reach, to put HEART into their preaching and teaching, as well as brains.* A second characteristic of the life-work of Richard Baxter is that he CONSECRATED HIS VARIED POWERS TO THE GOOD OF " THE COM- MON PEOPLE." Whether in the pulpit or cate- chizing or holding prayer-meeting, or printing * The old Scotch minister was warranted in his sarcastic rebuke of a young brother, who delivered an elegant polished essay, kid-gloved and emotionless, when he said, " I'd have given a few thochts " [thoughts] " the preference to all that tinkle-tinkle of sentence-making and studied elocution." Thoughts by all means, and thoughts aflame ; " thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." 126 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. another and another book, his main thought was 'compassion on the ignorant, and on them out of the way.' It is historical that this was a ' new thing ' in England. The Reformation was a proud memory. The names of the Reformers brought glory to the Anglican Church that paled the mythical saints of the Church of Rome ; and they are their glory still, let degenerate sons malign them as they may. The great, the gentle-born, the learned, the rich and well-to-do, went to their parish churches. But it is a melancholy truth that it was only here and there that the National Church discharged the obligations for which it existed as a Church. Sir James Stephen has pungently said, " A long interval had elapsed before the national temples and hierarchy were consecrated to the nobler end of enlightening the ignorant, and administering comfort to the poor."* Richard Baxter, whilst he had noblest elo- quence and bravely direct speech for the Edinburgh Review, as before and onward. RICHARD BAXTER. 127 noblest and learnedest in the land — and noblest and learnedest owned his spell — as a Preacher and as a Parish Clergyman spent himself in in- forming and, by God's grace, transforming the lowliest and poorest and most obdurate of his charge — pleading as nowhere men have been pleaded with, and warning and urging and entreating, * lest a promise being left them of entering into that rest, they should seem to fall short of it.' And so he, like the Master, ' went out and in ' among ' the people,' Jiis people — and in season and out of season pressed home the glorious gospel of the blessed God. How immense and blessed was his success, what Kidderminster grew to under him witnesses, as adoringly told in the " Reliquianae." Contrast him in this with even so saintly a man as George Herbert. Very lovely was his ultimate character and life. Yet he was — after ordination — the veriest recluse — shrinking from contact with ' the people.' I am touched with his long ascetic fastings and prayers within his little church of Bemerton for his small flock. 128 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. But if he had prayed with them, gone among them, come closely near to them, how infinitely better! Richard Baxter was no recluse. He was a busy man, and it is your busy man who readiest makes time for duties, and the joy of 'serving.' He prayed and wept and thought and suffered for his people ; but he did more. His sermons were to them ; his prayers were with them ; his whole energies for them. He was eminently contemplative, a meditative spirit; but he willingly tore himself away from his Study on any summons. It is not to be won- dered at that the great Kidderminster Church was crowded, and the homes of whole streets vocal with praise and prayer every night. What might not the Church of England have done and been had a Richard Baxter been found in even a score of her parishes! For a man of his stamp is not merely like a street-lamp that .shines and does its own useful service ; but is a setter-on-fire of other souls. Another side of this is — not polemical, but once more simply historical — that " rich beyond RICHARD BAXTER. 129 all Protestant rivalry in sacred literature, the Church of England, from the days of Parker to those of Laud, had scarcely produced any one considerable work of popular instruction. The ' Pastoral Care ' which Burnet depicted, in the reign of William and Mary, was at that time a vision which, though since richly ful- filled, no past experience had realized. Till a much later time, the alphabet was among the mysteries which the English Church con- cealed from her catechumens." These are the judicial grave words of Sir James Stephen. As he was a devoted Churchman, I prefer to let him speak for me. If his language is start- ling, it is its sad realism that barbs it : — " There is," he continues, " no parallel in the annals of any other Protestant State, of so wonderful a con- centration, and so imperfect a diffusion of learning and genius, of piety and zeal. The reigns of Whitgift, Ban- croft, and Laud were unmolested by cares so rude AS THOSE OF EVANGELIZING THE ARTISANS AND PEA- SANTRY. Jewel and Bull, Hall and Donne, Hooker and Taylor, lived and wrote for their peers, and for future ages, but not FOR THE COMMONALTY OF THEIR OWN. Yet was not Christianity bereft in England of her dis- 9 130 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. tinctive and glorious privilege. It was still the religion of the poor. Amidst persecution, contempt, and penury, the Puritans had toiled and suffered, and had not rarely died in their service."* I know not that a more damning charge could be brought against a Church than this of Sir James Stephen against the Church of England. I for one am saddened as I read the great sermons and other books of the great and good men named, in recollection of their utter forgetfulness of 'the people.' It is to exalt the ecclesiastical institute called the Church at the expense of Christ, not to mourn that a pseudo-apostolical succession vaunted by Whitgift and Bancroft and Laud was not rather exchanged for a succession of saintly Workers (large-brained and large-hearted too) in the line of the Puritans. As it was, that the ' Commonalty ' of England, the vast body of 'the people,' were cared for at all, is mainly due to the genuinely apostolical labours * Edinburgh Review, vol. Ixx., pp. 1 83-4 : also in " Collective Essays." RICHARD BAXTER. 131 of men of the stamp of Richard Baxter, as cxemphfied in Kidderminster. That the Bible was brought into their homes and made famih'ar as " household words " was also due to them. That FAMILY WORSHIP was set up in entire streets, was due to them. That there was Christian literature provided, cheap and easily- read and understood and yearningly relished, is similarly due to them. For in the dark interregnum between the gracious books of the " preaching " and " lecturing " Puritans and the paganizing usurpation of Laud and onward, only such home-speaking cheap books as Richard Baxter's and later Puritans and Nonconformists kept the ' lamp alive ' in the thick darkness. Except his historical-contro- versial treatises, which were addressed to those in " high places," — for he feared to close with no antagonist, — the writings of our illustrious Worthy were ' practical,' and their supreme aim was usefulness in building up character and in nurturing the spiritual life and in guarding from the errors of contending factions and fractions. 132 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. I reckon it the glory of Richard Baxter that in the long roll of his Works so large a proportion were of the homeliest and most plain-spoken type, and brimming over with Bible texts and references. I look upon my complete collection of his Works — down to his single sheets and two and three sheets — as a treasure not to be outweighed by much more lauded literature. A light of life lies to my vision on such as these : — " The Right Method for Peace of Conscience and Spiritual Comfort" (1653): "Making Light of Christ" (1655): " Gildas Salvianus ; or^ The Reformed Pastor " (1656) : " The Safe Religion ; or, Three Disputations for the Reformed Religion against Popery" (1657): "A Treatise of Conversion" (1657): "A Call to the Unconverted " (1657) : The Crucifying of the World by the Cross of Christ " (1658) : "Directions and Persuasions to a Sound Conversion" (1658): "A Treatise of Self-Denial" (1659): "The Vain Religion of the Formal Hypocrite" (1659): "The Fool's Prosperity" (1659): "The Last Walk of a RICHARD BAXTER. 133 Believer" (1659): "The Mischief of Self- Ignorance and the Benefits of Self-Acquaint- ance " (1662): "A Saint or a Brute" (1662): " Now or Never " (1663) : " Divine Life " (1664) : "Two Sheets for Poor Families" (1665): "A Sheet for the Instruction of the Sick during the Plague" (1665): "Directions to the Con- verted for their Establishment, Growth and Perseverance" (1669): "The Life of Faith " (1670): -'The Divine Appointment of the Lord's Day"(i67i): "The Duty of Heavenly Meditation Revived " (1671): "How far Holi- ness is the Design of Christianity" (1671): "God's Goodness Vindicated" (1671): "More Reasons for the Christian Religion and no Reason against it" (1672): "Full and Easy Satisfaction which is the True and Safe Reli- gion " (1674) : "The Poor Man's Family Book" (1674) : " Reasons for Ministerial Plainness and Fidelity " (1676) : "A Sermon for the Cure of Melancholy" (1682): "Compassionate Counsel to Young Men" (1682): "How to do Good to Many " (1682) : " Family Catechism " (1683) : 134 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. Obedient Patience" (1683): "Farewell Ser- mon prepared to have been preached to his hearers at Kidderminster at his departure, but forbidden " (1683) : " Dying Thoughts " (1683) : '* Unum Necessarium " (1685) : " The Scripture Gospel Defended" (1690): "A Defence of Christ and Free Grace" (1690): "Monthly Preparations for the Holy Communion " (1696) : " The Mother's Catechism " (1701) : and "What we must do to be Saved" (1692-1868). Who may attempt to estimate the good, the undying good, such matterful and richly Scriptural books did wherever they went in their thou- sands and even tens of thousands ? * Besides, he gave away enormous quantities of his own and kindred good books. Nor, as literature per se do the books of Richard Baxter need * I ask that it be noted here that I include others along with Baxter as creators of our popular Christian literature. Earlier there was glorious old Latimer, and many cheap tracts and single sheets about in the world. Contemporary there was Flavel and Durant and others noticeable. Still, no one man did so much for popular Christian literature as Baxter. RICHARD BAXTER. to fear comparison with contemporaneous. I rejoice to be able to adduce hereon the testimony of a Master, the present Arch- bishop of Dubh'n — and what he thus says of the " Saint's Everlasting Rest " holds substantially of everything he wrote. " Let me mention here," observes his Grace, " before entering into deeper matters, one formal merit which it eminently possesses. I refer to that without which, I suppose, no book ever won a permanent place in the literature of a nation, and which I have no scruple in ascribing to it — I mean its style. A great admirer of Baxter has recently suggested a doubt whether he ever recast a sentence, or bestowed a thought on its rhythm, and the balance of its several parts ; state- ments of his own make it tolerably certain that he did not. As a consequence he has none of those bravura passages which must have cost Jeremy Taylor, in his " Holy Living and Dying," and elsewhere, so much of thought and pains, for such do not come of themselves and unbidden, to the most accomplished masters 136 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. of language. But for all this, there reigns in Baxter's writings, and not least in " The Saint's Rest," a robust and masculine eloquence ; nor do these want from time to time rare and unsought felicity of language, which, once heard, can scarcely be forgotten. In regard indeed of the choice of words, the book might have been written yesterday. There is hardly one which has become obsolete ; hardly one which has drifted away from the meaning which it has in his writings. This may not be a great matter ; but it argues a rare insight, conscious or un- conscious, into all which was truest, into all which was furthest removed from affectation and untruthfulness in the language, that after more than two hundred years so it should be ; and one may recognise here an element, not to be overlooked, of the abiding popu- larity of the book."* Fine and finely put! Even more might be said. To-day his style * Baxter and " The Saint's Rest " in " Companions for the Devout Life": 1877, p. 89. RICHARD BAXTER. 137 seems to me a model of a spoken as distin- guished from a merely written style. He wrote as Paul did ; and even his letters are all oraiioiis. I would concentrate attention on this double service rendered by Baxter {a) As a Preacher and ' Pastor ' to ' the people,' {b) as the virtual creator of popular Christian literature. What Prelate or Dean or Canon or Preacher within the length and breadth of the National Church may for a single moment be put in comparison with this single man in either of these ? This is not, I reiterate, matter polemical, but matter of fact. All honour and gratitude, therefore, to Richard Baxter for that seraphic fervour that enabled him to achieve so abundant and mea- surelessly blessed work in his long day and generation. A third thing in Baxter that has — as I think — a living message for to-day, is his FAITH IN THE POWER OF CONSCIENCE IN OUR MORAL NATURE. No more than Savonarola earlier, or George Whitefield later, was he a man of 138 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. exceptional intellect qua intellect. He had, be- yond all debate, a sinewy, penetrative, almost morbidly acute brain. There are in his contro- versial writings multiplied evidences of special philosophical-metaphysical resources and apti- tudes, and insight that has the look of intuition. I question if a shrewder, swifter, more inde- ceivable mind existed in England in his age. He looks within and without, above and be- neath and all round, and in far perspective beyond his subject-matter. It must be con- ceded that — " Other avenues stretching away to the right hand and to the left, he cannot always resist the temptation to explore ; and this though they may lead him far away from that which is his more immediate concern. Above all, let him only find himself in the neighbourhood of some perplexed question of the Schools, such a one as has tasked and divided the noblest intellects of Christendom for centuries, which has set Thomist against Scotist, Realist against Nominalist, and is likely to do the same to the end of time : — for these controversies are not dead, they have only a little shifted their ground ; — and at once, like the war-horse of Job, he smells the battle afar off, ' the thunder of the captains and the shouting,' and RICHARD BAXTER. 139 nothing will content him till he finds himself in their midst."* His many opponents discovered, to their cost, that they needed to be agile in weapon-use and wary in guard to escape his blows. He gave very much harder strokes than any he received. Some of the ' Dignitaries ' are made to look extremely foolish under his irony and vehement exposures and unhesitating confutation. But it were to vindicate Richard Baxter's claims from a mistaken standpoint to magnify his intellect as compared with other contemporaries ; e.g. it is John Howe's intellectual sznc^Xty as distinguished from mere piety, the grandeur and richness and momentum of his thinking, that — as we have seen — is the inevitable impression left on every capable, modest and " considering " reader. You are not thus struck with Baxter's thinking, ex- cept here and there at long intervals — rathei" with its home-coming to men's businesses and bosoms. He was more of a Schoolman, less of a Philosopher than Howe. He himself * Ibid., p. 88. I40 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. writes: — " Next to practical divinity, no books so suited with my disposition as Aquinas, Scotus, Durandus, Ockham and their disciples" (Rel. Baxt.)* Further : The facts of his Life— like those of John Bunyan, and perhaps of the supremest man of all literature, William Shakespeare — go to show that he had nothing like academic train- ing. He had " little Latin and less Greek." His Latin folio swarms with evidences of defective scholarship. SiR James Stephen thus sum- marizes his school-training : " The three remain- ing years of his pupilage .... were spent at the endowed school at Wroxeter, which he quitted at the age of nineteen, destitute of all mathematical and physical science — ignorant of Hebrew — a mere smatterer in Greek, and pos- sessed of as much Latin as enabled him in after life to use it with reckless facility."! Correspon- dent with this is the absence of laden margins, * See Abp. Trench's Lecture, as before, for excellent criticism on Baxter's ' School' affinities, etc. t Edinburgh Review, as before, p. 182. RICHARD BAXTER. 141 albeit you come on the most uncouth Latin names and authorities from whom he had spelled out their teaching. I accentuate the fact. His circumstances explain it. I do not — need I say — infer from it that Baxter was without a certain culture. "A mind so prolific, and which yielded such early fruit, could not advance to manhood without much well-directed culture."* Neither do I infer from it that we ought now to pay less heed to the mastery of the "ancient learning." Contrariwise, I hold it is presumption in these days for any Church not to aim at a thoroughly educated and disciplined ministry and Sunday- school workers. Personally I regard that minis- ter of the Gospel as underfurnished who cannot use his Hebrew Old Testament and Greek Sep- tuagint and Greek New Testament with entire mastery. That would be my minimum ; and the maximum can hardly be set too high, cceteris paribus. But Richard Baxter's life-work, based fundamentally on his English Bible, has surely a message for us to-day. Does it not put a re- * Ibid. 142 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. proving finger on a weak spot of our modes of preaching? Does it not suggest reform in our presentation of 'the truth ' ? He had — I urge — no sovran intellect, he had little scholarship or culture proper ; but he was the most successful preacher and winner of souls to Christ and nur- turer of won souls, that England ever has had. What is the explanation ? I answer that his tem- perament ennobled his intellect; his seraphic fervour did brain-work and heart -work in opulent amalgam. I answer again, that though he was no scholar and never was at a University (by no blame of his own), he was an omnivorous reader of books, and had a peculiar faculty of swiftly extracting their innermost marrow. So that, alike in his preaching and in his books, he is most apt with "apples of gold in basket-work of silver," from a wide range. For myself I have found quickening and instruction from his marginal words, and confirmations of his own arguments and pleadings. But neither of these uncovers the whole secret of his power. I repeat and press, — RICHARD BAXTER. 143 He had faith in the human conscience. Reasoning was all very well, imagination and fancy were all very well, spoils from good and learned books were all very well ; — but the ultimate thing was that, in preaching or writing of the truth that he found in the Bible, he relied on the reality of conscience. He should have said ' amen ' to Bishop Butler's classical words on conscience : " Had it strength as it had right, had it power as it had manifest authority, it would govern the world." * Con- sequently his works, broadly regarded, are appeals — not to intellect, not to imagination, not even to the affections, but emphatically to conscience. That was his real force. There he felt he had an ally for God and for the great facts and doctrines and messages of the Gospel. Therefore throughout this is his sus- taining hope, viz., that the Spirit of God, taking " the things of Christ " proclaimed by * Sermon i., on Conscience. The whole paragraph about conscience is vital. 144 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. him from the Word, does meet a response in every human conscience. It is impossible to over-state the fulness, the opulence, the variety or the wistfulness, the yearning, the in- tensity, the seraphic fervour of his addresses to the human conscience. If only he can get lodgement there for his present truth he has hope ; if only he can obtain hearers through their moral nature, to the great words of God in Christ, he counts on success. He is con- vinced that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred that issue in conversion, i.e., that are won to believe the gospel and are led to Christ, the thing is done through Divine dealing with the conscience. Hence, though in his Episcopal as against Presbyterian, and in his Papal and Quaker and Independent controversies, he meets his antagonists in their own chosen re- gions, and proves their match ; e.g., almost playfully toppling down even such an one as Dr. John Owen ; * yet as a Preacher and as * With all his intellect and learning, Owen was singu- RICHARD BAXTER. a practical Writer, he presses home, — " Tlius saith the Lord," "It is written." I would revive Richard Baxter's faith in conscience. For whatever be the relation of the Christian ministry to feeling, to the information and discipline of the intellect, and to all the parts of our complex nature, there can be no doubt but that — absolutely — it has to do with con- science. The Christian minister's chief function,, as dealing with men for God, is to manifest the truth before their consciences ; and in his pas- toral work, as distinct from his evangelistic, he is to arouse, sustain, make ^mighty that ' rectorial ' power in the human breast. Students of SiR William Hamilton of Edinburgh remember the golden-lettered motto of the famous class- room : " On earth there is nothing great but man : in man, nothing great but mind." I feel that I am safe in going farther and adding, larly vulnerable to so agile an opponent as Baxter. His oppressive style was also terribly against him. None the less is John Owen foremost of the foremost rank in weight and worth. 10 146 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. ' In mind, nothing is greater than con- science.' I would have us all grasp and realize this. If it be done it will save a man from that dreary childishness of Ritualism ; it will save him from that rhetoric that passes itself off for eloquence ; it will save him from sensationalism ; it will save him from that cold-blooded logic that goes on splitting hairs and constructing syllogisms before men who are dead in tres- passes and sins ; it will save him from that offence to our deepest spiritual instincts, ' beautiful prayers,' — almost as sad as vulgar and bellowing prayers : (we do not want ex- hibitions of ' fine taste ' in prayer, but some- thing inspired of Christ : reverence will not be awanting in that case) ; it will save him from himself; it will give him a Divine courage. Who will make him afraid ? The rich man ? the proud man the learned man } the political man ? the infidel man ? the sneering scientist } Nay ! On the contrary, they shall one and all bow and quail as in the presence of the righteous judgment of God. In this matter RICHARD BAXTER. 147 of dealing with conscience, let tlie preacher put forth all his knowledge, wisdom, learning, genius (if he have it), strength of manhood, fervour of nature, — fearless of all consequences, 6'.^., of ' splitting up his party,' ' damaging his usefulness,' ' giving occasion to the adver- sary,' and so forth, and so forth. Do not let him zig-zag, with the character of being ' safe,' as one who knows how to preserve his popu- larity and his salary ; do not let him * cheep ' — and I use the expressive Scotch word even if Englishmen do not understand it— when he ought to "lift up his voice like a trumpet."* Even should he die by the roadside, let him earn an epitaph like this, " Here lies , who never feared the face of man." All ^this, I must however observe, to be effective, must be combined with TENDERNESS AND SYMPATHY. Richard Baxter was in these pre-eminent. He ' melted ' as he rebuked ; * ' Cheep ' = chirp or chirrup— a thin scrannel voice and sanctimonious tone implied. 148 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. he quivered as he accused ; he yearned as he warned ; he pitied as he condemned; he urged and entreated as he showed the peril of delay. Consciences may be dealt with inhumanly. Your fire-and-brimstone men do that : indeed at times put them on a gridiron — over a painted fire : the inhumanness real enough if the fire be only painted. Logic may be very inhuman — sooth to say, Calvinistic logic, with its inferences and crotchets of interpretation exalted into ' inspired principles,' not unsel- dom is. Some of the comfort administered to mourners by men I know, and in books, strikes me as inhuman. With Baxter there is no merciless pushing of conclusions, or of facts of Scripture and human life. There is a consistent vein of HUMANITY all through. Let some brief bits from three of his finest books illustrate. In the " Saint's Everlasting Rest " he says : — " But when in the other world, love meets love, it will not be like Joseph and his brethren, who lay upon one another's necks weeping : it will be loving and rejoicing, not loving and sorrowing." RICHARD BAXTER. 149 It seems to me he touches us here with that " touch of nature which makes the whole world kin." Other two quotations relate to the death of his wife — that truest and noblest of ' elect ' ladies. "Perhaps," he says, "love and grief may rnake me speak more than many will think fit." And then he goes on: "And I will not be judged by any that never felt the like." Again, speaking of his wife's monument in Christ Church, he says : — " But Christ's Church on earth is liable to those changes of which the Jerusalem above is in no danger. In the doleful flames of London, 1666, the fall of the church broke the marble all to pieces ; so that it proved no lasting monument. I hope this paper monument, erected by one who is following even at the door, in some passion indeed of love and grief, but in sincerity of truth, will be more publicly useful and durable than that marble stone was." Once more : his relentless and vulgarly libel- lous opponent, Bagshawe, died ' in prison,' and on the tidings reaching Baxter he closed their contention thus : — " While we wrangle here in the dark, we are dying. ISO REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. and passing to the world that will decide all our con- troversies, and the safest passage thither is by peaceable holiness." Is there not a fine, tender, holy, sweet human- ness in this ? I could easily multiply proofs that 'stern ' is just about the most absurd and false word possible to apply to Richard Baxter.* Equally decisive is the 'testimony' of Dr. Bates in his noble funeral sermon, e.g. : — " His prayers were an effusion of the most lively, melting expressions of his intimate, ardent affections to God : from the abundance of the heart, the lips spake. His soul took wing for heaven, and swept up the souls of others with him. Never did I see or hear a holy minister * I must note however that in his reverence for con- science (other people's) and tenderness, he grew. In the outset, I think it is clear that he found it difficult to make allowance for persons who conscientiously differed from him on Church questions, and that he did not easily learn the rule, ' Put yourself in his place.' Barclay, in his Religious Societies in the CommonweaWi (p. 333), speaks of how he grew in grace in this respect, and cites some of his gracious language owning a change of view about the Holy Spirit, so bringing him into more sympathy with his early opponents the Quakers. RICHARD BAXTER. 131 address himself to God with more reverence and humility, with respect to His glorious greatness ; never with more zeal and fervency, correspondent to the infinite moment of his requests, nor with more filial reliance on the Divine mercy. " In his sermons there was a rare union of arguments and motives, to convince the mind and gain the heart ; all the fountains of reason and persuasion were open to his discerning eye. There was no resisting the force of his discourses without denying reason and Divine revelation. He had a marvellous feUcity and copiousness in speaking. There was a noble negligence in his style ; for his great mind could not stoop to the affected eloquence of words. He despised flashy oratory ; but his expressions were clear and powerful, so convincing the understanding, so enter- ing into the soul, so engaging the affections, that those were as deaf as adders who were not charmed by so wise a charmer. He was animated with the Holy Spirit, and breathed celestial fire, to inspire heat and life into dead sinners, and to melt the obdurate in their frozen tombs." I must not withhold part of the vivid sum- mary of Orme : — " Baxter's severity never partakes of the nature of misanthropy. He never seems to take pleasure in wound- ing. He employs the knife with an unsparing hand ; but that hand always appears to be guided by a tender, sympathising heart. He denounces sin in language of tremendous energy, and exposes its hideous nature by the light of the flames of hell itself ; but it is to urge the sinner 152 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. to flee from the wrath to come, and to lay hold on the hope set before him. He never appears as the minister of Divine vengeance, come to execute wrath, and to make men miserable before the time ; but as an angel of mercy brandishing a flaming sword to drive men to the tree of life. In his own words : — " ' He preach'd, as never sure to preach again, And as a dying man to dying men.' " * Beside Baxter, Jeremy Taylor is a monk, and even JOSEPH Alleine, hard. This allegiance to conscience, and faith in it, made the Bible to be, to him, without a sha- dow of doubt, God's Book. God had spoken, ay, speaks, in it, God's mind and heart and purpose are revealed there. God's House is a place of audience and communion with God. Prayer does reach Him. Faith does grasp Him. The " exceeding great and precious promises " are realities to be asked and counted on. Sanctification onward from conversion is no dream. God is no dumb or deaf or in- different Governor of the universe, Who has * Life, p. 486 ; Poet. Frag., p. 30. RICHARD BAXTER. 153 wound it up like a watch and slipped it under His pillow and gone to sleep till the Day of Doom arrives. And so, as among everlasting verities, Richard Baxter unladened himself of his ' burden,' as old Hebrew prophets did ; stood up to declare that so-and-so was God's eternal truth. No more than does the Bible itself, did he stand in the pulpit to prove, or to debate, or to reason- out. Book on book he gave to the like of that, and his confutations of error and unbelief are simply priceless for their argumentative weight and solid debating worth ; but as a Preacher he urged the ' Revelation ' of God, the words of God, the truth of God, the Gospel out of the infinite heart of God. So doing, that seraphic fervour of which we have already written, drove home his sermons with more than mortal impetus. Awed, rapt, believing, expectant, declarative, dying-like himself, he took a grip of men's thoughts and feelings and lives ; made what was still divine in them — their conscience — answer, ay reverberate the facts and truths and sanctions he pressed upon them. 154 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. A subsidiary element in Baxter's faith in con- science and his addresses to it deserves passing notice. I refer to the chastity of his presentations of ' the truth.' Nowhere else that I know will you find anatomy so trenchant of fallen human nature, and yet so modest. You have detection of disease, and ' lusts,' and sophistries, and miseries, and self-accusations, portrayed with terrifying exactitude ; but there is no touch of the morbid, or of that suggestiveness of sinning that characterises Roman Catholic and modern ' High Church ' literature. His manly, gentle- manly nature abhorred ' confessional ' lines of thought and feeling. He is vivid but chaste, intense but consolatory, faithful but persuasive. This DECLARATIVE preaching of Richard Baxter was doubtless sharpened by his realizing as few have done that a Christian church — hum- blest ' conventicle ' as well as cathedral — is in very truth God's house. There he could not but have a kind of disdain of objectors and objections that elsewhere, with his naturally combative temperament, he was always ready to meet with RICHARD BAXTER. their own weapons. His books reveal that he had fought out his conckisions, wrestled on the sharp peaks of despair (the 'dark mountains') for his beliefs, struggled as for very life with spectres from the abyss of doubt, and enigmas, and perplexities, and mysteries of being, wept himself into tenderness over the hard facts of human existence and possibilities of destiny. It is all the more pathetic that in the pulpit he leaves doubt and fear and anguish and question- ing behind him, — Abraham-like going up ' to worship.' It is to me infinitely affecting to mark the sharp line of division between no little of his controversies and his sermons. I read the grand seventy-third Psalm of Asaph more understandingly, as I find Richard Baxter so absolute, so joyous, so triumphant, so declarative and simply a 'voice' for God in the pulpit. The clear piercing light of the Word kindled all about him, and the still more piercing light of the Divine Face, and so he was lifted above all intercepting mists and all disturbing forces. Yet with all his declarativeness (called by some IS6 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. foolishly dogmatism), what fine and broad human Cathoh'city there was ! I am not more sure that we need Richard Bax- ter's seraphic fervour to-day than I am that we would do well to combine with our methods his faith in the human conscience and consequent declarative preaching. I have not a syllable to say against the most intellectual preaching that can be commanded. The loftiest intellect may well be dedicated to this grandest of human functions when a true man fills it. I regard any preaching that does not address and seek to convince our reason, as without the necessary basis of solid fact. I have little liking for either, on the one hand effusive sentimentalism, or on the other gushing exclamatoriness. I do not think the pulpit is a fitting place for that rhetorical elocution that cheats itself into a belief that it is oratory, or for that word-painting that weens it is imagination, or for gorgeous phrase-making that seeks to sensationalize the Gospel. I am disposed to think — though so far as I know my own heart, uncensoriously — that ' Christian RICHARD BAXTER. 157 Evidence' literature has been sadly overdone. I must regard the seven-fold threshed-out contro- versies on inspiration and cognate topics, as mere dealing with the husk. I desiderate, in fine, DECLARATIVE preaching in the faith that the Bible vindicates its own inspiration. I long for a return to Richard Baxter's faith in human conscience. I would fain give impulse to our younger preachers and students, who are destined to take our vacated places, towards being fired with his seraphic fervour, and his fearless state- ment of all that " is written." I am anxious to see them with bearing-down power asserting, not arguing, the fundamental facts and doctrines of the Bible, or accrediting them equally with the facts and teachings of the outward world (on which God never breaks silence, or vindicates), and as realizing that they have witness in man's moral nature alike in its aspirations and unrest, in its yearnings and sorrows, in its hopes and terrors, in its strength and mutableness. I want less — oh, infinitely less — recognition of the awe- less and pragmatical objections and oppositions 158 REPRESENTATIVE NO.XCOXFORMISTS. of " science falsely so-called," and a more reso- lute sounding out of what has been revealed and declared. I seek Richard Baxter's Biblical self-assertativeness, Biblical affirmation, Biblical glorious assumptions, if you will, Biblical si- lences, to be held fast and held faster, and so that in the very manner and bearing it shall be demonstrated that the Preacher tells of what he knows, testifies of what he has experienced — leaving ALL in the keeping of the human hearts and consciences within which they are placed, and in that of the ever-watching and magnani- mously patient Holy Spirit, Who knows where every spoken or printed word falls, and nurtures every seed of the Word to its springing, bloom- ing, and fruitage. As the ' application ' of all this — already hinted at in the lecture on JOHN HoWE — it is to me a sorrow and a bewilderment, that so vast a number of preachers and Sunday School teachers content themselves with informing. That is to say, I miss from our present-day sermons, to a deplorable extent, the "applica^ RICHARD BAXTER. 159 tions" all round, with which Baxter and his compeers invariably closed them. There may- have been, perchance, disproportionate length and exaggerated divisions and sub-divisions. Yet withal there were point-blank shots, direct, personal, unmistakable speaking straight (never the meanness and cowardice of at) the individual with a "Thou art the man" as of old. The trains of foregoing exposition and thinking, the riches of illustrative and anecdotical instruction, the illumined and engrandeured message, were all grasped in concluding appeals and warnings, and cogencies and urgencies, and importunities of declaration and enforcement. Now how all too often is the sermon huddled up without any attempt to individualize or to send arrowily home to each hearer what has been spoken. I am more and more satisfied that herein we are losers, and must return to the old-fashioned ways. With faith in the Word, and faith in human conscience, and faith in a present God, and Baxterian fervour, I should count on new life, new energy, new aggressiveness, new con^ i6o REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. quests. The old ' applications ' demand revival, not neglect. It needeth that we return on an- cient forms. It is the thing I urge. It is the poor stopping short at information, I lament. I must give examples of Baxter's preaching confirmatory of what I have stated. In 1658 he published " The Crucifying of the World by the Cross of Christ." It was originally an Assize sermon ; and the book is dedicated to Thomas Foley, Esq., High Sheriff of the county. Let us realize the assembled Court and the impression of these words as delivered with his "soft, flexible, melodious voice" and seraphic fervour : — " Honourable, worshipful, and all well-beloved, it is a weighty employment that occasioneth your meeting here to-day. The estates and lives of men are in your hands. But it is another kind of judgment which you are all hastening towards : when judges and juries, the accusers and accused, must all appear upon equal terms, for the final decision of a far greater cause. The case that is then and there to be determined, is not whether you shall have lands or no lands, life or no life (in our natural sense) ; but whether you shall have heaven or hell, sal- vation, or damnation, an endless life of glory with God RICHARD BAXTER. i6i and the Redeemer, and the angels of heaven, or an endless life of torment with devils and ungodly men. As sure as you now sit on those seats, you shall shortly all appear before the Judge of all the world, and there receive an irreversible sentence, to an unchangeable state of happi- ness or misery. This is the great business that should presently call up your most serious thoughts, and set all the powers of your souls on work for the most effectual preparation ; that if you are men, you may quit yourselves like men, for the preventing of that dreadful doom which unprepared souls must there expect. The greatest of your secular affairs are but dreams and toys to this. Were you at every assize to determine causes of no lower value than the crowns and kingdoms of the monarchs of the earth, it were but as children's games to this. If any man of you believe not this, he is worse than the devil that tempteth him to unbelief; and let him know that unbelief is no prevention, nor will put off the day, or hinder his appearance ; but ascertain his condemnation at that appearance. " He that knows the law and the fact, may know before your assize, what will become of every prisoner, if the proceedings be all just, as in our case they will certainly be. Christ will judge according to His laws ; know therefore whom the law condemneth or justifieth, and you may know whom Christ will condemn or justify. And seeing all this is so, doth it not concern us all to make a speedy trial of ourselves in preparation to this final trial I shall for your own sakes therefore, take the boldness, as the officer of Christ, to summon you to appear before yourselves, and keep an assize this day in your II 1 62 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. own souls, and answer at the bar of conscience, to what shall be charged upon you. Fear not the trial ; for it is not conclusive, final, or a peremptory irreversible sentence that must now pass. Yet slight it not, for it is a necessary preparative to that which is final and irreversible. Con- seciuentially, it may prove a justifying accusation, an absolving condemnation, and if you proceed to execution, a saving, cjuickening death, which I am now persuading you to undergo. The whole world is divided into two sorts of men : one that love God above all, and live for Him ; and the other that love the flesh and world above all, and live to them. One that seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness ; another that seek first the things of this life. One that mind and savour the things of the flesh and of man ; the other that mind and savour most the things of the Spirit and of God. One that account all things dung and dross that they may win Christ ; another that make light of Christ in comparison of their business, and riches, and pleasures in the world. One, that live by sight and sense upon present things; another that live by faith upon things invisible. One, that have their conversation in heaven, and live as stran- gers upon earth ; another that mind earthly things, and are strangers to heaven. One, that have in resolution forsaken all for Christ, and the hope of a treasure in heaven ; another, that resolve to keep somewhat here though they venture and forsake the heavenly reward, and will go away sorrowful that they cannot have both. One, that being born of the flesh is but flesh ; the other, that being born of the Spirit, is spirit. One, that live as without God in the world ; the other, that live as without RICHARD BAXTER. 163 the seducing world in God, and in and by the subservient world to God. One, that have ordinance and means of grace as if they had none ; the other, that have houses, lands, wives, as if they had none. One, that believe as if they believed not, and love God as if they loved Him not, and pray as if they prayed not,— as if the fruit of these were but a shadow ; the other, that weep as if they wept not for worldly things, and rejoice as if they rejoiced not. One, that have Christ as not possessing Him, and use Him and His name as but abusing them ; the other, that buy as if they possessed not, and use the world as not abusing it. One, that draw near to God with their lips when their hearts are far from Him; the other, that corporally converse with the world when their hearts are far from it. One, that serve God, who is a Spirit, with carnal service, and not in spirit and truth ; the other, that use the world itself spiritually, and not in a carnal, worldly manner. In a word, one sort are children of this world ; the other are the children of the world to come, and heirs of the heavenly kingdom. One sort have their portion in this life, and the other have God for their portion. One sort have their good things in this lifetime, and their reward here ; the other have their evil things in this life, and live in hope of the everlasting reward.* In another vein is his "Walking with God." It is full of beauty, and is instinct with his devotional force, as witness; — * Works, by Orme, vol. ix., pp. 431-433. i64 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. " ' To walk with God,' he says, ' is a word so high, that I should have feared the guilt of arrogance in using it, if I had not found it in the Holy Scriptures. It is a word that importeth so high and holy a frame of soul, and expresseth such high and holy actions, that the naming of it stiiketh my heart with reverence, as if I had heard the voice to Moses, " Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground." Methinks he that shall say to me, Come see a man that walks with God, doth call me to see one that is next unto an angel or glorified soul. It is a far more reverend object in mine eye than ten thousand lords or princes, consi- dered only in their fleshly glory. It is a wiser action for people to run and crowd together to see a man that walks with God, than to see the pompous train of princes, their entertainments, or their triumph. Oh happy man that walks with God, though neglected and contemned by all about him ! What blessed sights doth he daily see ! What ravishing tidings, what pleasant melody doth he daily hear, unless it be in his swoons or sickness ! What delectable food doth he daily taste ! He seeth, by faith, the God, the glory which the blessed Spirits see at hand by nearest intuition ! He seeth that in a glass, and darkly, which they behold with open face ! He seeth the glorious Majesty of his Creator, the eternal King, the Cause of causes, the Composer, Upholder, Preserver, and Governor of all worlds ! He beholdeth the wonder- ful methods of His providence ; and what he cannot reach to see, he admireth, and waiteth for the time when that also shall be open to his view ! He seeth by faith the world of spirits, the hosts that attend the throne RICHARD BAXTER. 165 of God ; their perfect righteousness, their full devoted- ness to God ; their ardent love, their flaming zeal, their ready and cheerful obedience, their dignity and shining glory, in which the lowest of them exceed that which the disciples saw on Moses and Elias, when they appeared on the holy mount and talked with Christ ! He hears by faith the heavenly concert, the high and harmonious songs of praise, the joyful triumphs of crowned saints, the sweet commemorations of the things that were done and suffered on earth, with the praises of Him that redeemed them by His blood, and made them kings and priests unto God. Herein he hath sometimes a sweet foretaste of the everlasting pleasures which, though it be but little, as Jonathan's honey on the end of his rod, or as the clusters of grapes which were brought from Canaan into the wilderness ; yet they are more excellent than all the delights of sinners."* Again : Here is another passage which re- minded an able Essayist of the spirit in which those who stand by the sea of glass before the throne, cry down to man, whilst looking up to God :— " ' Who would not fear and glorify Thee, Thou King of saints ; for Thou only art holy !' It is this : — ' God is so * Works, as before, vol. xiii., pp. 242, 243. 1 66 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. abundantly and wonderfully represented to us in all His works, as will leave us under the guilt of the most in- excusable contempt, if we overlook Him, or live as without Him in the world. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. Cannot you see that, which all the world re- vealeth ? nor hear that, which all the world proclaimeth ? O sing ye forth the honour of His name ; make His praise glorious. Can we pass Him by, that is every- where present, and by every creature represented to us ? Can we forget Him, when all the world are our remem- brancers Can we stop our ears against the voice of heaven and earth ? Can we be ignorant of Him, when the whole creation is our teacher ? Can we overlook that holy, glorious name, which is written so legibly upon all things our eyes ever beheld, that nothing but blindness, sleepiness, or distraction, could possibly keep us from discerning it ? " ' I have many times wondered, that, as the eye is dazzled so with the beholding of the greatest light, that it can scarcely perceive the shining of a lesser, so the glorious, transcendent majesty of the Lord, doth not even overwhelm our understandings, and so transport and take us up, as that we scarce observe or remember anything else. For naturally the greatest objects of our sense are apt to make us insensible, at that time, to the smaller ; and our exceeding great business is apt to make us utterly forget and neglect those (things) that are exceed- ingly small. And, oh, what nothings are the best and greatest of the creatures, in comparison with God ! And RICHARD BAXTER. what toys and trifles are all our other businesses in the world, in comparison of the business we have with Him ! " ' But I have been stopped in these admirations by considering that the wise Creator hath fitted and ordered all His creatures according to the use He designeth them to. And therefore, as the eye must be receptive only of so much light as is proportioned to its use and pleasure ; and must be so distant from the sun, that its light may rather guide than blind us, and its heat rather quicken than consume us ; so God hath made our understanding capable of no other knowledge of Him here than what is suited to the work of holiness. Our souls, in this lantern of a body, must see Him through so thick a glass as not to distract us, or take us off the works which He enjoineth us : and God and our souls shall be at such a distance, as that the proportionable light of His countenance may conduct us, and not overwhelm us ; and His love be so revealed as to quicken our desires, and draw us on to a better state, but not so as to make us utterly impatient of this world, and utterly weary of our lives. So that when I consider, that certainly all men would be dis- tracted, if their apprehensions of God were any whit answerable to the greatness of His majesty and glory, (the brain being not able to bear such high operations of the soul, nor the passions which would necessarily follow,) it much reconcileth my wondering mind to the wise and gracious providence of God, in setting innocent nature itself at such a distance from His glory, though it recon- cile me not to that doleful distance which is introduced by sin, and which is furthered by Satan, the world, and the flesh. 1 68 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. "'And it further reconcileth me to this disposure and will of the blessed God, when I consider that, if God, and lieaven, and hell, were as near and open to our appre- hensions, as the things are which we see and feel, this life would not be what God intended it to be, a life of trial and preparation for another. What trial would there be of any man's faith, or love, or obedience, or consistency, or self-denial, if we saw God stand by, or apprehended Him as if we saw Him? It would be no more praise- worthy or rewardable, to abhor all temptations to worldli- ness, ambition, gluttony, drunkenness, lust, cruelty, than it is for a man to be kept from sleeping that is pierced with thorns ; or for a man to forbear to drink a cup of melted gold, which he knows will burn out his bowels. " ' But though in this life we may neither hope for, nor desire, such overwhelming sensible apprehensions of God, as the rest of our faculties cannot answer, nor our bodies bear ; yet that our apprehensions of Him should be so base, and small, and dull, and inconstant, as to be borne down by the noise of worldly business, or by the presence of any creature, or by the tempting baits of sensuality, this is the more odious, by how much God is more great and glorious than the creature, and even because the use of the creature itself is but to reveal the gloiy of the Lord. It is no unjust dishonour or injury to the creature, 10 be accounted as nothing in comparison with God, that it may (thus) be able to do nothing against Him and His interests ; but to make such a nothing of the most glorious God, by our contemptuous forgetfulness or neglect, as that our apprehensions of Him cannot prevail against the sordid pleasures of the flesh, and against the richest baits RICHARD BAXTER. 169 of sin, and all the wrath and allurements of man, — this is but to make a god of dust, and dung, and nothing. It is a wonder that man's understanding can become so sottish as thus to wink the sun itself into a constant darkness. O sinful man, into how great a depth of ignorance, stupidity, and misery, art thou fallen?'"* I should scarcely be forgiven were I not to draw something from the " Saint's Everlasting Rest." I would preface my brief selection here with the finely catholic words of Archbishop Trench. He has quoted some choice bits, and remarks : — " Certainly these are good ; and it would be easy to multiply them a hundredfold ; but there is more and bettet and higher behind. That pathos which I ascribed to Baxter just now does not manifest itself merely in those calls to the unconverted, full as those are of an inward bleeding compassion. There are passages not a few toward the end of the book, strains of the most passionate devotion, in which he seeks to initiate such as have yielded themselves to his guidance into the deeper mysteries of Divine meditation, to furnish them with some of the materials on which the soul may work, to lead them upward and onward, step by step, from * See Baxter's " Practical Works," 4 vols. 8vo., vol. i., pp. xxix.-xxx. (Published by Virtue, 1838.) 170 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. strength to strength, from glory to glory, to the con- templation of the glory of God. Take, for example, this. He has spoken of some motives to love, and proceeds : — " ' But if yet thou feelest not thy love to work, lead thy heart further, and shew it yet more. Shew it the King of saints on the throne of His glory, who is the first and the last ; who liveth and was dead. Draw near and behold Him. Dost thou not hear His voice ? He that called Thomas to come near and to see the print of the nails, and to put his fingers into His wounds. He it is that calls to thee, Come near, and be not faithless but be- lieving. Look well upon Him. Dost thou not know Him ? Why, it is He that brought thee up from the pit of hell and purchased the advancement which thou must inherit for ever. And yet dost thou not know Him ? Why, His hands were pierced. His head was pierced, His side was pierced, His heart was pierced with the sting of thy sins, that by these marks thou mightest always know Him. Hast thou forgotten since He wounded Himself to cure thy wounds ; and let out His own blood to stop thy bleeding If thou know Him not by the face, the voice, the hands, if thou know Him not by the tears and bloody sweat, yet look nearer — thou mayest know Him by the heart. " ' Hast thou forgotten the time when thou wast weep- ing, and He wiped the tears from thine eyes ? when thou wast bleeding, and He wiped the blood from thy soul? when pricking cares and fears did grieve thee, and He did refresh thee and draw out the thorns ? Hast thou forgotten when thy folly did wound thy soul, and the RICHARD BAXTER. venomous guilt did seize upon thy heart ; when He sucked forth the mortal poison from thy soul, though therewith He drew it into His own? Oh how often hath He found thee sitting weeping like Hagar, while thou gavest up thy state, thy friends, thy life, yea, thy soul for lost ; and He opened to thee a well of conso- lation, and opened thine eyes also, that thou mightest see it. How oft hath He found thee in the posture of Elias, sitting down under the tree forlorn and solitary, and desiring rather to die than to live ; and He hath spread thee a table of relief from heaven, and sent thee away refreshed, and encouraged to His work. How oft hath He found thee in such a passion as Jonas, in thy peevish frenzy aweary of thy life ; and He hath not answered passion with passion, though He might indeed have done well to be angry, but hath mildly reasoned thee out of thy madness, and said, Dost thou well to be angry, and to repine against Me ? How often hath He set thee on watching and praying and repenting and believing, and when He hath returned, hath found thee fast asleep ; and yet He hath not taken thee at the worst, but instead of an angry aggravation of thy fault. He hath covered it over with the mantle of love, and prevented thy overmuch son'ow with a gentle excuse. The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak? How oft hath He been traduced in His cause or name, and thou hast (like Peter) denied Him at least by thy silence, while He hath stood in sight ; yet all the revenge He hath taken hath been a heart- melting look, and a silent remembering thee of thy fault by His countenance.' "And hear him once and only once more; as he 172 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. rebukes with the same passionate earnestness those who, loving God, do not love Him better ; who professing to seek, and in a sense seeking a heavenly country, are yet unwilling to reach it, and to find themselves (all life's tempest past) in the Fair Havens of the eternal rest : — " ' Ah foolish, wretched soul, doth every prisoner groan for freedom ? and every slave desire his jubilee ? and every sick man long for health ? and every hungry man for food, and dost thou alone abhor deliverance ? Doth the seaman long to see the land ? Doth the husbandman desire the harvest ? and the traveller long to be at home ? and the soldier long to win the field? And art thou loth to see thy labours finished ? and to receive the end of thy faith? and to obtain the things for which thou livest ? Are all thy sufferings only seeming ? have thy griefs and groans been only dreams ? If they were, yet methinks we should not be afraid of waiting ; fearful dreams are not delightful. Or is it not rather the world's delights that are all mere dreams and shadows ? Is not all its glory as the light of a glow-worm, a wandering fire ; yielding but small directing light and as little comforting heat in all our doubtful and sorrowful dark- ness. Or hath the world in these its latter days laid aside its ancient enmity? Is it become of late more kind? Who hath wrought this great change, and who hath made this reconciliation ? Surely not the great Reconciler. He hath told us in the world we shall have trouble, and in Him only we shall have peace. We may reconcile ourselves to the world (at our peril), but it will never reconcile itself to us. Oh foolish unworthy soul, RICHARD BAXTER. 173 who hadst rather dwell in this land of darkness than be at rest with Christ ; who hadst rather stay among the wolves, and daily suffer the scorpion's stings, than to praise the Lord with the Host of heaven ! If thou didst well know what heaven is, and what earth is, it would not be so.' " * I would only add that " Gildas Salvianus " is simply beyond price to the Minister of the Gospel and all Workers for Christ. Even Dean Goulburn's striking book of our own day is thin and formal beside it. A fourth thing in the life-work of Richard Baxter that suggests itself to me as a message for to-day is THE USE HE MADE OF THE English Bible alone. I have already expressed my own judgment and conviction as to an increased rather than a lessened scholarliness and culture. Had I my own way I should greatly widen our ministers' and students' culture. I wish it were as discreditable to them not to know, for example, our transcendent Elizabethan- * " Companions for the Devout Life," as before, p. 100, and pp. 100-3. 174 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. Jacobean literature as to be ignorant of the ancient classics. I have an idea also that in our colleges Arabic as a living language would be the best of all gateways by which to enter into Hebrew ; and I would add other Semitic tongues. But while I stand up for a richly and variously educated ministry, I can scarcely find words contemptuous enough for surface- show ' tinkering ' — whether in pulpit or Sunday- school — of our English Bible. To all intents and purposes it is the Bible of the English- speaking race, regarded broadly. It may safely be so. For the truest scholarship is the fore- most to admit that whilst in process of time corrections and revisions are inevitable, yet substantially the outcdme of the Jerusalem- Chamber long-continued labours will be a very miniminii of change. The revision probably will show a difference in the translation of aorists and prepositions and consistency in rendering the same original words by the same English word. No doubt various passages will be found to have a different meaning from RICHARD BAXTER. 175 what hitherto has been attached to them. But I do not think of anything that will even touch fundamental fact or doctrine. The tcxtus is another matter; but that is not in the province of the translator. But with reference even to it, wc need have no fear. No doubt, e.g., taking the Divinity of Christ, a revised text deprives us of some few proof-passages ; but the grand truth shines out the same as ever.* It were pity if it were otherwise. It was a measurelessly grander gift than the Translators themselves ever dreamed of that they gave in the Au- thorized Version. All honour to Tyndale and Coverdale and other pioneers in making the Hebrew and Greek ' speak English ; ' far be it from us to abate from their high-hearted service. But in itself, as an English Book, there is nothing to be placed in competition or even comparison with our present English Bible. Nicely true — up to the available texts of * This is simply saying that I have not less faith in the grand old Bible-truth because I use my Ginsburg and Tischendorff and Lachmann. 176 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. the period — to the originals, its English is the richest and finest and most musically idiomatic. How home-speaking and yet so far-brought ! how coloured of the Orient and nevertheless so Western ! how ancient and at the same time so youthful ! how grand and also simple ! how diverse in its congruousness, and how homogeneous in its diversity ! How definite and yet how wide it is ! how local and nevertheless cosmopolitan ! What a splendid history the English Bible has ! It was accepted as the Bible of Shake- speare and Bacon and MiLTON, and Sir Thomas Browne and John Selden. Its cloth-of-gold was worked by them into their supremest workmanship. Its words fitly uttered their noblest personal aspirations. When Oliver Cromwell in his war-tent read a Psalm ere he hurled his Ironsides against the Cavaliers, it was from his English Bible. It went across the wintry seas to " New England " with the Pilgrim Fathers, as before, in their exile to Holland. It was all the Bible the "immortal RICHARD BAXTER. 177 dreamer " ever knew. Scholars though they were, George Herbert and William Cowper clasp hands over the English Bible. The " Assembly of Divines " at Westminster — that added a book true in its deepest lines and most articulate teaching to the Bible, and that Presbyterians at least will not willingly let die — pondered over it — as later the 'Ejected' of 1660, when two thousand strong they resolved to leave their beloved National Church rather than violate conscience. In the lonely moors and bleak hill-sides of Scotland, the ' Cove- nanters ' wrestled with God through its golden- worded promises. John Howe hewed hence the * lively stones ' of his " Living Temple." Richard Baxter found here his " Saint's Ever- lasting Rest." Charles Wesley drew from it his " Songs of Zion " ; John Wesley his evangelical ' Gospel ' ; George Whitfield his burning appeals ; our own Church's forefathers on both sides of the Tweed, their soul-satisfying "Marrow of the Gospel." SiBBES plucked his "Bruised Reed" from the side of its "living 12 178 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. stream " ; Leighton fetched from it his unction ; Thomas Boston his "Fourfold State" and " Crook in the Lot." It was the English Bible Jonathan Edwards grasped when, as he dis- coursed of eternal realities, the great Church was transformed into a Bochim. It was it grand Dr. John Erskine called for when fronting the ' Moderates ' in the General Assembly he cried out, ' Rax [reach] me that Bible.' It was 'the one book' ("there is but one, Lockhart") that dying Sir Walter Scott asked his son-in-law to read to him. It was the English Bible whose strange revelation of himself to himself so moved Byron on receiving the memorable letter from John Sheppard. It has inspired our noblest eloquence, it has barbed our most epoch-making speeches, it has burnished our divinest poetry, it has given a tongue to our grandest music, it has been the beating heart of our sweetest hymns, it has been the soul of our greatest sermons, it has given imperishable watch-words in the fight for freedom, civil and religious, it has sustained RICHARD BAXTER. 179 patience in the darkest days, piercing the thick- est gloom with its light of immortal Hope. Thomas Chalmers and Edward Irving, Newman and Frederick Maurice and Robertson, Candlish and Cairo and Guthrie, Pusey and Liddon and Mozley, Lynch and Maclaren and Hull and Spur- geon, Binney and Allon and Charles Stanford and Alexander McLeod and John Ker, — to name only a representative few — ' preached ' — and so far as they being dead still speak, or being still with us still "preach" — their supremest sermons from the English Bible. It has gone into the prison and the hospital and the battlefield. It has been as a lamp in the valley of shadows. It has been the 'troth' [= betrothal] Bible of many lowly loving hearts — as of Robert Burns and his Highland Mary when that burning heart was at its best and purest. It has been the mother's gift-Bible to the sailor-lad going far away ; and to myriad others on lifting up the anchors from home and setting out into i8o REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. the great world. It was " the big Ha' Bible " of " The Cotter's Saturday Night " as of the winsome lay of Robert NicoU. It was the Bible whence our own Church's gentle Michael Bruce fetched his sweet paraphrases, and a leaf of which he folded down on the night he died. It was out of it " Robinson Crusoe " read for himself and " Friday," and brave-hearted " Jeannie " to her erring sister " Efifae " Deans, It was over it Eva and " Uncle Tom " wept and prayed and hoped together. I name these because it rules in the sphere of imagination as in reality. It was by it the slave was made of a thing a man, and roused to flee from the rice-swamp to enfranchising Canada. It was to it David Livingstone "in the shadows" turned as he lay dying "in the Dark Conti- nent." It has been to untold millions the Marriage Bible, the Family Bible, hallowed by unforgetable memories and associations, and pathetic with old and faded entries of births and marriages and deaths. When we went to college or to city-life it was the Book of RICHARD BAXTER. i8i books that mothers' eyes and tears and broken words commended to us as she put it into our * trunk.' It has made entombed miners die "in peace," leaving poorly-scrawled yet trust- ing words from it, on pieces of shale. It has interpreted to the sin-stung and penitent their own wildered anguish, and guided them back to their Father's House and Heart. It has brought back light of hope to eyes faded and worn and dry, in midnight mission and among the fallen, as out of it ' fair women and brave men ' spoke of the redeeming love of Jesus Christ. Its promises are proverbs. Its proverbs are aphorisms. Its deepest say- ings are crystalline-clear to the heart and look of faith. Its warnings come like motherly, sisterly voices. I love to think how in glory it shall be found that scarcely a text of the New Testament but has been a saving word to human souls. Weary, broken, humbled, backsliding, forsaken, desperate men and women have in the English Bible found at long-last their rest. Pure, inviolate, dedicated 1 82 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. ones from dawn of thought and resolve have been won to Christ through it. What a cloud of witnesses glorify its every page ! What joy and pathos, what gratitude and wonder, what hallelujahs and prayer, what incitement and restraint, what hope and anguish, what sun- shine and shadow consecrate it all over the world ! If I have seemingly diverged from my subject in thus paying tribute to our English Bible, I am not reluctant to plead guilty. But after all it is only a seeming divergence. For I turn back on my observation that Richard Baxter preached as he preached, and achieved the life-work he did, from his English Bible. My earnest counsel therefore would be, that while by all means we continue to read in the original whatever we expound and enforce in the pulpit or elsewhere, and while I would have us all enrich ourselves with the fullest apparatus possible, we shall nevertheless keep in habitual recollection that to the mass of our auditories the English Bible is their only Bible, with — as we have heard — RICHARD BAXTER. deepnesses and tendernesses and heart-holdings of familiarity that furnish a capable Preacher with a means for profoundest influence second only to the conscience. I would have ministers and students grow more and more intimately acquainted with their English Bible. A fifth and final thing that asserts itself in studying the character and life-work of Richard Baxter— as of thousands more — is the guilt of schism that lies on our national Church of England that had no room FOR him within IT AND ROOM FOR THOSE WHO WERE WITHIN IT AND DISPLACED OTHERS. I do not, I confess, much care for the word schism. It has the hiss of the serpent in it. Neither have I polemical ends to serve in these Lectures. But with all calmness and gravity, I must assert that in my judgment, it was nothing short of schism for any Church to 'silence' and cruelly persecute and spoil such men as Richard Baxter. Equally is it schism to-day, of the most culpable type, to ignore, as so many Churchmen unhappily do, the i84 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. insignia of Divine sanction accorded to the ministry and to 'the people' of Noncon- formity. Richard Baxter was parish-clergy- man of Kidderminster. Richard Baxter literally transformed his parish and beyond it, until it was a Goshen in the midst of Egyptian dark- ness. Richard Baxter was offered and pressed to accept a bishopric — of Hereford. His regard to conscience suffered him not to accept the insidious honour or to fall in with the godless ' Uniformity ' sought, and the ' et cetera.'* His humble self-estimate made the lure no tempta- tion. On the other hand, Edward Reynolds accepted the bishopric offered him at the same time, and died Bishop of Norwich. I do not sit in judgment on Reynolds. I name him simply to bring out the monstrousness and supersti- tion and nonsense and schism of High-Church Episcopalianism. For who for one instant would compare poor Edward Reynolds in anything with Richard Baxter.^ And yet Richard * As early as 1640 he had been troubled by this et cetera oath. RICHARD BAXTER. 185 Baxter's mouth was shut and he was put in prison because he would meet with and exhort a few Christian friends in ' a private house ' ! For that and the Hke he was brow-beaten and insulted by the ermined ruffian Judge Jeffreys, doing the bidding of the Court and the Church. Who either would compare any two thousand of the * clergy ' in the mass within the National Church with the two thousand of 'The Ejected'? And yet again — as simple matter-of-fact — the former alone were held to have ' orders,' the latter none ! Those ' within ' were (and to-day are) God's clergy, those ' without ' were (and to-day are) 'intruders.' And so down till to-day in High- Church theories and practice I " Good God!" as even calm John Howe was moved to exclaim — What are ' orders What con- stitutes a Divine ' commission ' What carries authority with it in this matter of preaching the Gospel and dispensing the ordinances of the New Testament ? Surely, surely if God's grace finds and fashions such a man as RiCHARD Baxter 1 86 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. and such men as were the two thousand of 1662, and gives them the ' character ' He did, and the magnificent success they had in ad- vancing His Kingdom on earth and peopling Heaven, there is witness and sanction unchal- lengeable ! Here is the unanswered appeal of John Howe : — " I do particularly believe, — as I doubt not but God is graciously present with those that in the sincerity of their hearts have chosen to serve Him in the way which the Lord prescribes, — so, that if Dr. Stillingfleet had known what proofs there are of that same gracious presence in these SO MUCH censured meetings, his thoughts would have been very different of them from that they are. I do not speak of proselyting men to a party, which I heartily despise as a mean and inconsiderable thing : but have known some and heard of many instances of very ignorant and profane persons that have been led, perhaps by their own curiosity or it may be by the per- suasion of some neighbour or friend, to hear and see what was done in such meetings, that have (through God's blessing upon so despised means) become very much reformed men, and, for aught that could be judged, serious and sincere Christians. And whereas some, that have very prejudicial thoughts of all that frequent such meetings, may be apt to suspect all effects of that kind to be nothing else but illusions of fancy, or a disposition at least to enthusiasm, or an artificial and industrious RICHARD BAXTER. hypocrisy ; I am very confident that if the Doctor had had an opportunity frequently to observe and converse with such, — as we have had,— and heard the sobriety and consistency of their discourse, and seen the unaffected simphcity, humility, and heavenliness of their conversa- tion, he could not have allowed himself the liberty of such hard censures, but would have judged of many such per- sons as you and I do." * Bishop necessary for ' orders ' ! I could under- stand it if God were dead or dethroned, or if the Divine Head of the Church were not on His priestly Throne, or if God the Holy Spirit were not still on our earth. But with a living God to look to, and DEMONSTRATION of His sanction of the ministry and ' people ' of Nonconformity, — as of Conformity in the measure of fidelity to preaching and beheving and reproducing the Gospel, — it is the very senility of credulousness and also schism of a deadly sort, to so stand on ' Church ' claims. Spiritual signs, Divine transformations, have all along gone with the work and labours * " A Letter concerning Dr. Stillingfleet's Sermon : " Works, vol. v., as before, p. 252. 1 88 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. of Nonconformists equally with the like-minded of the Church of England and Church of Rome. There has been continuously, under Noncon- formist ministries earlier, later and present, the turning of erewhile wanderers back to their Heavenly Father's Home ; the purification of the erewhile fallen and shamed ; the ennobling of the erewhile mean and debased; the liberat- ing of erewhile enthralled and sordid natures. There have been consecrate and potential lives at home, and pre-eminently in the foremost Foreign Mission fields, outside of the National Church.* We are asked to disown the Divine ' witness ' and the working of God's Spirit. We are asked to discredit these spiritual signs. We * To-day, as from the first, Nonconformity admittedly is bearing "the heat and burden of the day" in FOREIGN MISSIONS, e.g., in India, Carey, Marshman, and Ward earlier, and later, Wilson and Duff ; in China, Morison and Medhurst, Legge and Burns ; in the South Seas, Williams ; in Africa, Moffat and Livingstone — were all Nonconformists. Yet I cordially admit that many of the Church of England missionaries have been co-equally noble men, and done co-equally noble service. RICHARD BAXTER. are urged to stand in doubt, even to brand our ' commission ' thus ratified. We are supposed simple enougli to shut up God in a temple made with hands, inscribed ' The Church of England,' or ' The Church of Rome.' It ' hurts our understanding ' to hear such drivel of 'apostolical succession,' and violation of * unity ' dinned in our ears. It rouses a con- tempt we fain would not cherish, to be called to serve ourselves inferior to men of whom, man for man, we feel ourselves to be the equals. It moves to pity all round to find this exclusive and excluding ' clergy ' — as we come in contact with them — largely by the thousand under- educated, and especially unfurnished theologi- cally, and many habitually trafficking in ser- mons from January to January that are not their own. Arrogance anywhere is bad, but it is double-dyed bad when, by thousands, the men who claim to be ' priests ' show no signs of Divine recognition that Noncon- formists do not show. The Church of England is a venerable and igo REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. illustrious section of the Church of Christ. Its roll of Worthies may compare with any other's. But really she is only a " little sister " in com- parison with the vast aggregate of evangelical Nonconformity in England and her Colonies and Christendom. Emphatically the Church of England, I must solemnly reiterate, has been in the past, and is to-day, by a hundred proofs, guilty of schism in her attitude towards Non- conformity. The National Church sectarianizes and provincializes herself when she unchurches those whom God has churched, and holds aloof from those whom Christ has made part of His own Body. The serene assumption that she is ' The Church,' and that refusal to believe in either her or Episcopacy is 'division,' etc., etc., etc., is not less unhistorical than it is ludicrous ; is no less an impertinence than a wrong. It is a pain to me to say these things ; but in the face of superciliousness and denial that Non- conformists are " ministers of religion " I dare not be silent. Methinks if we could get back Richard Baxter's seraphic fervour ; if we could RICHARD BAXTER. igr eet his faith in the human conscience ; if we could get his splendid declarativeness ; if we could get his fulness of proclamation of " the old, old story " ; if we could come to think more of Christ and less of the Church ; if we could actualize to ourselves the need of every variety of gift and character and agency in meeting the forces in action against our common Christianity — I have little doubt that men's present ways of speech and bearing towards servants and believers of the same Divine Lord would be greatly altered. God speed the day ! William Orme in his Life, and Archbishop Trench in his Lecture, close their estimate of Baxter with one of his poems, his " Vale- diction." In the latter's words, — " Let me cite as my valediction a few verses from this, as showing that age had not dulled his longing desire for the Heavenly rest ; being such also as may fitly quicken our own desire after the same " : — " ' What is the time that's gone, And what is that to come ? Is it not now as none? The present stays not. 192 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. Time posteth, oh how fast. Unwelcome death makes haste, None can call back the past, Judgement delays not. Though God brings in the light, Sinners awake not ; Because hell's out of sight, They sin forsake not. " ' Man walks in a vain shew ; They know, yet will not know. Sit still, when they should go. But run for shadows ; While they might taste and know The living streams that flow, And crop the flowers that grow. In Christ's sweet meadows. Life's better slept away Than as they use it ; In sin and drunken play Vain men abuse it. " ' Is this the world men choose. For which they heaven refuse, And Christ and grace abuse, And not receive it ? Shall I not guilty be Of this in some degree. If hence God would me free, And I'd not leave it ? My soul, from Sodom fly. Lest wrath there find thee Thy refuge rest is nigh, Look not behind thee. " 'There's none of this ado ; None of the hellish crew, God's promise is most tnie. Boldly believe it. RICHARD BAXTER. 193 My friends are gone before, And I am near the shore, My soul stands at the door ; O Lord, receive it. It trusts Christ and His merits ; The dead He raises. Join it with blessed Spirits, Who sing Thy praises.' 13 SAMUEL RUTHERFORD: "Visits of those friends who resided near were not nnfrequent, such as the Gordons, Viscount Kenmure and his lady, and Marion M'Naught. But at times Anwoth manse [parsonage] was lighted up by the glad visit of luiexpected guests. There is a tradition that Archbishop Ussher, passing through Galloway, turned aside on a Saturday to enjoy the congenial society of Rutherford. He came, however, in disguise, and being welcomed as a guest, took his place with the rest of the family when they were catechised, as was usual, that evening. The stranger was asked, ' How many commandments are there?' His reply was 'Eleven.' The pastor corrected him; but the stranger maintained his position, quoting our Lord's words, 'A new com- mandment I give unto you, that ye love one another.' They retired to rest, all interested in the stranger. Sabbath morning dawned. Rutherford arose, and repaired, as was his custom, for meditation, to a walk that bordered on a thicket, but was startled by hearing the voice of prayer — prayer too for the host, and on behalf of the souls of the people that day to assemble. It was no other than the holy Archbishop Ussher ; and soon they came to an explanation, for Rutherford had begun to suspect he had 'entertained angels unawares.' With great mutual love they conversed together; and at the request of Rutherford, the Archbishop went up to the pulpit, conducted the usual service of the Presbyterian pastor, and preached on 'The New Com- mandment.'" — Dr. Andrew A. Bonar's Sketch of Samuel Rutherford (Letters, vol. i., pp lo, ii). " He would send me as a spy into the wilderness of suffering, to see the Land, and to try the ford ; and I cannot make a lie of Christ's cross ; I can report nothing but good of Him and it " (Letter cx\'iii.) SAMUEL RUTHERFORD: Devout Affection. Bom at Nishet, in Roxburghshire, Scotland, 'about 1600.' Died 20th March, 166 1, at St. Andrew's : buried there, and it was Thomas Halyburton' s dying request that lie might be laid near his grave. AMUEL RUTHERFORD— of whom I have now to speak — is not a " household word " hke the others of our quaternion. Only those who "turn aside" from the beaten high- ways of national history and literature to their by-ways, are at all likely to be familiar with it. None the less is it true in this case, as in that grander of old, that if we do " turn aside " we shall find if not (technically) a "great sight" yet a 'sight' net ill comparable with what Moses saw, " a bush burning yet not consumed." I fear that, except to a very few, now-a-days, the numerous writings of Rutherford are as if igS REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. they had perished in the Great Fire of London. But when search is made, one relatively small book is discovered as quick to-day as at the first on its being sent forth in rudest and humblest form from the Dutch (Rotterdam) press ; or to recur to our metaphor, one little ' bush ' of his theological-literary growth — his "Joshua Redivivus ; or Mr. Rutherford's Letters," 1664 * — retains all its original green- ness and brightness and fragrance of bloom ; nor is it at all likely that after surviving so long it ever will be forgotten. It is through his LETTERS, and the DEVOUT AFFECTION shown in them, that Samuel Rutherford is still — as in the past — a spi- ritual force. It is from what he was as the writer of these Letters, and for what he did * With reference to the title "Joshua Redivivus," I imagine it was meant — the pubhcation being posthumous — to designate Rutherford as a Joshua-hke man, who though dead should now speak as if alive, by these Letters. Considering the ' leading ' part that he had filled in the ' Kirk,' and at the Westminster Assembly, it was not a badly-chosen name. SAMUEL RUTHERFORD. 199 by them and continues to do, that I seek to fetch a message from him for us to-day. To make a clean breast of it at once, I must confess that exclusive of his Letters and "Trial and Triumph of Faith" (1645), and "Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Him- self" (1647), and "Covenant of Life Opened" (1655), and "Influences of the Life of Grace" (1659), some of his " Sacramental Sermons : taken by a Hearer" earlier and later — the Works of our worthy are in my judgment hard and ungracious reading. Even of these prac- tical books it must be owned that there is little of penetrative thinking, or richness of spiritual experience, or memorable putting of things. There is a sweet incense of piety through all ; but otherwise the books are thin and poor. Their method has all the vices of contemporaries, with only very occasional gleams of happy phrase. Their one merit is that they are full of the "exceeding great and precious promises " and truths of the Gospel, and that they hold forth with wistful and passionate -00 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. entreaty, a crucified Saviour as the one centre for weary souls in their unrest, and the one liope for the world. He again and again bursts the barriers of his rigid creed under the spell of the all-sufificiency of the Lord Jesus. I have been touched with the pathos of his appeals to the impenitent and delaying. These are self-evidently the outcome of profoundest ' con- cern ' for those to whom he 'preached.' The " wrath to come " was to him a very seer's "vision." The lightnings seemed to hurtle in the sky overhead. I do not marvel that his audiences were agitated even to outcries. It must be added that by temperament he had more reliance on love than terror. An English merchant said of him, even during controversies that sorely vexed and distracted his spirit, '•' I went to St. Andrew's, where I heard a sweet, majestic-looking man (Robert Blair), and he showed me the majesty of God. After him, I heard a little fair man (Samuel Rutherford), and he showed me the loveliness of Christ." * It M'Crie's Sketches, s.n. SAMUEL RUTHERFORD. 20 1 is also told that when he was expatriating on Jesus Christ, his manner grew so animated that it seemed as if he would have " flown out of the pulpit." ■■■ I ask that all this be kept in grateful recol- lection. I ask that he may have all the benefit of accumulated testimony to his fidelity and gentle power and powerful gentleness as a " Preacher of the Gospel." For I must now state as a foil, that his controversial writings are of the most distressing type that I have ever come across, surpassed — if surpassed — only in those of the assailants of the great-brained and illustrious JOHN GooDWiN.f From his * ' Rabbi ' Duncan says of his " Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself" — " S. R. gives us in this book some unpretending but deep philosophy. He denies power in the will against the Arminian and asserts it against the Antinomian position. Any other doctrine of power uncreaturifies the creature. It either brutifies man or deifies him."— Brown's Memoir, p. 413. Dr. Bonar quotes a flowery passage from De Providcntid. Cf. Knight's Colloqicia Pcripatctica (pp. 4, 6) on the same book by Dr. Duncan. t John Goodwin : Would that for the (as a whole) arid 202 REPRESENTATIVE NONCONFORMISTS. (so-called) " Peaceable and Temperate Plea for Paul's Presbytery in Scotland" (1642) to his "Lex Rex: the Law and the Prince " (1644), and from his " Divine Right of Presbyteries " (1644) to " The Divine Right of Church Govern- ment and Excommunication" and "A Dispute touching Scandal and Christian Duty " (1646), and from his " Survey of the Spiritual Anti- Christ" and "Modest Survey of the Secrets of Antinomianism " (1648) to his "Survey of Mr. [Thomas] Hooker's Church Discipline" (1658) — you have — speaking generally — such assump- tion of personal infallibility, such fierceness of contradiction, such unmeasured vituperation {c.g^ " It is a lye ! It is a lye !" exceeding often), such extreme narrowness of sectarian orthodoxy and such suspicion of all who differed from him, and would not pronounce his shibboleth (e.g., "apostate Spottiswood," etc.), as is alike wonderful and sorrowful. Then there is his and dreary works of Dr. Thomas Goodwin, we had a worthy collection of John Goodwin's. Dr. Jackson's Life of him is utterly unsatisfactory. SAMUEL RUTHERFORD. 203 " Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience" (1649), whose very title is an offence and an opprobrium, and which is a treatise simply confounding in its iron logic and (supposed) demonstrations. His " Lex Rex " is noticeable, and to be honoured for its brave speech for the liberty of the people, and its unflinching argumentative in- sistence that bad kings were " dethronable "; * * It is due to Rutherford to give in full, what I find nowhere, the title-page of " Lex Rex" : — " Lex Rex : | The Law and the Prince. | A Dispute for the just | Prerogative | of King and People. | Con- taining the Reasons and Causes of the | most necessary Defensive Wars of the Kingdom | of Scotland, and of their Expedition for the ayd | and help of their dear Brethren of England. | In which their Innocency is asserted, and a full | Answer is given to a Seditious Pamphlet, Intituled, | Sacro-Sancta Regum Majestas, or I The Sacred and Royall Prerogative of Christian Kings ; | Under the | Name of J. A. | But penned by Jo : Rlaxvjell the Excommunicate P. Prelat. | With a Scrip- tural Confutation of the ruinous Grounds of | W. Barclay, H. Grotius, H. Arnisceus, Ant. de Domi. P. Bishop of Spalato, I and of other late Anti-Magistratical Royalists ; as the Author of | Ossorianum, D. Fern, E. Symmons, the Doctors of Aberdeen,