Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Pastor & Teacher of the Faith
December 8 · d. 1691
also known as Richard Baxter of Kidderminster
Richard Baxter was an English pastor and writer of the seventeenth century, remembered above all for twenty years at Kidderminster and for the books that came out of them. He never attended a university. He wrote well over a hundred works, negotiated at the Savoy Conference for a church broad enough to hold both sides, withdrew from the Church of England in 1662, and was tried and imprisoned at nearly seventy for a paraphrase of the New Testament. He died in London on 8 December 1691.
Richard Baxter was born in Shropshire in 1615, in his grandfather's house at Rowton, and even the day of his birth is uncertain: he gave 12 November once, spoke elsewhere of 19 November as his baptism day, and the parish register has a baptism on 6 November, earlier than the birth he claimed. He grew up in a household with a grievance. A maypole was set up directly in front of the family's door, and the Baxters, who wanted the Lord's Day kept quietly, could do nothing about it.
His schooling was poor. The curates near his home were weak men, two of them drunkards; the schoolmasters were indifferent; and the master of the free school at Wroxeter advised him against Oxford altogether. So he read. He read at Ludlow Castle in another man's library, and at about fourteen he read the devotional Puritan writers, William Perkins and Richard Sibbes and Ezekiel Culverwell and Edmund Bunny, and dated his own conversion from them. A Victorian critic later judged that he came out of all this "destitute of all mathematical and physical science, ignorant of Hebrew, a mere smatterer in Greek." He then wrote something between one hundred thirty-five and two hundred books.
In 1641, aged twenty-five, he was invited to Kidderminster as lecturer. He was not the vicar; he was the preacher, and that was enough. He went from house to house through the town, family by family, teaching the faith to each household in its own kitchen. The crowds grew until the church needed new galleries to hold them. Out of that work came the book he is still known by, in which he wrote that a minister must take heed to himself first: "Take heed to yourselves, lest you be void of that saving grace of God which you offer to others." He did not spare himself in it. "Many a preacher is now in hell," he wrote, "who hath a hundred times called upon his hearers to use the utmost care and diligence to escape it."
The Civil War pulled him out of the town. He preached at Alcester on the day of Edgehill, sheltered among a company of some thirty refugee ministers at Coventry, and served as chaplain to Colonel Whalley's regiment until February 1647, when his health broke. Ill and unable to work, resting at Rous Lench in Worcestershire, he wrote most of a book about heaven. It is the warmest thing he ever set down. "What makes such frozen, uncomfortable Christians," he asked, "but their living so far from heaven?" And then: "O Christian, get above!"
He wanted one church, not a victorious party. He opposed the killing of the king, and he opposed Cromwell's drift toward a crown; Cromwell, for his part, disliked his talkativeness and would not argue with him. At the Restoration he preached before the Commons, was offered the bishopric of Hereford and declined it, and at the Savoy Conference in 1661 was given a fortnight to produce an alternative to the Book of Common Prayer. He produced one, an entire liturgy out of the service he had been using at Kidderminster. The bishops would not discuss it. On 16 May 1662, three days before the Act of Uniformity was passed, he took his own leave of the Church of England at Blackfriars rather than wait to be put out. Some two thousand ministers were ejected that August.
That September he married Margaret Charlton. She had come to Kidderminster as a gentry girl "glittering her self in costly Apparel, and delighting in her Romances," and was converted under his preaching; she said it was received on her heart as the seal on the wax. She was twenty-six and he was forty-seven, and he had once thought a minister better unmarried. For nineteen years she spent her own money on his ministry, and later on his fines and his defence. When she died in 1681 he wrote her life within six weeks.
Then came the years of harassment: goods seized, books taken, short imprisonments. In February 1685 he was arrested for libelling the church in his paraphrase of the New Testament, and on 30 May he stood in the Guildhall before Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys, nearly seventy, nothing but skin and bones. Jeffreys called him an old rogue, a conceited, stubborn, fanatical dog who deserved whipping through the city, and said he had poisoned the world with his Kidderminster doctrine. His counsel pointed out that the prisoner had spent his life trying to keep Puritans inside the Church of England. The packed jury convicted him anyway: five hundred marks, and prison until it was paid. He was there about eighteen months.
He came out and went on writing. He had always written as a man with little time. Long before, closing a book addressed to one unconverted reader, he had signed himself "Thy serious Monitor" and said he wrote it "as one that is going into another world, where the things are seen that I here speak of." He died in London on the morning of 8 December 1691, aged seventy-six, and was buried beside Margaret at Christ Church, Newgate Street. Conforming clergy and Dissenters came together to the grave, and of that day the record says there had never been such a private funeral seen in England. Looking back on his whole ministry, he had put it in two lines of verse:
"I preach'd, as never sure to preach again, / And as a dying man to dying men!"
He had been preaching, all along, about a rest he expected to reach.
You do not get to choose which side finds you inconvenient. Baxter opposed the killing of a king and was ejected by that king's son; he defended bishops in print and was tried for libelling them; he wanted one church and belonged, at the end, to neither party comfortably. What held was not a position but a practice: going house to house in one town, teaching one family at a time, for twenty years. That is what the monument remembers and what his own writing keeps returning to, that a man is not saved for being an able preacher but for being a sanctified one. Where has holding to something true already cost you standing with people you hoped would keep you, and what would it take to go on doing the small, unglamorous work anyway?
Almost everything known about Baxter's life passes through his own hands first. The primary source is Reliquiae Baxterianae, his narrative of his life and times, published in 1696, five years after his death, edited and arranged from his papers by his executor Matthew Sylvester. That mediation is the single most important caution here: the account is first-person, but written in old age under persecution, and selected and ordered by another man. The authoritative modern text is the Oxford edition of 2020, prepared from Baxter's autograph where it survives; a 1925 abridgment by J. M. Lloyd Thomas is what most readers have used. Alongside it stands a large body of correspondence, calendared by N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey Nuttall in 1991 at 1,250 surviving letters. William Orme's life appeared in 1830, from within a Dissenting tradition with reasons to present him favourably; the densest single chronology remains Alexander Balloch Grosart's article in the Dictionary of National Biography of 1885, itself compiled from Orme and the Reliquiae; Geoffrey Nuttall's biography of 1965 is the standard modern short life.
Several things commonly said about him are wrong, and the sources say so plainly. He was not ejected on 16 May 1662; he withdrew that day, and the Act of Uniformity took effect on 24 August. He was appointed lecturer at Kidderminster, not vicar, and he was twenty-five, not twenty-six. He wrote The Saints' Everlasting Rest at Rous Lench, not at Bewdley; Bewdley is where he debated infant baptism with the Baptist John Tombes on 1 January 1650, before a crowd the source numbers at about fifteen hundred on each side, which is better read as a measure of fame than a count. His army chaplaincy lasted about twenty-one months, ending in February 1647, not five years. He was tried at the Guildhall, not at Westminster. His birth date is unsettled, as described above. The imprisonment is sometimes given as 1684 and sometimes 1685; the DNB writes it "28 Feb. 1684-5," which is simply the old style of dating a February that fell before the legal new year, and the year is 1685.
Two publication dates are still open. The Reformed Pastor is given as 1656 by the DNB, but a 1657 issue demonstrably exists; A Call to the Unconverted is given as 1657, though its preface is signed 11 December 1657, which points toward a first edition of 1658. Neither has been settled against the English Short Title Catalogue.
Three quotations circulate under his name that this research could not place in his works. "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity" is not his coinage and is separately misattributed to Augustine. "He that hath light thoughts of sin, never had great thoughts of God" has no located source. And the hymn "Ye Holy Angels Bright," sung today, descends from him through a nineteenth-century recasting; not one word of his own composition in it has been verified. His own words, on the same subject as the first of these, are better anyway. Writing in 1680 he said: "I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church... If the Name CHRISTIAN be not enough, call me a CATHOLICK CHRISTIAN." C. S. Lewis took the title of Mere Christianity from that usage.
There is no shrine and no relic. Baxter died a Dissenter, outside the church that later commemorated him, and what grew up around his memory is textual and civic rather than devotional. He was buried beside Margaret at Christ Church, Newgate Street; the church was gutted in the Blitz on the night of 29 December 1940, never rebuilt, and its ruined nave laid out as a public garden in 1989. No grave or marker of his survives there.
The monument that does survive is at Kidderminster: a white marble figure by Sir Thomas Brock, raised in 1875 and moved beside St Mary's parish church in March 1967, with Anglican and Nonconformist clergy sharing the platform at its unveiling, two centuries after his death and long before any calendar took him up. Its inscription reads: "In a stormy and divided age he advocated unity and comprehension pointing the way to the everlasting rest."
The commemoration is modern, and the Anglican world is not of one mind about the date. The Anglican Church in North America keeps 8 December, listing him among the Anglican commemorations beside Nicholas Ferrar and C. S. Lewis, without a proper collect. The Episcopal supplementary calendars keep 8 December with a collect that gives thanks for a man "who out of love for you followed his conscience at cost to himself," and that visibly borrows from the hymn descended from him. The Church of England keeps him on 14 June, as "Richard Baxter, Puritan Divine."
The quotations here come from five works, all in the public domain and freely readable online. "Take heed to yourselves" and "God never saved any man for being a preacher" are from [The Reformed Pastor](work:reformed-pastor), chapter 1, section 1, in William Brown's nineteenth-century abridgment as printed by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, not the 1656 first-edition wording. "What makes such frozen, uncomfortable Christians" and "O Christian, get above!" are from [The Saints' Everlasting Rest](work:saints-everlasting-rest), chapter 11, in Benjamin Fawcett's abridgment; John Wesley abridged the same book for his Christian Library in 1754, five years before Fawcett. "As one that is going into another world" and the signature "Thy serious Monitor" close the preface to [A Call to the Unconverted](work:call-to-the-unconverted), dated 11 December 1657. "I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN" is from the prefatory epistle, section II, point 4, of Church-History of the Government of Bishops and Their Councils Abbreviated (1680), quoted from the first printing. The couplet "I preach'd, as never sure to preach again, / And as a dying man to dying men!" is verse, not prose, and is not from The Reformed Pastor as it is almost always cited: it stands in "Love Breathing Thanks and Praise," the Second Part, in Poetical Fragments (1681), quoted here from the 1821 Pickering reprint, which reads "h-id" where the sense requires "had." The slavery passage is A Christian Directory, part 2, title 2, in the directions to masters in foreign plantations. Margaret Baxter's words are quoted from secondary accounts of A Breviate of the Life of Margaret Baxter, and Sir James Stephen's judgment on Baxter's education is quoted from the Dictionary of National Biography (1885), where it is reported. Baxter's manuscripts are at Dr Williams's Library, London: 362 treatise items in 31 volumes and 621 letters in six, spanning 1638 to 1691.
One passage deserves stating in full rather than in the flattering half. In A Christian Directory Baxter wrote that to "catch up poor negroes or people of another land, that never forfeited life or liberty, and to make them slaves, and sell them, is one of the worst kinds of thievery in the world," and that such men are enemies of mankind; buyers of kidnapped people, he says, are bound to free them. But the section is pastoral instruction to slaveholders, and in it he also allows that a man who forfeits his freedom by crime may penally be made a slave, that a poor man may sell himself into servitude for life, and that a criminal slave may be beaten and denied part of his bread. The condemnation is real and it is narrow. He also published, in the last year of his life, a defence of the reality of apparitions and witchcraft against sceptics; that he held the belief is well documented, and no evidence was found either way that he supported any particular prosecution.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Richard Baxter special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52