monly end either in yielding a credulous, and therefore an infirm assent, or by reposing in a self-sufficient and far more hazardous incredulity. For these reasons, we attach less value to the long series of Baxter's works in support of the foundations of the Christian faith than to the rest of his books which have floated in safety down the tide of time to the present day. Yet it would be difficult to select, from the same class of writings, any more eminently distinguished by the earnest love and the fearless pursuit of truth; or to name an inquirer into these subjects who possessed and exercised to a greater extent the power of suspending his long-cherished opinions. and of closely interrogating every doubt by which they were obstructed. clude from his view whatever recollections he judged hostile to his immediate purpose. Every prejudice was at once banished when any debatable point was to be scrutinized; and, with equal facility, every reasonable doubt was exiled when his only object was to enforce or illustrate a doctrine of the truth of which he was assured. The perfect submission of the will to the reason may belong to some higher state of being than ours. Оп mortal man that gift is not bestowed. In the best and the wisest, inclination will often grasp the reins by which she ought to be guided, and misdirect the judgment which she should obey. Happy they, who, like Baxter, have so disciplined the affections, as to disarm their temporary usurpation of all its more dangerous tendencies! In his solicitude to sustain the conclusions Controversies are ephemeral. Ethics, metahe had so laboriously formed, Baxter unhappily physics and political philosophy are doomed invoked the aid of arguments, which, however to an early death, unless when born of genius impressive in his own days, are answered in and nurtured by intense and self-denying inours by a smile, if not by a sneer. The sneer, dustry. Even the theologians of one age must, however, would be at once unmerited and un- alas! too often disappear to make way for those wise. When Hale was adjudging witches to of later times. But if there is an exception to death, and More preaching against their guilt, the general decree which consigns man and and Boyle investigating the sources of their his intellectual offspring to the same dull forpower, it is not surprising that Baxter availed getfulness, it is in favour of such writings as himself of the evidence afforded by witchcraft those which fill the four folio volumes bearing and apparitions in proof of the existence of a the title of "Baxter's Practical Works." Their world of spirits; and therefore in support of appearance in twenty-three smart octavos is one of the fundamental tenets of revealed reli- nothing short of a profanation. Hew down the gion. Marvellous, however, it is, in running Pyramids into a range of streets, divide Niagara over his historical discourse on that subject, to into a succession of water privileges, but let find him giving so unhesitating an assent to not the spirits of the mighty dead be thus the long list of extravagances and nursery evoked from their majestic shrines to animate tales which he has there brought together; the dwarfish structures of our bookselling unsupported as they almost all are by any generation. Deposit one of those gray folios proof that such facts occurred at all, or by on a resting-place equal to that venerable any decorous pretext for referring them to pre- burden, then call up the patient and serious ternatural agency. Simon Jones, a stout-hearted thoughts which its very aspect should inspire, and able-bodied soldier, standing sentinel at and confess that, among the writings of uninWorcester, was driven away from his post by spired men, there are none better fitted to the appearance of something like a headless awaken, to invigorate, to enlarge, or to console bear. A drunkard was warned against intem- the mind, which can raise itself to such celestial perance by the lifting up of his shoes by an colloquy. True, they abound in undistinguishinvisible hand. One of the witches condemned able distinctions; the current of emotion, when by Hale threw a girl into fits. Mr. Emlin, a flowing most freely, is but too often obstructed bystander, "suddenly felt a force pull one of by metaphysical rocks and shallows, or dithe hooks from his breeches, and, while he verted from its course into some dialectic looked with wonder what had become of it, winding; one while the argument is obscured the tormented girl vomited it up out of her by fervent expostulation ; at another the passion mouth." At the house of Mr. Beecham, there is dried up by the analysis of the ten thousand was a tobacco pipe which had the habit of springs of which it is compounded; here is a "moving itself from a shelf at the one end of maze of subtleties to be unravelled, and there the room to a shelf at the other end of the a crowd of the obscurely learned to be refuted; room." When Mr. Munn, the minister, went the unbroken solemnity may shed some gloom to witness the prodigy, the tobacco pipe re- on the traveller's path, and the length of the mained stationary; but a great Bible made a way may now and then entice him to slumber. spontaneous leap into his lap, and opened But where else can be found an exhibition, at itself at a passage, on the hearing of which once so vivid and so chaste, of the diseases of the evil spirit who had possessed the pipe was the human heart-a detection so fearfully exact, exorcised. "This Mr. Munn himself told me, of the sophistries of which we are first the vowhen in the sickness year, 1665, I lived in luntary and then the unconscious victims-a Stockerson hall. I have no reason to suspect light thrown with such intensity on the madness the veracity of a sober man, a constant preacher, and the wo of every departure from the rules and a good scholar." Baxter was credulous of virtue-a development of those rules so and incredulous for precisely the same reason. comprehensive and so elevated-counsels Possessing by long habit a mastery over his more shrewd or more persuasive-or a prothoughts, such as few other men ever acquired, clamation more consolatory of the resources a single effort of the will was sufficient to ex-provided by Christianity for escaping the dan gers by which we are surrounded-of the eternal rewards she promises-or of the temporal blessings she imparts, as an earnest and a foretaste of them? "Largior hic campis ather." Charles, and Laud, and Cromwell are forgotten. We have no more to do with antipædobaptism or prelacy. L'Estrange and Morley disturb not this higher region; but man and his noblest pursuits-Deity, in the highest conceptions of his attributes which can be extracted from the poor materials of human thought-the world we inhabit divested of the illusions which insnare us-the word to which we look forward bright with the choicest colours of hope-the glorious witnesses, and the Divine Guide and Supporter of our conflict -throng, animate, and inform every crowded page. In this boundless repository, the intimations of inspired wisdom are pursued into all their bearings on the various conditions and exigencies of life, with a fertility which would inundate and overpower the most retentive mind, had it not been balanced by a method and a discrimination even painfully elaborate. Through the vast accumulation of topics, admonitions, and inquiries, the love of truth is universally conspicuous. To every precept is appended the limitations it seems to demand. No difficulty is evaded. Dogmatism is never permitted to usurp the province of argument. Each equivocal term is curiously defined, and each plausible doubt narrowly examined. Not content to explain the results he has reached, he exhibits the process by which they were excogitated, and lays open all the secrets of his mental laboratory. And a wondrous spectacle it is. Calling to his aid an extent of theological and scholastic lore sufficient to equip a whole college of divines, and moving beneath the load with unencumbered freedom, he expatiates and rejoices in all the intricacies of his way-now plunging into the deepest thickets of casuistic and psychological speculation- and then emerging from them to resume his chosen task of probing the conscience, by remonstrances from which there is no escape-or of quickening the sluggish feelings by strains of exalted devotion. That expostulations and arguments of which almost all admit the justice, and the truth of which none can disprove, should fall so ineffectually on the ear, and so seldom reach the heart, is a phenomenon worthy of more than a passing notice, and meriting an inquiry of greater exactness than it usually receives, even from those who profess the art of healing our spiritual maladies. To resolve it "into the corruption of human nature," is but to change the formula in which the difficulty is proposed. To affirm that a corrupt nature always gives an undue preponderance to the present above the future, is untrue in fact; for some of our worst passions-avarice, for example, revenge, ambition, and the like-chiefly manifest their power in the utter disregard of immediate privations and sufferings, with a view to a supposed remote advantage. To represent the world as generally incredulous as to the reality of a retributive state, is to contradict universal experience, which shows how firmly that persuasion is incorporated with the language, habits, and thoughts of mankind;-manifesting itself most distinctly in those great exigencies of life, when disguise is the least practicable, To refer to an external spiritual agency, de termining the will to a wise or a foolish choice. is only to reproduce the original question in another form-what is that structure or mechanism of the human mind by means of which such influences operate to control or guide our volitions? The best we can throw out as an answer to the problem is, that the constitution of our frames, partly sensitive and partly rational, and corresponding with this the condition of our sublunary existence, pressed by animal as well as by spiritual wants, condemns us to a constant oscillation between the sensual and the divine, between the propensities which we share with the brute creation, and the aspirations which connect us with the author of our being. The rational soul contemplates means only in reference to their ends; whilst the sensuous nature reposes in means alone, and looks no farther. Imagination, alternately the ally of each, most readily lends her powerful aid to the ignobler party. Her golden hues are more easily employed to exalt and refine the grossness of appetite, than to impart brilliancy and allurement to objects brought within the sphere of human vision by the exercise of faith and hope. Her draperies are adjusted with greater facility, to clothe the nakedness and to conceal the shame of those things with which she is most conversant, than to embellish the forms, and add grace to the proportions of things obscurely disclosed at few and transient intervals. It is with this formidable alliance of sense and imagination that religion has to contend. Her aim is to win over to her side that all-powerful mental faculty which usually takes part with her antagonist, and thus to shed over every step in life the colours borrowed from its ultimate as contrasted with its immediate tendency;—to teach us to regard the pleasures and the pains of our mortal state in the light in which we shall view them in our immortal existence; to make things hateful or lovely now, according as they impede or promote our welfare hereafter. He is a religious, or in the appropriate language of theology, a "regenerate" man, who, trained to this discipline, habitually transfers to the means he employs, the aversion or the dislike due to the end he contemplates; who discerns and loathes the poison in the otherwise tempting cup of unhallowed indul gence, and perceives and loves the medicinal balm in the otherwise bitter draught of hardy self-denial. Good Richard Baxter erected his four folio volumes as a dam with which to stay this confluent flood of sense and imagina tion, and to turn aside the waters into a more peaceful and salutary channel. When their force is correctly estimated, it is more reason. able to wonder that he and his fellow-labourers have succeeded so well, than that their success has been no greater. On his style as an author, Baxter himself is the best critic. "The commonness and the greatness of men's necessity," he says, "commanded me to do any thing that I could for their relief, and to bring forth some water to cast upon this fire, though I had not at hand a | from his more severe pursuits. His faithful silver vessel to carry it in, nor thought it the pen attended Baxter in his pastime as in his most fit. The plainest words are the most studies; and produced an autobiography, which profitable oratory in the weightiest matters. appeared after his death in a large folio voFineness for ornament, and delicacy for delight; lume. Calamy desired to throw these posthu but they answer not necessity, though some- mous sheets into the editorial crucible, and to times they may modestly attend that which reproduce them in the form of a corrected and answers it." He wrote to give utterance to a well-arranged abridgment. Mr. Orme laments full mind and a teeming spirit. Probably he the obstinacy of the author's literary executor, never consumed forty minutes in as many which forbade the execution of this design. years, in the mere selection and adjustment of Few who know the book will agree with him. words. So to have employed his time, would A strange chaos indeed it is. But Grainger in his judgment have been a sinful waste of has well said of the writer, that "men of his that precious gift. "I thought to have ac- size are not to be drawn in miniature." Large quainted the world with nothing but what was as life, and finished to the most minute detail, the work of time and diligence, but my con- his own portrait, from his own hand, exhibits science soon told me that there was too much to the curious in such things a delineation, of of pride and selfishness in this, and that hu- which they would not willingly spare a single mility and self-denial required me to lay by stroke, and which would have lost all its force the affectation of that style, and spare that in- and freedom if reduced and varnished by any dustry which tended but to advance my name other limner, however practised, or however with men, when it hindered the main work and felicitous. There he stands, an intellectual crossed my end." Such is his own account; giant as he was, playing with his quill as Herand, had he consulted Quinctilian, he could cules with the distaff, his very sport a labour, have found no better precept for writing well under which any one but himself would have than that which his conscience gave him for staggered. Towards the close of the first book writing usefully. First of all the requisites for occurs a passage, which, though often repubexcelling in the art of composition, as one of lished, and familiar to most students of Engthe greatest masters of that art in modern lish literature, must yet be noticed as the most times, Sir Walter Scott, informs us, is "to have impressive record in our own language, if not something to say." When there are thoughts in any tongue, of the gradual ripening of a that burn, there never will be wanting words powerful mind, under the culture of incessant that breathe. Baxter's language is plain and study, wide experience, and anxious self-obperspicuous when his object is merely to in-servation. Mental anatomy, conducted by a form; copious and flowing when he exhorts; hand at once so delicate and so firm, and comand when he yields to the current of his feel-parisons so exquisitely just, between the imings, it becomes redundant and impassioned, pressions and impulses of youth, and the tranand occasionally picturesque and graphic. There are innumerable passages of the most touching pathos and unconscious eloquence, but not a single sentence written for effect. His chief merit as an artist is, that he is perfectly artless; and that he employs a style of great compass and flexibility, in such a manner as to demonstrate that he never thought about it, and as to prevent the reader, so long at least as he is reading, from thinking about it either. Mr. quil conclusions of old age, bring his career of strife and trouble to a close of unexpected and welcome serenity. In the full maturity of such knowledge as is to be acquired on earth, of the mysteries of our mortal and of our immortal existence, the old man returns at last for repose to the elementary truths, the simple lessons, and the confiding affections of his childhood; and writes an unintended commentary, of unrivalled force and beauty, on the inspired declaration, that to become as little The canons of criticism, which the great children is the indispensable, though arduous nonconformist drew from his conscience, are condition of attaining to true heavenly wisdom. however, sadly inapplicable to verse. To substitute for this self-portraiture, any James Montgomery has given his high suffrage other analysis of Baxter's intellectual and in favour of Baxter's poetical powers, and moral character, would indeed be a vain atjustifies his praise by a few passages selected tempt. If there be any defect or error of which from the rest with equal tenderness and discre- he was unconscious, and which he therefore tion. It is impossible to subscribe to this has not avowed, it was the combination of an heresy even in deference to such an authority; undue reliance on his own powers of investior to resist the suspicion that the piety of the gating truth, with an undue distrust in the critic has played false with his judgment. No- result of his inquiries. He proposed to himthing short of an actual and plenary inspiration | self, and executed, the task of exploring the will enable any man who composes as rapidly whole circle of the moral sciences, logic, ethics, as he writes, to give meet utterance to those divinity, politics, and metaphysics, and this ultimate secretions of the deepest thoughts and toil he accomplished amidst public employthe purest feelings in which the essence of ments of ceaseless importunity, and bodily poetry consists. Baxter's verses, which how-pains almost unintermitted. Intemperance ever are not very numerous, would be decid- never assumed a more venial form; but that edly improved by being shorn of their rhyme this insatiate thirst for knowledge was indulged and rhythm, in which state they would look to a faulty excess, no reader of his life, or of like very devout and judicious prose, as they really are. Every man must and will have some relief his works, can doubt. In one of his most remarkable treatises "On Falsely Pretended Knowledge," the dangerous result of indulging this omnivorous appetite is peculiarly remarkable. Probabilities, the only objects of such studies, will at length become evanescent, or scarcely perceptible, when he who holds the scales refuses to adjust the balance, until satisfied that he has laden each with every suggestion and every argument which can be derived from every author who has preceded him in the same inquiries. Yet more hopeless is the search for truth, when this adjustment, once made, is again to be verified as often as any new speculations are discovered; and when the very faculty of human understanding, and the laws of reasoning, are themselves to be questioned and examined anew as frequently as doubts can be raised of their adaptation to their appointed ends. Busied with this immense apparatus, and applying it to this boundless field of inquiry, Baxter would have been bewildered by his own efforts, and lost in the mazes of a universal skepticism, but for the ardent piety which possessed his soul, and the ever recurring expectation of approaching death, which dissipated his ontological dreams, and roused him to the active duties, and the instant realities of life. Even as it is, he has left behind him much, which, in direct opposition to his own purposes, might cherish the belief that human existence was some strange chimera, and human knowledge an illusion, did it not fortunately happen that he is tedious in proportion as he is mystical. Had he possessed and employed the wit and gayety of Boyle, there are some of his writings to which place must have been assigned in the Index Expurgatorius of Protestantism. Amongst his contemporaries, Baxter appears to have been the object of general reverence, and of as general unpopularity. His temper was austere and irritable, his address ungracious and uncouth. While cordially admitting the merits of each rival sect, he concurred with none, but was the common censor and opponent of all. His own opinions on church government coincided with the later judgment, or, as it should rather be said, with the concessions of Archbishop Usher. They adjusted the whole of that interminable dispute to their mutual satisfaction at a conference which did not last above half an hour; for each of them was too devoutly intent on the great objects of Christianity to differ with each other very widely as to mere ritual observances. The contentions by which our forefathers were agitated on these subjects, have now happily subsided into a speculative and comparatively uninteresting debate. They produced their best, and perhaps their only desirable result, in diffusing through the Church, and amongst the people of England, an indestructible conviction of the folly of attempting to coerce the human mind into a servitude to any system or profession of belief; or of endeavouring to produce amongst men any real uniformity of opinion on subjects beyond the cognisance of the bodily senses, and of daily observation. They have taught us all to acknowledge in practice, though some may yet deny in theory, that as long as men are permitted to avow the truth, the inherent diversities of their understandings, and of their circumstances, must impel them to the acknowledgment of corresponding variations of judgment, on all questions which touch the mysteries of the present or of the future life. If no man laboured more, or with less success, to induce mankind to think alike on these topics, no one ever exerted himself more zealously, or more effectually, than did Richard Baxter, both by his life and his writings, to divert the world from those petty disputes which falsely assume the garb of religious zeal, to those eternal and momentous truths, in the knowledge, the love, and the practice of which, the essence of religion consists. One word respecting the edition of his works, to which we referred in the outset. For the reason already mentioned, we have stuck to our long-revered folios, without reading so much as a page of their diminutive representatives, and can therefore report nothing about them. But after diligently and repeatedly reading the two introductory volumes by Mr. Orme, we rejoice in the opportunity of bearing testimony to the merits of a learned, modest, and laborious writer, who is now, however, beyond the reach of human praise or censure. He has done every thing for Baxter's memory which could be accomplished by a skilful abridgment of his autobiography, and a careful analysis of the theological library of which he was the author; aided by an acquaintance with the theological literature of the seventeenth century, such as no man but himself has exhibited, and which it may safely be conjectured no other man possesses. Had Mr. Orme been a member of the Established Church, and had he chosen a topic more in harmony with the studies of that learned body, his literary abilities would have been far more correctly estimated, and more widely cele brated. We fear that they who dissent from her communion, and who are therefore excluded from her universities and her literary circles, are not to expect for their writings the same toleration which is so firmly secured for their persons and their ministry. Let them not, however, be dejected. Let them take for examples those whom they have selected as teachers; and learning from Richard Baxter to live and to write, they will either achieve his celebrity, or will be content, as he was, to labour without any other recompense than the tranquillity of his own conscience, the love of the people among whom he dwelt, and the ap probation of the Master to whom every hour of his life, and every page of his books, were alike devoted. PHYSICAL THEORY OF ANOTHER LIFE.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1840.] In a series of volumes of later birth than | fashioned meeting-house, coeval with the ac that from which the author of the "Natural cession of the House of Hanover-and near History of Enthusiasm" takes the title of his it the decent residence, in which, since that literary peerage, he has bent his strength to auspicious era, have dwelt the successive pasthe task of revealing to itself the generation to tors of that wandering flock-fanning a genewhich he belongs. A thankless office that of rous spirit of resistance to tyrants, now happily the censorship! A formidable enterprise this, to be encountered only in imagination, or in to rebuke the errors of a contentious age, the records of times long since passed away. while repelling the support of each of the con- Towards the close of the last century, a mild tending parties! To appease the outraged and venerable man ruled his household in that self-complacency of mankind, such a monitor modest but not unornamented abode; for there will be cited before a tribunal far more relent- might be seen the solemn portraits of the oriless than his own. Heedless both of con- ginal confessors of nonconformity, with many tumely and of neglect, he must pursue his a relic commemorative of their sufferings and labours in reliance on himself and on his their worth. Contrasted with these were the cause; or, if fame be the reward to which he lighter and varied embellishments which beaspires, he must content himself with the anti-speak the presence of refined habits, female cipation of posthumous renown. It is not, however, easy for the aspirant himself to find the necessary aliment for such hopes. The writer of these works will therefore indulge us in a theory invented for the aid of his and our own imagination. Let it be supposed, that, instead of yet living to instruct the world, he was now engaged in bringing to the test of experiment his own speculations as to the condition of mankind in the future state. He reappears amongst sublunary men under the auspices of some not unfriendly editor; who, however, being without any other sources of intelligence respecting his course of life and studies, has diligently searched his books for such intimations as may furnish the materials for a short "Introductory Notice" of him and of them. The compiler is one of those who prefer the positive to the conjectural style of recounting matters of fact; and has assumed the freedom of throwing into the form of unqualified assertion the inferences he had gleaned from detached passages of the volumes he is about to republish. With the help of this slight and not very improbable hypothesis, the author of these works, while still remaining amongst us, may suppose himself to be read-generous enough to feel that the insolence of ing, in some such lines as the following, the sentence which the critic of a future day will pass on his literary character. taste, and domestic concord. There also were drawn up, in deep files, the works and the biographies of the Puritan divines, from Thomas Cartwright, the great antagonist of Whitgift, to Matthew Pool, who, in his Synopsis Criticorum, vindicated the claims of the rejected ministers to profound Biblical learning. This veteran battalion was flanked by a company of recruits drafted from the polite literature of a more frivolous age. Rich in these treasures, and in the happy family with whom he shared them, the good man would chide or smile away such clouds as checkered his habitual serenity, when those little nameless courtesies, so pleasantly interchanged between equals, were declined by the orthodox incumbent, or accepted with elaborate condescension by the wealthy squire. The democratic sway of the ruling elders, supreme over the finances and the doctrines of the chapel, failed to draw an audible sigh from his resolute spirit, even when his more delicate sense was writhing under wounds imperceptible to their coarser vision. He had deliberately made his choice, and was content to pay the accustomed penalties. A sectarian in name, he was at heart a Catholic, some of his neighbours, and the vulgarity of others, were rather the accidents of their position than the vices of their character. VexaOne of those seemingly motionless rivers tions such as these were beneath the regard of which wind their way through the undulating him who maintained in the village the sacred surface of England, creeps round the outskirts cause for which martyrs had sacrificed life of a long succession of buildings, half town, with all its enjoyments; and who aspired to half village, where the monotony of the wat- train up his son to the same honourable sertled cottage is relieved by the usual neigh-vice, ill requited as it was by the glory or the bourhood of structures of greater dignity;the moated grange-the mansion-house, pierced by lines of high narrow windows-the square tower of the church,struggling through a copse of lime trees-the gray parsonage, where the conservative rector meditates his daily newspaper and his weekly discourse-the barn Physical Theory of Another Life. By the author of "Natural History of Enthusiasm." 8vo. London, 1839. riches of this transitory world. That hope, however, was not to be fulfilled. The youth had inherited his father's magnanimity, his profound devotion, his freedom of thought, and his thirst for knowledge. But he disclaimed the patrimony of his father's ecclesiastical opinions. His was not one of those minds which adjust themselves to whatever mould early habits may have prepared for them. It was compounded of elements, be |