But for our blessed and truly
Apostolic and Scriptural Liturgy, our churches' pews would long ago have
been filled by Arians and Socinians, as too many of their desks and
pulpits already are.
Part III. p. 59.
As also to make us take such a poor suffering as this for a sign of
true grace, instead of faith, hope, love, mortification, and a
heavenly mind; and that the loss of one grain of love was worse than a
long imprisonment.
Here Baxter confounds his own particular case, which very many would
have coveted, with the sufferings of other prisoners on the same
score;--sufferings nominally the same, but with few, if any, of Baxter's
almost flattering supports.
Ib. p. 60.
It would trouble the reader for me to reckon up the many diseases and
dangers for these ten years past, in or from which God hath delivered
me; though it be my duty not to forget to be thankful. Seven months
together I was lame with a strange pain in one foot, twice delivered
from a bloody flux; a spurious cataract in my eye, with incessant webs
and networks before it, hath continued these eight years, * * * so
that I have rarely one hour's or quarter of an hour's ease. Yet
through God's mercy I was never one hour melancholy, &c.
The power of the soul, by its own act of will, is, I admit, great for
any one occasion or for a definite time, yea, it is marvellous. But of
such exertions and such an even frame of spirit, as Baxter's were, under
such unremitting and almost unheard-of bodily derangements and pains as
his, and during so long a life, 1 do not believe a human soul capable,
unless substantiated and successively potentiated by an especial divine
grace.
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