ed, with some regiments of foot, to command, in chief; partly that he might be governor there, and not Whalley, when the city was surrendered. So when it was yielded, Rainsborough was governor, to head and gratify the sectaries, and settle city and county in their way; but the committee of the county were for Whalley, and lived in distaste with Rainsborough, and the sectaries prospered there no further than Worcester city itself, a place which deserved such a judgment; but all the country was free from their infection.

"All this while, as I had friendly converse with the sober part, so I was still employed with the rest as before, in preaching, conference, and disputing against their confounding errors; and in all places where we went, the sectarian soldiers much infected the counties, by their pamphlets and converse. The people admiring the conquering army, were ready to receive whatsoever they commended to them; and it was the way of the faction to represent what they said, as the sense of the army, and to make the people believe that whatever opinion they vented, which one in forty of the army owned not, was the army's opinion. When we quartered at Agmondesham, in Buckinghamshire, some sectaries of Chesham had set up a public meeting as for conference, to propagate their opinions through all the country; and this in the church, by the encouragement of an ignorant sectarian lecturer, one Bramble, whom they had got in, while Dr. Cook, the pastor, and Mr. Richardson, his curate, durst not contradict them. When this public talking-day came, Bethel's troopers, with other sectarian soldiers, must be there to confirm the Chesham men, and make men believe that the army was for them. I thought it my duty to be there also, and took divers sober officers with me, to let them see that more of the army were against them than for them. I took the reading pew, and Pitchford's cornet and troopers took the gallery. And there I found a crowded congregation of poor well-meaning people, who came in the simplicity of their hearts to be deceived. Then did the leader of the Chesham men begin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers set in, and I alone disputed against them from morning until almost night; for I knew their trick, that if I had but gone out first, they would have prated what boasting words they listed when I was gone, and made the people believe that they had

baffled me, or got the best; therefore, I stayed it out till they first rose and went away." Some of the sober people of Agmondesham, gave me abundance of thanks for that day's work, which they said would never be there forgotten; I heard also that the sectaries were so discouraged that they never met there any more.

"The great impediments to the success of my endeavors, I found were only two; the discountenance of Cromwell and the chief officers of his mind, which kept me a stranger from their meetings and councils; and my incapacity of speaking to many, as soldiers' quarters are scattered far from one another, and I could be but in one place at once. So that one troop at a time, ordinarily, and some few more extraordinarily, was all that I could speak to. The most of the service I did beyond Whalley's regiment was, by the help of Captain Lawrence, with some of the General's regiment, and sometimes I had converse with Major Harrison and a few others; but I found that if the army had only had ministers enough, who would have done such little as I did, all their plot must have been broken, and king, and parliament, and religion, might have been preserved. I, therefore, sent abroad to get some more ministers among them, but I could get none. Saltmarsh and Dell were the two great preachers at the head quarters; but honest and judicious Mr. Edward Bowles kept still with the General. At last I got Mr. Cook, of Roxhall, to come to assist me; and the soberer part of the officers and soldiers of Whalley's regiment were willing to remunerate him out of their own pay. A month or two he staid and assisted me; but was quickly weary, and left them again. He was a very worthy, humble, laborious man, unwearied in preaching, but weary when he had not an opportunity to preach, and weary of the spirits he had to deal with.

"All this while, though I came not near Cromwell, his designs were visible, and I saw him continually acting his part. The Lord General suffered him to govern and to do all, and to choose almost all the officers of the army. He first made Ireton commissary-general; and when any troop or company was to be disposed of, or any considerable officer's place was void, he was sure to put a sectary in the place; and when the brunt of the war was over, he looked not so much at their valor as their opinions; so that, by degrees, VOL. II.

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he had headed the greatest part of the army with anabaptists, antinomians, seekers, or separatists at best. All these he led together by the point of liberty of conscience, which was the common interest in which they did unite. Yet all the sober party were carried on by his profession, that he only promoted the universal interest of the godly, without any distinction or partiality at all; but still, when a place fell void, it was twenty to one a sectary had it; and if a godly man, of any other mind or temper, had a mind to leave the army, he would, secretly or openly, further it. Yet he did not openly profess what opinion he was of himself."*

The fact which Baxter here testifies, namely that all this while he came not near Cromwell, is a fact which ought to qualify his strictures on Cromwell's proceedings and intentions. Baxter feared, as well he might, the progress of arminianism, antinomianism and fanaticism in the army; and he used, with laudable diligence, the weapons of his warfare to check those evils. Had he been intimate with the counsels of the sectarian commanders at head quarters, he might have seen other evils at work in other quarters, and threatening to become, in their results, not less disastrous to the cause of truth and holiness. Cromwell saw, what the good chaplain of Whalley's regiment seems never to have suspected, that the Presbyterian party in the assembly and in parliament, were determined to set up their Scotch hierarchy as the kingdom of Jesus Christ, and, under the claim of a divine right, to put again upon the necks of Independents, Baptists, and all other sectaries, a yoke of uniformity, which neither they nor their fathers had been able to bear. Seeing this, he must have felt himself bound to use all proper means for the defeat of such a design; and it is not difficult to suppose that he may have acted as conscientiously in his measures for the defence of the great principles on which the revolution rested, as Baxter acted in attempting to argue down the vagaries of antinomian fanatics.

After the surrender of Worcester, the war with the king being apparently at an end, Baxter visited his old flock at Kidderminster, and was earnestly importuned to resume his labors there. On this

*Narrative, Part I. pp. 55, 57.

application he went to Coventry, and sought the advice of the ministers there, by whose counsel he had first gone into the army. In asking their advice he told them not only all his fears, but that his own judgment was clear for staying in the army till the crisis which he expected should arrive. Their opinion accorded with his; and he determined on a still longer absence from the peaceful labors of his pastoral charge.

About this time he retired from his quarters for a while on account of his health. He visited London for medical assistance, and spent some time at Tunbridge wells, and returned to his regiment in Worcestershire, prepared to go on with his work. But soon the fatigue and exposure of moving from place to place, as in that military life he was under the necessity of doing, during a cold and snowy season had almost proved fatal to him. He was attacked with a violent bleeding at the nose, which continued till his strength and almost his life was exhausted.

"And thus," he says, "God unavoidably prevented all the effect of my purposes in my last and chiefest opposition of the army; and took me off at the very time when my attempt should have begun. My purpose was to have done my best, first to take off that regiment which I was with, and then, with Capt. Lawrence, to have tried upon the General's, in which too was Cromwell's chief confidence; and then to have joined with others of the same mind; for the other regiments were much less corrupted. But the determination of God against it was most observable; for the very time that I was bleeding, the council of war sat at Nottingham, where, as I have credibly heard, they first began to open their purposes, and act their part; and, presently after, they entered into their engagement at Triploe Heath. And as I perceived it was the will of God to permit them to go on, so I afterwards found that this great affliction was a mercy to myself; for they were so strong, and active, that I had been likely to have had small success in the attempt, and to have lost my life among them in their fury. And thus I was finally separated from the army.

"When I had staid at Melbourne, in my chamber, three weeks, being among strangers, and not knowing how to get home, I went to Mr. Nowell's house, at Kirby-Mallory, in Leicestershire, where,

with great kindness, I was entertained three weeks. By that time, the tidings of my weakness came to the Lady Rous, in Worcestershire, who sent her servant to seek me out; and when he returned, and told her I was afar off, and he could not find me, she sent him again to find me, and bring me thither, if I were able to travel. So, in great weakness, thither I made shift to get, where I was entertained with the greatest care and tenderness, while I continued the use of means for my recovery; and when I had been there a quarter of ayear, I returned to Kidderminster."*

It was during this long sickness, and while he was anticipating a speedy departure, that he employed himself in writing that work on the "Saint's Everlasting Rest," which has made his name dear to the friends of serious and practical religion through the world. This was the first written of all his published compositions. A much smaller work, entitled "Aphorisms of Justification," designed to refute some of the antinomian errors which he had been combatting in the army, was commenced while the "Saint's Rest" was still unfinished and was published in 1649, two years after his return to Kidderminster. The "Saint's Rest" was published in 1650.

Of the circumstances in which this work was written, the author says, "While I was in health, I had not the least thought of writing books, or of serving God in any more public way than preaching; but when I was weakened with great bleeding, and left solitary in my chamber at Sir John Cook's in Derbyshire, without any acquaintance but my servant about me, and was sentenced to death by the physicians, I began to contemplate more seriously on the everlasting rest, which I apprehended myself to be just on the borders of. That my thoughts might not too much scatter in my meditation, I began to write something on that subject, intending but the quantity of a sermon or two; but being continued long in weakness, where I had no books and no better employment, I followed it on, till it was enlarged to the bulk in which it is published. The first three weeks I spent in it was at Mr. Nowel's house, at Kirby Mallory, in Leicestershire; a quarter of a year more, at

*Narrative, Part I. pp. 58, 59.