all day. Just imagine the state of our English
courts when a judge could thus assail a poor wretch of a woman after
passing a cruel sentence upon her. 'Hangman,' shouted the ermined brute,
'Hangman, pay particular attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly,
man. Scourge her till the blood runs. It is the Christmas season; a
cold season for madam to strip in. See, therefore, man, that you warm
her shoulders thoroughly.' And you all know who Richard Baxter was. You
have all read his seraphic book, _The Saints' Rest_. Well, besides being
the Richard Baxter so well known to our saintly fathers and mothers, he
was also, and he was emphatically, the peace-maker of the Puritan party.
Baxter's political principles were of the most temperate and
conciliatory, and indeed, almost royalist kind. He was a man of strong
passions, indeed, but all the strength and heat of his passions ran out
into his hatred of sin and his love of holiness, and an unsparing and
consuming care for the souls of his people. Very Faithful himself stood
before the bar of Judge Jeffreys in the person of Richard Baxter. It
took all the barefaced falsehood and scandalous injustice of the crown
prosecutors to draw out the sham indictment that was read out in court
against inoffensive Richard Baxter. But what was lacking in the charge
of the crown was soon made up by the abominable scurrility of the judge.
'You are a schismatical knave,' roared out Jeffreys, as soon as Baxter
was brought into court. 'You are an old hypocritical villain.' And
then, clasping his hands and turning up his eyes, he sang through his
nose: 'O Lord, we are Thy peculiar people: we are Thy dear and only
people.' 'You old blockhead,' he again roared out, 'I will have you
whipped through the city at the tail of the cart. By the grace of God I
will look after you, Richard.' And the tiger would have been as good as
his word had not an overpowering sense of shame compelled the other
judges to protest and get Baxter's inhuman sentence commuted to fine and
imprisonment. And so on, and so on. But it was Jeffreys' 'Western
Circuit,' as it was called, that filled up the cup of his infamy--an
infamy, say the historians, that will last as long as the language and
the history of England last. The only parallel to it is the infamy of a
royal house and a royal court that could welcome home and promote to
honour such a detestable miscreant as Jeffreys was. But the slaughter in
Somers