ated, but never appropriated, the distinction
between the King as the executive power, and as the individual
functionary. What obligation lay on the Scottish Parliament and Church
to consult the man Charles Stuart's personal likes and dislikes? The
Oath was to be taken by him as their King. Doubtless, he equally
disliked the whole Protestant interest; and if the Tories and Church of
England Jacobites of a later day had recalled James II., would Baxter
have thought them culpable for imposing on him an Oath to preserve the
Protestant Church of England and to inflict severe penalties on his own
Church-fellows?

Ib. p. 71.

And some men thought it a very hard question, whether they should
rather wish the continuance of a usurper that will do good, or the
restoration of a rightful governor whose followers will do hurt.

And who shall dare unconditionally condemn those who judged the former
to be the better alternative? Especially those who did not adopt
Baxter's notion of a 'jus divinum' personal and hereditary in the
individual, whose father had broken the compact on which the claim
rested.

Ib. p. 75.

One Mrs. Dyer, a chief person of the Sect, did first bring forth a
monster, which had the parts of almost all sorts of living creatures,
some parts like man, but most ugly and misplaced, and some like
beasts, birds and fishes, having horns, fins and claws; and at the
birth of it the bed shook, and the women present fell a vomiting, and
were fain to go forth of the room.

This babe of Mrs. Dyer's is no bad emblem of Richard Baxter's own
credulity. It is almost an argument on his side, that nothing he
believed is more strange and inexplicable than his own belief of them.

Ib. p. 76.

The third sect were the Ranters. These also made it their business, as
the former, to set up the light of nature under the name of Christ in
men, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, &c.

But why does Baxter every where assert the identity of the new light
with the light of nature? Or what does he mean exclusively by the
latter? The source must be the same in all lights as far as it is light.

Ib. p. 77.

And that was the fourth sect, the Quakers; who were but the Ranters
turned from horrid profaneness and blasphemy to a life of extreme
austerity on the other side.

Observe the _but_.

Ib.

Their doctrine is to be seen in Jacob Behmen's books by him that hath
nothing else to do,