ium, and of the
struggles between his Puritan temperament and his reverence for Episcopal
formulas, much might be profitably said, did the limits we have assigned
ourselves admit. Nor can we do more than briefly allude to the religious
doubts and difficulties which darkened and troubled his mind at an early
period.

He tells us at length in his Life how he struggled with these spiritual
infirmities and temptations. The future life, the immortality of the
soul, and the truth of the Scriptures were by turns questioned. "I
never," says he in a letter to Dr. More, inserted in the _Sadducisimus
Triumphatus_, "had so much ado to overcome a temptation as that to the
opinion of Averroes, that, as extinguished candles go all out in an
illuminated air, so separated souls go all into one common anima mundi,
and lose their individuation." With these and similar "temptations"
Baxter struggled long, earnestly, and in the end triumphantly. His
faith, when once established, remained unshaken to the last; and although
always solemn, reverential, and deeply serious, he was never the subject
of religious melancholy, or of that mournful depression of soul which
arises from despair of an interest in the mercy and paternal love of our
common Father.

The Great Revolution found him settled as a minister in Kidderminster,
under the sanction of a drunken vicar, who, yielding to the clamor of his
more sober parishioners, and his fear of their appeal to the Long
Parliament, then busy in its task of abating church nuisances, had agreed
to give him sixty pounds per year, in the place of a poor tippling
curate, notorious as a common railer and pothouse encumbrance.

As might have been expected, the sharp contrast which the earnest,
devotional spirit and painful strictness of Baxter presented to the
irreverent license and careless good humor of his predecessor by no means
commended him to the favor of a large class of his parishioners. Sabbath
merry-makers missed the rubicund face and maudlin jollity of their old
vicar; the ignorant and vicious disliked the new preacher's rigid
morality; the better informed revolted at his harsh doctrines, austere
life, and grave manner. Intense earnestness characterized all his
efforts. Contrasting human nature with the Infinite Purity and Holiness,
he was oppressed with the sense of the loathsomeness and deformity of
sin, and afflicted by the misery of his fellow-creatures separated from
the divine harmo