secution for
not conforming to some trifling matters of Church usage, while he
advocated the doctrine of passive obedience to the King or ruling power,
and the right of that power to enforce conformity. He wrote against
conformity while himself conforming; seceded from the Church, and yet
held stated communion with it; begged for the curacy of Kidderminster,
and declined the bishopric of Hereford. His writings were many of them
directly calculated to make Dissenters from the Establishment, but he was
invariably offended to find others practically influenced by them, and
quarrelled with his own converts to Dissent. The High Churchmen of
Oxford burned his Holy Commonwealth as seditious and revolutionary; while
Harrington and the republican club of Miles's Coffee House condemned it
for its hostility to democracy and its servile doctrine of obedience to
kings. He made noble pleas for liberty of conscience and bitterly
complained of his own suffering from Church courts, yet maintained the
necessity of enforcing conformity, and stoutly opposed the tolerant
doctrines of Penn and Milton. Never did a great and good man so entangle
himself with contradictions and inconsistencies. The witty and wicked
Sir Roger L'Estrange compiled from the irreconcilable portions of his
works a laughable Dialogue between Richard and Baxter. The Antinomians
found him guilty of Socinianism; and one noted controversialist undertook
to show, not without some degree of plausibility, that he was by turns a
Quaker and a Papist!

Although able to suspend his judgment and carefully weigh evidence, upon
matters which he regarded as proper subjects of debate and scrutiny, he
possessed the power to shut out and banish at will all doubt and
misgiving in respect to whatever tended to prove, illustrate, or enforce
his settled opinions and cherished doctrines. His credulity at times
seems boundless. Hating the Quakers, and prepared to believe all manner
of evil of them, he readily came to the conclusion that their leaders
were disguised Papists. He maintained that Lauderdale was a good and
pious man, in spite of atrocities in Scotland which entitle him to a
place with Claverhouse; and indorsed the character of the infamous
Dangerfield, the inventor of the Meal-tub Plot, as a worthy convert from
popish errors. To prove the existence of devils and spirits, he
collected the most absurd stories and old-wives' fables, of soldiers
scared from their posts at