derable help of country divines. Weakness
and pain helped me to study how to die; that set me a-studying how to
live; and that on studying the doctrine from which I must fetch my
motives and comforts; beginning with necessities, I proceeded by degrees,
and am now going to see that for which I have lived and studied."

Of the first essays of the young theologian as a preacher of the
Established Church, his early sufferings from that complication of
diseases with which his whole life was tormented, of the still keener
afflictions of a mind whose entire outlook upon life and nature was
discolored and darkened by its disordered bodily medium, 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