close upon
him with pain. All parties and sects had, as they thought, grounds of
complaint against him. There was in him an almost childish simplicity of
purpose, a headlong earnestness and eagerness, which did not allow him to
consider how far a present act or opinion harmonized with what he had
already done or written. His greatest admirers admit his lack of
judgment, his inaptitude for the management of practical matters. His
utter incapacity to comprehend rightly the public men and measures of his
day is abundantly apparent; and the inconsistencies of his conduct and
his writings are too marked to need comment. He suffered persecution 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 settl