Editor’S Note
EDITOR’S NOTE
Richard Baxter was a communicative man, the kind of magnetic, commanding person who makes you feel that he is taking you into his confidence every time he opens his mouth or puts pen to paper. Augustine, Luther, C. S. Lewis, and Billy Graham are four more instances of this human type—all of them, incidentally, persons with whom in different ways Baxter is comparable.
It is clear that Richard wrote very much as he talked, both in ordinary conversation and in the pulpit; the way shrewd precision combines with guileless spontaneity in all his books gives them a flavor of magisterial pathos that is unique and quite riveting. The Baxter writing style is loose but lucid; it is intimate, informal, repetitive, and schoolmasterly, yet always pointed and weighty, coming hot from both head and heart. Richard’s powers of analysis and articulation ensured that all his writing is clear and strong, even when exact grammar fails; and his zeal for God’s glory, the church’s purity, and the health of souls made his writing constantly ardent and arresting.
Someone coined the phrase “noble negligence” to describe Richard’s way of writing; it fits perfectly. Sure that his time was short and that there was a vast amount of work still waiting for him to do, he wrote at top speed and published with little or no revision, so that everything is brisk, frank, rough, and pungent—the literary legacy of a good man in a hurry. The subject matter of the Breviate, and the overtones of grief that mark its pages, set it apart from the rest of Baxter’s books, but it is vintage Baxter in respect of all the qualities mentioned so far.
Richard offers the book as true and useful history—useful, that is, in the sense that it illustrates principles about life with and under God that will guide and encourage Christian readers. More than once Richard anticipates the criticism that the Breviate is a self-pitying or self-applauding ego trip by insisting on its usefulness, and he titles its last chapter, almost defiantly, “Some Uses Proposed to the Reader from This History, as the Reasons Why I Wrote It” (“uses” means here “applicatory lessons”).
This was a very Puritan concern on Baxter’s part. In all their communications and commitments, the Puritans sought to observe a maxim that might be called the principle of parsimony, namely that there is no place in life for idle words or aimless actions, but that everything said and done should count for the cause of God and the good of his people. Whether or not Puritans as a body pushed this principle so far as to constrict Christian liberty is debatable, but there can be no debate that the principle itself is true and basic to responsible Christian living. We may well be glad that Baxter was concerned to observe it, for his chain of “uses” (twenty-one all told) offers insights on the Christian life and marriage that are golden in quality.
“They amount to the contention that his wife’s experiences can encourage hope, discourage despair, and prevent false expectations by showing what a saint may expect in this world, and that her example may guide others.”1
Honesty, humility, and the world-weariness brought on by his own weakness of body and grief of mind combine to give great authority, as well as great poignancy, to the lessons from Margaret’s story that the bereaved pastor-teacher draws out.
My goal in editing the Breviate has been to let Baxter speak to modern readers as straightforwardly as possible. So I have cut out a few paragraphs that clutter up the story, modernized spelling and punctuation, explained archaisms in brackets, and added or substituted a few words to secure a smoother flow. Since Richard thought of himself as writing for posterity no less than for his contemporaries, I do not think he would have objected to what I have done. The edition of the Breviate for scholars remains T. J. Wilkinson’s superb Richard Baxter and Margaret Charlton: A Puritan Love-Story (1928), sadly long out of print. I gratefully acknowledge the help that Wilkinson’s work has been in my own enterprise.