Richard Baxter
Richard Baxter
Richard Baxterwas an English Puritan church leader, poet, hymn-writer, theologian, and controversialist. Dean Stanley called him "the chief of English Protestant Schoolmen". After some false starts, he made his reputation by his ministry at Kidderminster, and at around the same time began a long and prolific career as theological writer. After the Restoration he refused preferment, while retaining a non-separatist Presbyterian approach, and became one of the most influential leaders of the Nonconformists, spending time in prison. His views on...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionClergyman
Date of Birth12 November 1615
Richard Baxter quotes about
Keep up a humble sense of your own faults, and that will make you compassionate to others
An aching tooth is better out than in. To lose a rotting member is a gain.
For it was thy sin, and the sin of all the world, that lay upon our Redeemer, and his sacrifice and satisfaction is sufficient for all, and the fruits of it are offered to one as well as another, but it is true that it was never the intent of his mind to pardon and save any that would not by faith and repentance be converted.
Get masters of families to do their duty, and they will not only spare you a great deal of labor, but will much further the success of your labors. You are not like to see any general reformation, till you procure family reformation. Some little religion there may be, here and there; but while it is confined to single persons, and is not promoted in families, it will not prosper, nor promise much future increase.
Surely love is both work and wages.
Sinners, hear and consider, if you wilfully condemn your souls to bestiality, God will condemn them to perpetual misery.
In a divine commonwealth holiness must have the principal honor and encouragement, and a great difference be made between the precious and the vile.
Life is short, and we are dull, and eternal things are necessary, and the souls that depend on our teaching are precious.
This is the sanctification of your studies: when they are devoted to God, and when He is the end, the object, and the life of them all.
If life be long I will be glad, that I may long obey; if short, yet why should I be sad to welcome to endless day?
When we speak to drunkards, worldlings, or any ignorant, unconverted men, we disgrace them as in that condition to the utmost, and lay it on as plainly as we can speak, and tell them of their sin, and shame, and misery: and we expect, not only that they should bear all patiently, but take all thankfully, and we have good reasons for all this; and most that I deal with do take it patiently ... But if we speak to a godly minister against his errors or any sin ... if it be not more an applause than a reprehension, they take it as an injury almost insufferable.
I did nothing that I might not have done better.
An ounce of mirth is worth a pound of sorrow.
Make careful choice of the books which you read: let the holy scriptures ever have the pre-eminence, and, next to them, those solid, lively, heavenly treatises which best expound and apply the scriptures, and next, credible histories, especially of the Church ... but take heed of false teachers who would corrupt your understandings.