And who shall dare unconditionally condemn those who judged the former to be the better alternative?  Especially those who did not adopt Baxter’s notion of a ‘jus divinum’ personal and hereditary in the individual, whose father had broken the compact on which the claim rested.

Ib. p. 75.

One Mrs. Dyer, a chief person of the Sect, did first bring forth a monster, which had the parts of almost all sorts of living creatures, some parts like man, but most ugly and misplaced, and some like beasts, birds and fishes, having horns, fins and claws; and at the birth of it the bed shook, and the women present fell a vomiting, and were fain to go forth of the room.

This babe of Mrs. Dyer’s is no bad emblem of Richard Baxter’s own credulity.  It is almost an argument on his side, that nothing he believed is more strange and inexplicable than his own belief of them.

Ib. p. 76.

  The third sect were the Ranters.  These also made it their business, as
  the former, to set up the light of nature under the name of Christ in
  men, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, &c.

But why does Baxter every where assert the identity of the new light with the light of nature?  Or what does he mean exclusively by the latter?  The source must be the same in all lights as far as it is light.

Ib. p. 77.

  And that was the fourth sect, the Quakers; who were but the Ranters
  turned from horrid profaneness and blasphemy to a life of extreme
  austerity on the other side.

Observe the but.

Ib.

Their doctrine is to be seen in Jacob Behmen’s books by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms.

This is not in all its parts true.  It is true that the first principles of Behmen are to be found in the writings of the Neo-Platonists after Plotinus, and (but mixed with gross impieties) in Paracelsus;—­but it is not true that they are easily known, and still less so that they are communicable in common familiar terms.  But least of all is it true that there is nothing original in Behmen.

Ib.

  The chiefest of these in England are Dr. Pordage and his family.

It is curious that Lessing in the Review, which he, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn conducted under the form of Letters to a wounded Officer, joins the name of Pordage with that of Behmen.  Was Pordage’s work translated into German?

Ib. p. 79.