of a free will in man;—­or acknowledged as laws, for example, the unconditional bindingness of the practical reason;—­or to be freely affirmed as necessary through their moral interest, their indispensableness to our spiritual humanity, for example, the personeity, holiness, and moral government and providence of God;—­let these be vindicated from absurdity, from self-contradiction, and contradiction to the pure reason, and restored to simple incomprehensibility.  He who seeks for more, knows not what he is talking of; he who will not seek even this is either indifferent to the truth of what he professes to believe, or he mistakes a general determination not to disbelieve for a positive and especial faith, which is only our faith as far as we can assign a reason for it.  O! how impossible it is to move an inch to the right or the left in any point of spiritual and moral concernment, without seeing the damage caused by the confusion of reason with the understanding.

Ib. p. 181.

My soul is much more afflicted with the thoughts of the miserable world, and more drawn out in desire of their conversion than heretofore.  I was wont to look but little further than England in my prayers, as not considering the state of the rest of the world;—­or if I prayed for the conversion of the Jews, that was almost all.  But now as I better understand the care of the world, and the method of the Lord’s Prayer, so there is nothing in the world that lieth so heavy upon my heart, as the thought of the miserable nations of the earth.

I dare not not condemn myself for the languid or dormant state of my feelings respecting the Mohammedan and Heathen nations; yet know not in what degree to condemn.  The less culpable grounds of this languor are, first, my utter ignorance of God’s purposes with respect to the Heathens; and second, the strong conviction, I have that the conversion of a single province of Christendom to true practical Christianity would do more toward the conversion of Heathendom than an army of Missionaries.  Romanism and despotic government in the larger part of Christendom, and the prevalence of Epicurean principles in the remainder;—­these do indeed lie heavy on my heart.

Ib. p. 135.

Therefore I confess I give but halting credit to most histories that are written, not only against the Albigenses and Waldenses, but against most of the ancient heretics, who have left us none of their own writings, in which they speak for themselves; and I heartily lament that the historical writings of the ancient schismatics and heretics, as they were called, perished, and that partiality suffered them not to survive, that we might have had more light in the Church affairs of those times, and been better able to judge between the Fathers and them.

It is greatly to the credit of Baxter that he has here anticipated those merits which so long after gave deserved celebrity to the name and writings of Beausobre and Lardner, and still more recently in this respect of Eichhorn, Paulus and other Neologists.