Part III. p. 59.

As also to make us take such a poor suffering as this for a sign of true grace, instead of faith, hope, love, mortification, and a heavenly mind; and that the loss of one grain of love was worse than a long imprisonment.

Here Baxter confounds his own particular case, which very many would have coveted, with the sufferings of other prisoners on the same score;—­sufferings nominally the same, but with few, if any, of Baxter’s almost flattering supports.

Ib. p. 60.

It would trouble the reader for me to reckon up the many diseases and dangers for these ten years past, in or from which God hath delivered me; though it be my duty not to forget to be thankful.  Seven months together I was lame with a strange pain in one foot, twice delivered from a bloody flux; a spurious cataract in my eye, with incessant webs and networks before it, hath continued these eight years, * * * so that I have rarely one hour’s or quarter of an hour’s ease.  Yet through God’s mercy I was never one hour melancholy, &c.

The power of the soul, by its own act of will, is, I admit, great for any one occasion or for a definite time, yea, it is marvellous.  But of such exertions and such an even frame of spirit, as Baxter’s were, under such unremitting and almost unheard-of bodily derangements and pains as his, and during so long a life, 1 do not believe a human soul capable, unless substantiated and successively potentiated by an especial divine grace.

Ib. p. 65.

The reasons why I make no larger a profession necessary than the Creed and Scriptures, are, because if we depart from this old sufficient Catholic rule, we narrow the Church, and depart from the old Catholicism.

Why then any Creed?  This is the difficulty.  If you put the Creed as in fact, and not by courtesy, Apostolic, and on a parity with Scripture, having, namely, its authority in itself, and a direct inspiration of the framers, inspired ‘ad id tempus et ad eam rem’, on what ground is this to be done, without admitting the binding power of tradition in the very sense of the term in which the Church of Rome uses it, and the Protestant Churches reject it?  That it is the sum total made by Apostolic contributions, each Apostle casting, as into a helmet, a several article as his [Greek:  symbolon], is the tradition; and this is holden as a mere legendary tale by the great majority of learned divines.  That it is simply the Creed of the Western Church is affirmed by many Protestant divines, and some of these divines of our Church.  Its comparative simplicity these divines explain by the freedom from heresies enjoyed by the Western Church, when the Eastern Church had been long troubled therewith.  Others, again, and not unplausibly, contend that it was the Creed of the Catechumens preparatory to the Baptismal profession of faith, which other was a fuller comment on the union