Justified True Belief

(●) The pastor of one small weaving town, who worked out there what a minister is for and left the church the phrase "mere Christianity." + Picture a Monday morning in Kidderminster, a cloth-making town on the river Stour in Worcestershire, sometime in the middle 1650s. A thin man in his late thirties, ill most days of his life, sits down with a list. On the list are the names of every family in the parish, something over eight hundred of them. He and his assistant will spend this day and the next going through fifteen or sixteen of those families one at a time, asking each household what they actually believe and why, and then praying with them. Next Monday they will do the next fifteen. In a year they will have reached the whole town. That is Richard Baxter, and the practice is why he matters. He was not a bishop, he never held a university post, and he never attended a university at all. He was the preacher of a single parish for about fourteen years, split in two by a civil war, and out of those years came The Reformed Pastor, the book that taught English-speaking ministers to think of a congregation as a list of names rather than a crowd in pews. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for two further reasons. He wrote one of the first full-length defenses of the faith in English aimed at ordinary readers, The Reasons of the Christian Religion, and he spent his life arguing that Christians divided over things that were not worth the division. When a hostile pamphlet complained that nobody could tell which party he belonged to, Baxter answered that he was a Christian, "a MEER CHRISTIAN," of no other religion. Three centuries later C. S. Lewis picked up the phrase, credited it to him by name, and gave it to the twentieth century as a book title.

(●) 1615 AD: Born in Shropshire to a father who had gambled away the family land and then found God over a Bible. + Richard Baxter was born at Rowton, a hamlet near High Ercall in Shropshire, in his mother’s father’s house. The two records of it disagree, and they disagree in a way that cannot be true. Baxter gave his own birthday as 12 November 1615; the parish register at High Ercall enters his baptism on the sixth of that month, which would have him carried to the font six days before he was born. The usual explanation is a slip of the clerk’s pen, and nobody has a better one. He was an only child. His father, also Richard, held a small estate at Eaton Constantine a few miles off and had mortgaged most of it away at cards and dice before his son was born. Then, in Baxter’s telling, the elder Baxter was changed by nothing more dramatic than reading the Scriptures on his own at home, without a preacher and without a friend to explain them. The neighbours had a word for people like that. Puritan, in that county and in that decade, meant a Protestant who thought the English church had stopped half way: a man who wanted plainer worship, more preaching, a Sunday kept strictly, and prayer and Bible reading in the house on the other six days. It was not a compliment. They said it the way you would say it of a man who had stopped being good company. Baxter grew up among clergy who could barely read the service. He counted four successive readers in his village church who were unable to preach at all, one of them a day-labourer who had learned his letters late in life. That childhood is the quiet explanation for everything he later did about catechizing (T2): he had seen at close range what happens to a parish when no one teaches it.

(●) c. 1630 AD: At about fifteen an old torn book, lent by a labourer, turned him toward God. + The poor day-labourer who read in the village church lent Baxter’s father a battered copy of what everyone called Bunny’s Resolution: a devotional book written by Robert Parsons, an English Jesuit (a priest of the Society of Jesus, the Roman Catholic order that taught, argued, and worked to win Protestant Europe back), and then edited into a Protestant version by Edmund Bunny. The book that first took hold of Baxter, in other words, came to him worn at the edges, borrowed from a labourer, and written in the first place by a man on the far side of the century’s deepest divide before a Protestant editor made it safe for Protestant hands. Baxter read it at about fifteen and said afterwards that the things he had known before came now "in another manner, with Light, and Sense and Seriousness" to his heart. Then a pedlar came to the door with ballads and a few good books, and his father bought Richard Sibbes’s The Bruised Reed. A servant in the house turned out to own a piece of William Perkins. That was the whole of it. "And thus (without any means but Books) was God pleased to resolve me for himself," he wrote, and it is worth noticing how much of his later life follows from that sentence: a man converted by cheap print spent forty years producing cheap print. His own schooling went a different way from most ministers’. He was tutored at Ludlow Castle by Richard Wickstead, chaplain to the council that governed Wales and the border counties from there, and he never went up to Oxford or Cambridge at all. Friends pushed him instead toward the court in London, where he spent about a month under Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, the crown officer who licensed plays and arranged the king’s entertainments. It was a month spent watching how a career was made, and he did not like what he saw. He went home disgusted and turned to divinity for good.

(●) 1638 to 1641 AD: Ordained at Worcester, he was chosen at twenty-five to preach in Kidderminster. + The start was modest, which is how most starts are. In 1638 John Thornborough, the bishop of Worcester, ordained him and licensed him to teach in the free school at Dudley, and it was at Dudley that he preached his first sermon. From there he moved on to Bridgnorth in Shropshire as assistant to the vicar, and stayed the better part of two years. Kidderminster came to him by an odd route. The town had an old vicar it did not want in the pulpit, and the arrangement finally reached was that the vicar would pay sixty pounds a year out of his two hundred to a preacher chosen by a body of trustees, keeping his living while somebody else did the preaching. The invitation reached Baxter in March 1640/1. (The English year then began on 25 March rather than 1 January, so a date falling in January, February or early March is written with both years to save confusion about which one is meant.) He preached a trial sermon, the trustees chose him unanimously, and on 5 April 1641 he began. He was twenty-five years old. It did not go smoothly. The rougher part of the town resisted him for years, and he later wrote that he had to break "over the brunt of the Opposition of the Rabble" before the war, after which he found them tractable. The truth is that a young man with no degree, preaching at the invitation of a committee, in a town of weavers who had not asked for reform, had to earn every foot of the ground he later stood on.

(●) 1642 to 1647 AD: Civil war drove him out of his parish and made him an army chaplain. + When the fighting began in August 1642 Kidderminster became dangerous for a man of his reputation. He went first to Gloucester, then to Coventry, where he lived in the garrison with some thirty other ministers who had also been driven from their parishes. After the battle of Naseby in 1645 he took a chaplaincy with the cavalry, Colonel Edward Whalley’s regiment of horse in the New Model Army, and served until early 1647. What he found in the ranks appalled him. The army was full of sects, which is what the age called companies of believers who had broken away to worship on their own terms outside the parish church, and Baxter had no sympathy with their cause whatever. He watched godly men divide into parties over church government, over baptism, over who might preach, and the sight marked him permanently. Men who agreed about Christ were tearing at each other around a campfire, and he came away convinced that the energy Christians spend fighting each other is the single greatest waste in the church. Everything he later wrote about concord (T4) grew from those two years in the saddle. His health broke there. He suffered from bleeding at the nose, kidney stones, and a catalogue of other complaints that ran his whole adult life; by his own count he took advice from thirty-six physicians and read authors who told him his disease was incurable. He said plainly that he wrote every book he ever wrote while ill.

(●) 1647 to 1660 AD: He came back from a near-fatal illness and spent thirteen years making Kidderminster a different town. + In 1647 a violent nosebleed left him so weak that his recovery was not expected. He had begun a book about heaven three weeks earlier in a sickroom at Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire; then Lady Rous took him into Sir Thomas Rous’s house at Rous Lench in Worcestershire, and there, across a quarter of a year, he wrote the greater part of The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. He had no expectation of returning to a pulpit and no library to work from either, nothing beside him but a Bible and a concordance, which is simply an index listing every word in Scripture and each place it occurs. He finished the book after he got home to Kidderminster. The book takes its title and its argument from one verse: "So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God" (Hebrews 4:9). It runs to four parts and several hundred pages, and the last part, the one people actually read, is a set of practical directions for thinking about heaven on purpose, daily, as a discipline (T3). It was published in 1650 and reprinted through his lifetime and for two centuries after. He went back to Kidderminster in 1647 and stayed until 1660, and those were the years he later called his sweet employment. Preaching twice a week, catechizing every household in turn (T2), and from 1653 pulling the ministers of the whole county into the Worcestershire Association, an agreement by which men who disagreed about church government promised to do the pastoral work together anyway, he watched a market town change in front of him. He kept the details, because he thought they were God’s and not his. The church had to have five new galleries built into it to seat the people who came. There were six hundred communicants at the Lord’s Supper, and of those he had doubts about fewer than twelve. On Sunday afternoons, he wrote, "you might hear an hundred Families singing Psalms and repeating Sermons, as you passed through the Streets." And the sentence he could never say without embarrassment, and said anyway: "when I came thither first, there was about one Family in a Street that worshipped God and called on his Name, and when I came away there were some Streets where there was not past one Family in the side of a Street that did not so." The timing of those years troubled him for the rest of his life. Writing in old age under a very different government, he blessed God for having given him liberty to preach the gospel with success under a usurper he had opposed, Oliver Cromwell, and noted that he found himself silenced under a lawful king.

(●) 1660 to 1662 AD: He refused a bishopric, was refused his own pulpit, and was put out of the Church of England. + The Restoration of 1660, which brought Charles II back to the throne and the bishops back to their cathedrals, made Baxter briefly a man of consequence. He preached before the House of Commons on 30 April, was made a chaplain to the king, and was offered the bishopric of Hereford. He turned it down. Taking it would have meant conforming, that is, accepting the worship and the government of the church exactly as the restored bishops were re-establishing them, and there were terms in that settlement he could not accept. What he wanted was not a mitre but a church wide enough for moderate men on both sides to stay inside together, and a bishopric bought at the price of that hope was not worth having. So he asked for the only thing he actually did want, which was leave to go back to Kidderminster, and he offered to go back on the humblest footing available, as curate to the old vicar, doing the work under another man’s name. He was refused. The town got up a petition for him signed by about sixteen hundred of its eighteen hundred communicants, the adults admitted to the Lord’s Supper and so as near as a parish came to a roll of its committed members, and it made the refusal harder rather than easier. George Morley, the bishop of Worcester, forbade him to preach anywhere in the diocese. He never stood in that pulpit again. One chance was left, and it came to nothing. The Savoy Conference of 1661 put bishops and presbyterians in the same room in London to see whether the Book of Common Prayer could be revised into something both sides could use, and Baxter was the leading spokesman for the moderate presbyterian side. In a fortnight, which is a remarkable piece of work by any standard, he drew up a complete alternative service book of his own, his Reformation of the Liturgy, prayers and sacraments and the whole order of worship. It was set aside without serious consideration. What came instead of a compromise was a fence. The Act of Uniformity received the royal assent in May 1662 and took effect on St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August, requiring of every minister in England an unfeigned assent and consent to everything contained in the Prayer Book. Baxter could not give it, and he had already preached his last sermon that May. Something close to two thousand ministers lost their livings that August, and from that day the word Nonconformist carried the settled meaning it has carried ever since: a Protestant who will not conform to the Church of England, and who therefore worships outside it, at whatever that costs him.

(●) 1662 to 1691 AD: Silenced and later jailed, he spent his last thirty years defending the faith in print instead of from a pulpit. + Seventeen days after the ejection, on 10 September 1662, Baxter married Margaret Charlton, a young woman from a Shropshire gentry family about twenty years his junior who had been converted under his Kidderminster ministry. He had argued for years that ministers were better unmarried, and he changed his mind about it in the most public way available to him. The marriage lasted nineteen years. When she died on 14 June 1681 he wrote A Breviate of the Life of Margaret Baxter, a grieving husband’s account of his wife that is unlike anything else in seventeenth-century English religious writing. The years between were spent moving house, preaching where the law allowed and sometimes where it did not, paying fines, and writing, always writing. A man forbidden a pulpit still has a printer, and Baxter used one hard. Most of his largest books belong to these years: The Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667), which sets out the case for God, for the soul, and for the truth of Scripture in English for readers with no Greek and no Latin, and its sequel More Reasons for the Christian Religion (1672), written against Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s claim that reason alone gives a man all the religion he needs; and A Christian Directory (1673), a folio manual of what to do when conscience is stuck, covering prayer, marriage, servants, money, lawsuits and neighbours. He had spent years answering those questions at kitchen tables in one town. Now he answered them on paper for anyone. Then, in February 1685, the law caught up with him in earnest. He was arrested on a charge of libelling the bishops in his newly published Paraphrase on the New Testament, a plain running explanation of the whole text for readers with no Greek; the offending matter was a handful of remarks in the notes on Matthew. He was tried on 30 May before Chief Justice George Jeffreys, who bullied him from the bench and would not let him finish a sentence in his own defense. The fine was five hundred marks, a mark being two thirds of a pound, so better than three hundred pounds from a man whose whole Kidderminster stipend had been sixty pounds a year. He was held in the King’s Bench prison until the fine was remitted and he was released on 24 November 1686. He was seventy-one. He died in London on 8 December 1691 and was buried beside Margaret at Christ Church, Newgate Street. Asked in his last hours how he was, he is reported to have answered, "Almost well." He left his papers to his friend Matthew Sylvester, who published them in 1696 as Reliquiae Baxterianae, one of the great autobiographies in the language and the source for most of what is known about him.

What He Taught

(T1) A minister’s first charge is his own soul, before it is anyone else’s. + The ministers of Worcestershire had set apart 4 December 1655 for a day of humiliation, a fast day kept to confess the failures of their own work. Baxter was too ill to attend. So he printed what he would have said, and the result was Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor (1656). The whole book hangs on one verse, Paul’s farewell to the elders of Ephesus: "Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood" (Acts 20:28). Baxter noticed the order of the two clauses and refused to let it go. Yourselves first. Then the flock. He is merciless about what happens when that order is reversed, and he is merciless in the first person, counting himself among the guilty. A man can spend his working life handling holy things and be a stranger to them. He can write a sermon against a sin he is at that moment committing. He can be fluent about repentance and unrepentant, and the fluency will hide it from everyone including himself. Baxter’s point is not that ministers should feel bad; it is that preaching is not a trade you can practice from outside, the way a locksmith can open a door he has no intention of walking through. Christians in every tradition have taken this as the book on the subject, and it is worth being clear why. The argument does not depend on a theory of church government, or on the Puritan settlement, or on anything else that belongs only to Baxter’s century. It depends on one sentence of Paul’s, read in order.

(Q) "Many a tailor goes in rags, that maketh costly clothes for others; and many a cook scarcely licks his fingers, when he hath dressed for others the most costly dishes." + Source: Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor, chapter 1, "The Oversight of Ourselves" (William Brown’s revised edition, the standard public-domain text). Baxter has just asked whether anyone can seriously imagine God saving a man for offering salvation to others while refusing it himself. The tailor and the cook are his answer: handling the goods is not the same as owning them (T1).

(T2) A parish is a list of names, and the work is done house by house. + Here is the practice that made Baxter famous, and it is almost embarrassingly plain. He and his assistant set aside every Monday and Tuesday, all day. They took the families of Kidderminster in order, fifteen or sixteen a week, and sat down with each household in turn. They used a short printed catechism, which is simply a set of questions with agreed answers, given out free to every family in the parish so that nobody could plead poverty. Then they asked the questions, listened to what came back, explained what needed explaining, and prayed with the family before leaving. He was honest about the arithmetic and about what it cost. Two days a week gone meant two days not spent preparing sermons, and he says so, and says it grieved him. Eight hundred families in a year meant about one conversation per household per year, which he calls a small matter compared with what people’s need required. He would have preferred once a quarter and could not manage it. What he found was that the private conversation did more visible good than all his public preaching. A sermon goes out to a room; it can be received, half-received, or slept through, and the preacher will never know which. A question asked across a kitchen table cannot be slept through. Baxter’s claim is not that preaching is unimportant, since he preached twice a week all through those years. It is that a congregation is not an audience, and a pastor who knows his people only from the pulpit does not actually know whether they are Christians at all.

(Q) "We spend Monday and Tuesday, from morning almost to night, in the work, taking about fifteen or sixteen families in a week, that we may go through the parish, in which there are upwards of eight hundred families, in a year." + Source: Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor, the dedicatory epistle to his fellow ministers (William Brown’s revised edition). He adds, in the same breath, that he had put the work off for years because he assumed people would scorn it and his strength would not bear it, and that he had been wrong on both counts: not one family had refused to come (T2).

(T3) Heaven is something to think about daily, and thinking about it is work. + Most people believe in heaven roughly the way they believe in Australia: it is certainly there, and it has nothing to do with Tuesday. Baxter thought this was the ordinary Christian’s central problem, and he wrote several hundred pages to fix it. The Saints’ Everlasting Rest ends with a set of directions for what he calls heavenly contemplation, by which he means a deliberate, scheduled, difficult exercise of turning the mind toward what God has promised and holding it there. Not a mood. Not a feeling that arrives when a hymn is good. A practice, with a time set aside for it, a place chosen for it, and a method, in which you take a promise of Scripture and reason about it, argue with your own reluctant heart about it, and turn the result into prayer. He gives reasons, and the reasons are practical rather than sentimental. A person becomes like whatever his mind feeds on most, so the object you attend to alters you. Comfort under affliction is not manufactured by trying to feel better; it comes from having somewhere else to look. And temptation loses most of its leverage on a man who genuinely expects to be somewhere better shortly. "Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth," Paul writes (Colossians 3:2), and Baxter treats that as an instruction with a method attached rather than a general encouragement. In his old age he admitted that he had once thought sermons on heaven were a waste of a congregation’s time. Everybody knows God is great and heaven is a blessed place, he used to say; tell me how to get there. He changed his mind completely, and put the change in a sentence: a man is no more Christian indeed than he is heavenly.

(Q) "A heavenly mind is a joyful mind; this is the nearest and the truest way to live a life of comfort. And without this you must needs be uncomfortable. Can a man be in the fire, and not be warm? or in the sunshine, and not have light? Can your heart be in heaven, and not have comfort?" + Source: The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, Part IV (first edition, London, 1650), spelling modernised. He is answering the Christian who finds the faith joyless and cannot think why. Baxter’s diagnosis is geographical: the northern countries are cold because they lie farther from the power of the sun, and frozen Christians are frozen for the same reason (T3).

(T4) A Christian’s name is Christian, and the party names are borrowed. + In 1680 Baxter heard of a Scottish pamphlet attacking the presbyterians of that country, and found himself in it. Its author, he reports, "knoweth not what to call me, unless it be a Baxterian, as intending to be a Hæresiarcha, being neither Papist, nor of the Church of England, nor Presbyterian, nor Independent." Those were the four boxes on offer in 1680: Rome; the restored Church of England, governed by its bishops; the presbyterians, who wanted a church run by ministers and elders together rather than by bishops; and the Independents, who held that each congregation answers to Christ and to no assembly above it. A heresiarch is the founder of a heresy, so the charge came to this. A man who will not live in any of the four boxes must be quietly nailing together a fifth. Baxter answered in the preface to his Church-History of the Government of Bishops, and his first move was to refuse the terms of the question. If he were a heresiarch, he asked, why had his accuser not troubled to name the heresy, with nearly eighty books of his to choose from? His position is easy to state and was not at all easy to hold in 1680. Scripture promises salvation to believers, that is, to Christians as such. It does not promise salvation to men as Papists, which was the period’s hostile word for Roman Catholics, or as Protestants, or as members of any other party, and Baxter says he would decline even the name Protestant if he did not take it to mean simple Christianity with the corruptions left out. If people insist on filing him somewhere, let them call him a catholic Christian, using catholic in its old sense of universal: one who holds the religion Christ and the apostles left to the whole church, and nothing extra. None of this was indifference, and the distinction is one Baxter himself was careful about. He argued theology his whole life, often at unreasonable length, and he was not saying doctrine does not matter. He was drawing a line between the things all Christians must hold, which are few and clear, and the things Christians have divided over, which are many and mostly harder than the people fighting about them realised. His own sense of that difficulty deepened with age. Late in life he wrote that he now saw more good and more evil in all men than he once did: better men turn out to be more faulty on closer acquaintance, and worse men turn out to have more in them for grace to work on. A man who believes both halves of that finds it difficult to keep a party going.

(Q) "I am a CHRISTIAN, a MEER CHRISTIAN, of no other Religion; and the Church that I am of is the Christian Church, and hath been visible where ever the Christian Religion and Church hath been visible." + Source: Church-History of the Government of Bishops and their Councils Abbreviated (London, 1680), preface, spelling and capitals as printed. He goes on: if any will call mere Christians a party because they take up with mere Christianity, the Creed and the Scripture, and will not be of any dividing or contentious sect, then he is of that party which is against parties (T4). This is the sentence C. S. Lewis had in mind.

(Q) "I preach'd, as never sure to preach again, And as a dying man to dying men!" + Source: Poetical Fragments (London, 1681), from the long autobiographical poem "Love Breathing Thanks and Praise." Baxter is looking back on the Kidderminster years and explaining why he preached the way he did. The two lines before it give the reason: still thinking he had little time to live, his fervent heart strove to win men’s souls. He was ill enough, often enough, that the sentence is a description rather than a flourish.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His book on pastoral work became the one ministers were handed, across three centuries and most denominations. + There is a small test for whether a practical book has survived: does anyone still quote it at people who are about to start the job? The Reformed Pastor passes. John Wesley thought enough of Baxter to extract The Saints’ Everlasting Rest for his Christian Library, the fifty-volume set he abridged to put good books in the hands of Methodist preachers who could not afford shelves. Charles Spurgeon, lecturing his own students in Victorian London on what he called the minister’s self-watch, reached straight for Baxter’s warning to take heed to yourselves, lest you be void of the saving grace you offer to others and a stranger to the gospel you preach. In the twentieth century J. I. Packer wrote his doctoral thesis on Baxter and spent a long career pressing him on readers who had never heard of a seventeenth-century Worcestershire parish. The book still gets reprinted, and it still lands, because nothing in its argument belongs only to the 1650s (T1).

(†) His little book for the unconverted went out in tens of thousands and crossed the Atlantic in an Algonquian translation. + James Ussher, the archbishop of Armagh, pressed Baxter to write plain books for ordinary people in their various conditions. Baxter put him off, thinking others had done it better, and then found after Ussher’s death that the advice had lodged. For the ungodly, he decided, direction was no use; what was needed was vehement persuasion. So he wrote A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live (1658), a short book of a few dozen pages built on God’s question in Ezekiel 33:11, why will you die. He kept count of what happened, and the numbers startled him. About twenty thousand copies were printed with his consent in a little more than a year, and ten thousand more after that, besides pirated editions he could not stop. Whole households, he was told, had been converted by it. Then it travelled. John Eliot, the missionary to the Massachusett people of New England, had finished printing the entire Bible in their language, one of the Algonquian tongues of the north-eastern coast, which he had had to learn and to set down in writing before he could print a word of it. The next thing he translated was Baxter’s Call. The pastor of the French church in London put it into elegant French, and it was printed in Dutch in Germany. Baxter, ejected and silenced and forbidden his own pulpit, found that the cheap print which had converted him at fifteen was carrying his voice to places he would never see.

(†) C. S. Lewis took his phrase and made it the name of the century’s best-known defense of the faith. + In 1944 Lewis wrote an introduction to a new translation of On the Incarnation by Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, and used it to argue that the cure for the blindness of any one period is to read old books from other periods. Every age has its characteristic mistakes, and the people inside an age cannot see them, because everybody around them is making the same ones. Lewis put the remedy in one sentence: "The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity (‘mere Christianity’ as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective." Eight years later that phrase became the title of the broadcast talks that have introduced generations of readers to Christian belief. The debt runs deeper than the words. Lewis’s whole method in that book, refusing to argue for any one communion and defending only what nearly all Christians at nearly all times have held, is Baxter’s method, and Baxter had worked it out in a decade when holding it cost a man his living. Baxter would have recognised something else in it too. He spent his last thirty years without a parish, writing for readers he could not see, on the conviction that the faith held in common is worth more than the arguments that separate. Lewis, at a microphone in wartime London, was doing the same job.

(†) Where many Christians part company with him: his account of how a sinner is justified. + The man who pleaded for concord spent an extraordinary amount of his life in controversy, and on one question he was himself the cause of it. In 1649 he published Aphorismes of Justification, and it set off a quarrel that outlived him. The word in that title is the one to slow down over, because everything turns on it. To be justified, in Paul’s vocabulary and in the vocabulary of every party to this fight, is to be accepted by God as righteous: to stand before him not guilty, the way a man walks out of a courtroom once the charge against him has been answered and the judge has said so out loud. Nobody in the quarrel doubted that this is what the word means. The whole fight was about the terms on which the verdict is given. Baxter held that Christ’s death satisfied God’s justice in a way that established a new covenant for the human race, and that under that covenant faith and sincere evangelical obedience are the conditions on which a person is justified. Evangelical obedience was his term for the obedience the gospel itself asks of a believer, repentance and trust and a life lived with Christ as Lord, as distinct from the flawless law-keeping that no one manages. He was not saying that anyone earns heaven. He insisted that the whole arrangement is a gift and that Christ alone merited it. But he would not say that Christ’s own obedience is reckoned to the believer, credited to the believer’s account as though he had performed it himself, and that refusal is the heart of the matter. His critics, John Owen among them at the time and others long after, said that this made obedience a condition of acceptance with God rather than its fruit, and so blunted the point of Paul’s sentence: "For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law" (Romans 3:28). Baxter’s reply was that Scripture also says a person is justified by works and not by faith alone (James 2:24), that any account of justification has to hold both texts, and that much of the quarrel was verbal. He called the Aphorismes in, saying that he had revoked the book and not the doctrine, and he went on defending the doctrine in Catholick Theologie (1675) and in An End of Doctrinal Controversies, published in the year he died. The merits are settled, if they are settled anywhere, in the letters of Paul and James themselves. The fact of the quarrel stands, and so does the irony in it. A large part of Christendom, including many who love everything else he wrote, reads Baxter on justification as having given away more than he needed to; and the same restless mind that could hold three parties in view at once and see the reconcilers as wiser than either extreme was also the mind that could not stop refining a formula until it satisfied nobody.