One of my sons had as his godfather a fiery Welsh minister of the Gospel who had studied at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. It was thanks to him and his advice that I became the owner of a 1935 Austin Seven – cable brakes and all – that became my pride and joy, and recipient of more engine oil than I cared to imagine, for two or three years.
I was also indebted to John for introducing me to a man he admired – Richard Baxter. I did not go so far as to plod through the pages of the ‘Christian Directory’ but I found his ‘Saints’ Everlasting Rest’ and ‘Reformed Pastor’ worth spending time on. Baxter is a man we should enjoy getting to know.
Baxter is one of those godly men who was sent to prison for what he believed. Bunyan is another. When the 1662 Act of Uniformity drew a line in the sand around the Established Church, 2,000 ministers were victims of the Great Ejection. Baxter was one of them. He was a man of independent mind and made clear his reservations about the views on limited atonement, for example, held by men such as John Owen who might have been considered his natural allies.
The one quotation from Baxter that I have always remembered is his take on the hope of glory. It is, he says, ‘the very spring that sets all the wheels going.’ If it meant that much to Baxter, it gained even more currency by its inclusion in one of the best things in the Book of Common Prayer, the general thanksgiving.
It was Baxter who coined the phrase ‘mere Christianity’. For some this meant he was happy to sit on the fence. Others thought he was not taking religious differences seriously. The phrase still has its admirers today, thanks to C.S. Lewis. There may be some of a wistful cast of mind who would like the Great Ejection of 1662 to be followed by a Great Injection of 2021. Arnold was thinking along these lines in the early 1800s. English Christianity has shown itself to be an adaptable creature since at least the days of the Synod of Whitby when the style of hair-cut was an obsessive issue among English Christians.
ENGLISH CHRISTIANITY
The early days of English Christianity are covered by a readable new book ‘The Anglo-Saxons’, by Marc Morris, published by Hutchinson. The rise, against the odds, it must seem, of the Christian faith to replace ingrained paganism, when it had to cope with divisions between Celts and newcomers, between north and south, between bishops serving as guardians of the faith and at the same time acting as officers of state (and sometimes military officers) is a wonder to behold. The sudden onset of plague complicated the issues further more than once. So did a contest between Latin and the vernacular. Wilfrid was in the thick of it in an up and down career that was a major factor in the evolution of English Christianity. Morris deals not only with English Christianity but with the Anglo-Saxon civilisation.
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