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Old Portraits, Modern Sketches, Personal Sketches and Tributes

J >> John Greenleaf Whittier >> Old Portraits, Modern Sketches, Personal Sketches and Tributes




The war of the Revolution interrupted, for a time, the philanthropic
plans of Dr. Hopkins. The beautiful island on which he lived was at an
early period exposed to the exactions and devastations of the enemy. All
who could do so left it for the mainland. Its wharves were no longer
thronged with merchandise; its principal dwellings stood empty; the very
meeting houses were in a great measure abandoned. Dr. Hopkins, who had
taken the precaution, at the commencement of hostilities, to remove his
family to Great Barrington, remained himself until the year 1776, when
the British took possession of the island. During the period of its
occupation, he was employed in preaching to destitute congregations.
He spent the summer of 1777 at Newburyport, where his memory is still
cherished by the few of his hearers who survive. In the spring of 1780,
he returned to Newport. Everything had undergone a melancholy change.
The garden of New England lay desolate. His once prosperous and wealthy
church and congregation were now poor, dispirited, and, worst of all,
demoralized. His meeting-house had been used as a barrack for soldiers;
pulpit and pews had been destroyed; the very bell had been stolen.
Refusing, with his characteristic denial of self, a call to settle in a
more advantageous position, he sat himself down once more in the midst of
his reduced and impoverished parishioners, and, with no regular salary,
dependent entirely on such free-will offerings as from time to time were
made him, he remained with them until his death.

In 1776, Dr. Hopkins published his celebrated "Dialogue concerning the
Slavery of the Africans; showing it to be the Duty and Interest of the
American States to Emancipate all their Slaves." This he dedicated to
the Continental Congress, the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.
It was republished in 1785, by the New York Abolition Society, and was
widely circulated. A few years after, on coming unexpectedly into
possession of a few hundred dollars, he devoted immediately one hundred
of it to the society for ameliorating the condition of the Africans.

He continued to preach until he had reached his eighty-third year. His
last sermon was delivered on the 16th of the tenth month, 1803, and his
death took place in the twelfth month following. He died calmly, in the
steady faith of one who had long trusted all things in the hand of God.
"The language of my heart is," said he, "let God be glorified by all
things, and the best interest of His kingdom promoted, whatever becomes
of me or my interest." To a young friend, who visited him three days
before his death, he said, "I am feeble and cannot say much. I have said
all I can say. With my last words, I tell you, religion is the one thing
needful." "And now," he continued, affectionately pressing the hand of
his friend, "I am going to die, and I am glad of it." Many years before,
an agreement had been made between Dr. Hopkins and his old and tried
friend, Dr. Hart, of Connecticut, that when either was called home, the
survivor should preach the funeral sermon of the deceased. The venerable
Dr. Hart accordingly came, true to his promise, preaching at the funeral
from the words of Elisha, "My father, my father; the chariots of Israel,
and the horsemen thereof." In the burial-ground adjoining his meeting-
house lies all that was mortal of Samuel Hopkins.

One of Dr. Hopkins's habitual hearers, and who has borne grateful
testimony to the beauty and holiness of his life and conversation, was
William Ellery Channing. Widely as he afterwards diverged from the creed
of his early teacher, it contained at least one doctrine to the influence
of which the philanthropic devotion of his own life to the welfare of man
bears witness. He says, himself, that there always seemed to him
something very noble in the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, the
casting of self aside, and doing good, irrespective of personal
consequences, in this world or another, upon which Dr. Hopkins so
strongly insisted, as the all-essential condition of holiness.

How widely apart, as mere theologians, stood Hopkins and Channing! Yet
how harmonious their lives and practice! Both could forget the poor
interests of self, in view of eternal right and universal humanity. Both
could appreciate the saving truth, that love to God and His creation is
the fulfilling of the divine law. The idea of unselfish benevolence,
which they held in common, clothed with sweetness and beauty the stern
and repulsive features of the theology of Hopkins, and infused a sublime
spirit of self-sacrifice and a glowing humanity into the indecisive and
less robust faith of Charming. What is the lesson of this but that
Christianity consists rather in the affections than in the intellect;
that it is a life rather than a creed; and that they who diverge the
widest from each other in speculation upon its doctrines may, after all,
be found working side by side on the common ground of its practice.

We have chosen to speak of Dr. Hopkins as a philanthropist rather than as
a theologian. Let those who prefer to contemplate the narrow sectarian
rather than the universal man dwell upon his controversial works, and
extol the ingenuity and logical acumen with which he defended his own
dogmas and assailed those of others. We honor him, not as the founder of
a new sect, but as the friend of all mankind,--the generous defender of
the poor and oppressed. Great as unquestionably were his powers of
argument, his learning, and skill in the use of the weapons of theologic
warfare, these by no means constitute his highest title to respect and
reverence. As the product of an honest and earnest mind, his doctrinal
dissertations have at least the merit of sincerity. They were put forth
in behalf of what he regarded as truth; and the success which they met
with, while it called into exercise his profoundest gratitude, only
served to deepen the humility and self-abasement of their author. As the
utterance of what a good man believed and felt, as a part of the history
of a life remarkable for its consecration to apprehended duty, these
writings cannot be without interest even to those who dissent from their
arguments and deny their assumptions; but in the time now, we trust, near
at hand, when distracted and divided Christendom shall unite in a new
Evangelical union, in which orthodoxy in life and practice shall be
estimated above orthodoxy in theory, he will be honored as a good man,
rather than as a successful creed-maker; as a friend of the oppressed and
the fearless rebuker of popular sin rather than as the champion of a
protracted sectarian war. Even now his writings, so popular in their
day, are little known. The time may come when no pilgrim of sectarianism
shall visit his grave. But his memory shall live in the hearts of the
good and generous; the emancipated slave shall kneel over his ashes, and
bless God for the gift to humanity of a life so devoted to its welfare.
To him may be applied the language of one who, on the spot where he
labored and lay down to rest, while rejecting the doctrinal views of the
theologian, still cherishes the philanthropic spirit of the man:--

"He is not lost,--he hath not passed away
Clouds, earths, may pass, but stars shine calmly on;
And he who doth the will of God, for aye
Abideth, when the earth and heaven are gone.

"Alas that such a heart is in the grave!'
Thanks for the life that now shall never end!
Weep, and rejoice, thou terror-hunted slave,
That hast both lost and found so great a friend!"






RICHARD BAXTER.

The picture drawn by a late English historian of the infamous Jeffreys in
his judicial robes, sitting in judgment upon the venerable Richard
Baxter, brought before him to answer to an indictment, setting; forth
that the said "Richardus Baxter, persona seditiosa et factiosa pravae
mentis, impiae, inquietae, turbulent disposition et conversation; falso
illicte, injuste nequit factiose seditiose, et irreligiose, fecit,
composuit, scripsit quendam falsum, seditiosum, libellosum, factiosum et
irreligiosum librum," is so remarkable that the attention of the most
careless reader is at once arrested. Who was that old man, wasted with
disease and ghastly with the pallor of imprisonment, upon whom the foul-
mouthed buffoon in ermine exhausted his vocabulary of abuse and ridicule?
Who was Richardus Baxter?

The author of works so elaborate and profound as to frighten by their
very titles and ponderous folios the modern ecclesiastical student from
their perusal, his hold upon the present generation is limited to a few
practical treatises, which, from their very nature, can never become
obsolete. The _Call to the Unconverted_ and the _Saints' Everlasting
Rest_ belong to no time or sect. They speak the universal language of
the wants and desires of the human soul. They take hold of the awful
verities of life and death, righteousness and judgment to come. Through
them the suffering and hunted minister of Kidderminster has spoken in
warning, entreaty, and rebuke, or in tones of tenderest love and pity, to
the hearts of the generations which have succeeded him. His
controversial works, his confessions of faith, his learned disputations,
and his profound doctrinal treatises are no longer read. Their author
himself, towards the close of his life, anticipated, in respect to these
favorite productions, the children of his early zeal, labor, and
suffering, the judgment of posterity. "I perceive," he says, "that most
of the doctrinal controversies among Protestants are far more about
equivocal words than matter. Experience since the year 1643 to this year
1675 hath loudly called me to repent of my own prejudices, sidings, and
censurings of causes and persons not understood, and of all the
miscarriages of my ministry and life which have been thereby caused; and
to make it my chief work to call men that are within my bearing to more
peaceable thoughts, affections, and practices."

Richard Baxter was born at the village of Eton Constantine, in 1615. He
received from officiating curates of the little church such literary
instruction as could be given by men who had left the farmer's flail, the
tailor's thimble, and the service of strolling stage-players, to perform
church drudgery under the parish incumbent, who was old and well-nigh
blind. At the age of sixteen, he was sent to a school at Wroxeter, where
he spent three years, to little purpose, so far as a scientific education
was concerned. His teacher left him to himself mainly, and following the
bent of his mind, even at that early period, he abandoned the exact
sciences for the perusal of such controversial and metaphysical writings
of the schoolmen as his master's library afforded. The smattering of
Latin which he acquired only served in after years to deform his
treatises with barbarous, ill-adapted, and erroneous citations. "As to
myself," said he, in his letter written in old age to Anthony Wood, who
had inquired whether he was an Oxonian graduate, "my faults are no
disgrace to a university, for I was of none; I have but little but what I
had out of books and inconsiderable help of country divines. Weakness
and pain helped me to study how to die; that set me a-studying how to
live; and that on studying the doctrine from which I must fetch my
motives and comforts; beginning with necessities, I proceeded by degrees,
and am now going to see that for which I have lived and studied."

Of the first essays of the young theologian as a preacher of the
Established Church, his early sufferings from that complication of
diseases with which his whole life was tormented, of the still keener
afflictions of a mind whose entire outlook upon life and nature was
discolored and darkened by its disordered bodily medium, and of the
struggles between his Puritan temperament and his reverence for Episcopal
formulas, much might be profitably said, did the limits we have assigned
ourselves admit. Nor can we do more than briefly allude to the religious
doubts and difficulties which darkened and troubled his mind at an early
period.

He tells us at length in his Life how he struggled with these spiritual
infirmities and temptations. The future life, the immortality of the
soul, and the truth of the Scriptures were by turns questioned. "I
never," says he in a letter to Dr. More, inserted in the _Sadducisimus
Triumphatus_, "had so much ado to overcome a temptation as that to the
opinion of Averroes, that, as extinguished candles go all out in an
illuminated air, so separated souls go all into one common anima mundi,
and lose their individuation." With these and similar "temptations"
Baxter struggled long, earnestly, and in the end triumphantly. His
faith, when once established, remained unshaken to the last; and although
always solemn, reverential, and deeply serious, he was never the subject
of religious melancholy, or of that mournful depression of soul which
arises from despair of an interest in the mercy and paternal love of our
common Father.

The Great Revolution found him settled as a minister in Kidderminster,
under the sanction of a drunken vicar, who, yielding to the clamor of his
more sober parishioners, and his fear of their appeal to the Long
Parliament, then busy in its task of abating church nuisances, had agreed
to give him sixty pounds per year, in the place of a poor tippling
curate, notorious as a common railer and pothouse encumbrance.

As might have been expected, the sharp contrast which the earnest,
devotional spirit and painful strictness of Baxter presented to the
irreverent license and careless good humor of his predecessor by no means
commended him to the favor of a large class of his parishioners. Sabbath
merry-makers missed the rubicund face and maudlin jollity of their old
vicar; the ignorant and vicious disliked the new preacher's rigid
morality; the better informed revolted at his harsh doctrines, austere
life, and grave manner. Intense earnestness characterized all his
efforts. Contrasting human nature with the Infinite Purity and Holiness,
he was oppressed with the sense of the loathsomeness and deformity of
sin, and afflicted by the misery of his fellow-creatures separated from
the divine harmony. He tells us that at this period he preached the
terrors of the Law and the necessity of repentance, rather than the joys
and consolations of the Gospel, upon which he so loved to dwell in his
last years. He seems to have felt a necessity laid upon him to startle
men from false hope and security, and to call for holiness of life and
conformity to the divine will as the only ground of safety. Powerful and
impressive as are the appeals and expostulations contained in his written
works, they probably convey but a faint idea of the force and earnestness
of those which he poured forth from his pulpit. As he advanced in years,
these appeals were less frequently addressed to the fears of his
auditors, for he had learned to value a calm and consistent life of
practical goodness beyond any passionate exhibition of terrors, fervors,
and transports. Having witnessed, in an age of remarkable enthusiasm and
spiritual awakening, the ill effects of passional excitements and
religious melancholy, he endeavored to present cheerful views of
Christian life and duty, and made it a special object to repress morbid
imaginations and heal diseased consciences. Thus it came to pass that no
man of his day was more often applied to for counsel and relief by
persons laboring under mental depression than himself. He has left
behind him a very curious and not uninstructive discourse, which he
entitled The Cure of Melancholy, by Faith and Physick, in which he shows
a great degree of skill in his morbid mental anatomy. He had studied
medicine to some extent for the benefit of the poor of his parish, and
knew something of the intimate relations and sympathy of the body and
mind; he therefore did not hesitate to ascribe many of the spiritual
complaints of his applicants to disordered bodily functions, nor to
prescribe pills and powders in the place of Scripture texts. More than
thirty years after the commencement of his labors at Kidderminster he
thus writes: "I was troubled this year with multitudes of melancholy
persons from several places of the land; some of high quality, some of
low, some exquisitely learned, and some unlearned. I know not how it
came to pass, but if men fell melancholy I must hear from them or see
them, more than any physician I knew." He cautions against ascribing
melancholy phantasms and passions to the Holy Spirit, warns the young
against licentious imaginations and excitements, and ends by advising all
to take heed how they make of religion a matter of "fears, tears, and
scruples." "True religion," he remarks, "doth principally consist in
obedience, love, and joy."

At this early period of his ministry, however, he had all of Whitefield's
intensity and fervor, added to reasoning powers greatly transcending
those of the revivalist of the next century. Young in years, he was even
then old in bodily infirmity and mental experience. Believing himself
the victim of a mortal disease, he lived and preached in the constant
prospect of death. His memento mori was in his bed-chamber, and sat by
him at his frugal meal. The glory of the world was stained to his
vision. He was blind to the beauty of all its "pleasant pictures." No
monk of Mount Athos or silent Chartreuse, no anchorite of Indian
superstition, ever more completely mortified the flesh, or turned his
back more decidedly upon the "good things" of this life. A solemn and
funeral atmosphere surrounded him. He walked in the shadows of the
cypress, and literally "dwelt among the tombs." Tortured by incessant
pain, he wrestled against its attendant languor and debility, as a sinful
wasting of inestimable time; goaded himself to constant toil and
devotional exercise, and, to use his own words, "stirred up his sluggish
soul to speak to sinners with compassion, as a dying man to dying men."

Such entire consecration could not long be without its effect, even upon
the "vicious rabble," as Baxter calls them. His extraordinary
earnestness, self-forgetting concern for the spiritual welfare of others,
his rigid life of denial and sacrifice, if they failed of bringing men to
his feet as penitents, could not but awaken a feeling of reverence and
awe. In Kidderminster, as in most other parishes of the kingdom, there
were at this period pious, sober, prayerful people, diligent readers of
the Scriptures, who were derided by their neighbors as Puritans,
precisians, and hypocrites. These were naturally drawn towards the new
preacher, and he as naturally recognized them as "honest seekers of the
word and way of God." Intercourse with such men, and the perusal of the
writings of certain eminent Non-conformists, had the effect to abate, in
some degree, his strong attachment to the Episcopal formula and polity.
He began to doubt the rightfulness of making the sign of the cross in
baptism, and to hesitate about administering the sacrament to profane
swearers and tipplers.

But while Baxter, in the seclusion of his parish, was painfully weighing
the arguments for and against the wearing of surplices, the use of
marriage rings, and the prescribed gestures and genuflections of his
order, tithing with more or less scruple of conscience the mint and anise
and cummin of pulpit ceremonials, the weightier matters of the law,
freedom, justice, and truth were claiming the attention of Pym and
Hampden, Brook and Vane, in the Parliament House. The controversy
between King and Commons had reached the point where it could only be
decided by the dread arbitrament of battle. The somewhat equivocal
position of the Kidderminster preacher exposed him to the suspicion of
the adherents of the King and Bishops. The rabble, at that period
sympathizing with the party of license in morals and strictness in
ceremonials, insulted and mocked him, and finally drove him from his
parish.

On the memorable 23d of tenth month, 1642, he was invited to occupy a
friend's pulpit at Alcester.

While preaching, a low, dull, jarring roll, as of continuous thunder,
sounded in his ears. It was the cannon-fire of Edgehill, the prelude to
the stern battle-piece of revolution. On the morrow, Baxter hurried to
the scene of action. "I was desirous," he says, "to see the field. I
found the Earl of Essex keeping the ground, and the King's army facing
them on a hill about a mile off. There were about a thousand dead bodies
in the field between them." Turning from this ghastly survey, the
preacher mingled with the Parliamentary army, when, finding the surgeons
busy with the wounded, he very naturally sought occasion for the exercise
of his own vocation as a spiritual practitioner. He attached himself to
the army. So far as we can gather from his own memoirs and the testimony
of his contemporaries, he was not influenced to this step by any of the
political motives which actuated the Parliamentary leaders. He was no
revolutionist. He was as blind and unquestioning in his reverence for
the King's person and divine right, and as hearty in his hatred of
religious toleration and civil equality, as any of his clerical brethren
who officiated in a similar capacity in the ranks of Goring and Prince
Rupert. He seems only to have looked upon the soldiers as a new set of
parishioners, whom Providence had thrown in his way. The circumstances
of his situation left him little choice in the matter. "I had," he says,
"neither money nor friends. I knew not who would receive me in a place
of safety, nor had I anything to satisfy them for diet and
entertainment." He accepted an offer to live in the Governor's house at
Coventry, and preach to the soldiers of the garrison. Here his skill in
polemics was called into requisition, in an encounter with two New
England Antinomians, and a certain Anabaptist tailor who was making more
rents in the garrison's orthodoxy than he mended in their doublets and
breeches. Coventry seems at this time to have been the rendezvous of a
large body of clergymen, who, as Baxter says, were "for King and
Parliament,"--men who, in their desire for a more spiritual worship, most
unwillingly found themselves classed with the sentries whom they regarded
as troublers and heretics, not to be tolerated; who thought the King had
fallen into the hands of the Papists, and that Essex and Cromwell were
fighting to restore him; and who followed the Parliamentary forces to see
to it that they were kept sound in faith, and free from the heresy of
which the Court News-Book accused them. Of doing anything to overturn
the order of Church and State, or of promoting any radical change in the
social and political condition of the people, they had no intention
whatever. They looked at the events of the time, and upon their duties
in respect to them, not as politicians or reformers, but simply as
ecclesiastics and spiritual teachers, responsible to God for the
religious beliefs and practices of the people, rather than for their
temporal welfare and happiness. They were not the men who struck down
the solemn and imposing prelacy of England, and vindicated the divine
right of men to freedom by tossing the head of an anointed tyrant from
the scaffold at Whitehall. It was the so-called schismatics, ranters,
and levellers, the disputatious corporals and Anabaptist musketeers, the
dread and abhorrence alike of prelate and presbyter, who, under the lead
of Cromwell,

"Ruined the great work of time,
And cast the kingdoms old
Into another mould."

The Commonwealth was the work of the laity, the sturdy yeomanry and God-
fearing commoners of England.

The news of the fight of Naseby reaching Coventry, Baxter, who had
friends in the Parliamentary forces, wishing, as he says, to be assured
of their safety, passed over to the stricken field, and spent a night
with them. He was afflicted and confounded by the information which they
gave him, that the victorious army was full of hot-headed schemers and
levellers, who were against King and Church, prelacy and ritual, and who
were for a free Commonwealth and freedom of religious belief and worship.
He was appalled to find that the heresies of the Antinomians, Arminians,
and Anabaptists had made sadder breaches in the ranks of Cromwell than
the pikes of Jacob Astley, or the daggers of the roysterers who followed
the mad charge of Rupert. Hastening back to Coventry, he called together
his clerical brethren, and told them "the sad news of the corruption of
the army." After much painful consideration of the matter, it was deemed
best for Baxter to enter Cromwell's army, nominally as its chaplain, but
really as the special representative of orthodoxy in politics and
religion, against the democratic weavers and prophesying tailors who
troubled it. He joined Whalley's regiment, and followed it through many
a hot skirmish and siege. Personal fear was by no means one of Baxter's
characteristics, and he bore himself through all with the coolness of an
old campaigner. Intent upon his single object, he sat unmoved under the
hail of cannon-shot from the walls of Bristol, confronted the well-plied
culverins of Sherburne, charged side by side with Harrison upon Goring's
musketeers at Langford, and heard the exulting thanksgiving of that grim
enthusiast, when "with a loud voice he broke forth in praises of God, as
one in rapture;" and marched, Bible in hand, with Cromwell himself, to
the storming of Basing-House, so desperately defended by the Marquis of
Winchester. In truth, these storms of outward conflict were to him of
small moment. He was engaged in a sterner battle with spiritual
principalities and powers, struggling with Satan himself in the guise of
political levellers and Antinomian sowers of heresy. No antagonist was
too high and none too low for him. Distrusting Cromwell, he sought to
engage him in a discussion of certain points of abstract theology,
wherein his soundness seemed questionable; but the wary chief baffled off
the young disputant by tedious, unanswerable discourses about free grace,
which Baxter admits were not unsavory to others, although the speaker
himself had little understanding of the matter. At other times, he
repelled his sad-visaged chaplain with unwelcome jests and rough,
soldierly merriment; for he had "a vivacity, hilarity, and alacrity as
another man hath when he hath taken a cup too much." Baxter says of him,
complainingly, "he would not dispute with me at all." But, in the midst
of such an army, he could not lack abundant opportunity for the exercise
of his peculiar powers of argumentation. At Amersham, he had a sort of
pitched battle with the contumacious soldiers. "When the public talking
day came," says he, "I took the reading-pew, and Pitchford's cornet and
troopers took the gallery. There did the leader of the Chesham men
begin, and afterwards Pitchford's soldiers set in; and I alone disputed
with them from morning until almost night; for I knew their trick, that
if I had gone out first, they would have prated what boasting words they
listed, and made the people believe that they had baffled me, or got the
best; therefore I stayed it out till they first rose and went away." As
usual in such cases, both parties claimed the victory. Baxter got thanks
only from the King's adherents; "Pitchford's troops and the leader of the
Chesham men" retired from their hard day's work, to enjoy the countenance
and favor of Cromwell, as men after his own heart, faithful to the Houses
and the Word, against kingcraft and prelacy.

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