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of existence, where he doubted not to enjoy | though forbearing despotism. It was an age

that perfect conformity of the human to the Divine will, to which, during his three-score years and ten, it had been his ceaseless labour to attain.

The record of the solitary, rather than of the social hours of a man of letters, must form the staple of his biography, yet he must be a strenuous reader, who should be able, from his own knowledge, to prepare such a record of the fruits of Richard Baxter's solitude. After a familiarity of many years with his writings, it must be avowed, that of the one hundred and sixty-eight volumes comprised in the catalogue of his printed works, there are some which we have never seen, and many with which we can boast but a very slight acquaintance. These, however, are such as (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Hallam) have ceased to belong to men, and have become the property of moths. From the recesses of the library in Red Cross street, they lower in the sullen majority of the folio page, over the pigmies of this duodecimo generation; the expressive, though neglected monuments of occurrences, which can never lose their place, or their interest, in the history of theological literature.

The English Reformation produced no Luther, Calvin, Zuingle, or Knox-no man who imparted to the national mind the impress of his own character, or the heritage of his religious creed. Our reformers, Cranmer scarcely excepted, were statesmen rather than divines. Neither he, nor those more properly called the martyrs of the Church of England, ever attempted the stirring appeals to mankind at large, which awakened the echoes of the presses and the pulpits of Germany, Switzerland, and France. From the papal to the royal supremacy-from the legatine to the archiepiscopal power-from the Roman missal to the Anglican liturgy, the transition was easy, and, in many respects, not very perceptible. An ambidexter controversialist, the English church warred at once with the errors of Rome and of Geneva; until relenting towards her first antagonist, she turned the whole power of her arms against her domestic and more dreaded enemy. To the resources of piety, genius, and learning, were added less legitimate weapons; and the Puritans underwent confiscation, imprisonment, exile, compulsory silence, every thing, in short, except conviction. When the civil wars unloosed their tongues and gave freedom to their pens, they found themselves without any established standard of religious belief: every question debatable; and every teacher conscience-bound to take his share in the debate. Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Seekers, Familists, Behmenists, and Quakers, were agreed only in cementing a firm alliance against their common enemies, the prelatists and papists. Those foes subdued, they turned against each other, some contending for supremacy, and some for toleration, but all for what they severally regarded or professed to regard as truth. Nor were theirs the polemics of the schools or the cloister. The war of religious opinion was accompanied by the roar of Cromwell's artillery-by the fall of ancient dynasties, and the growth of a military,

of deep earnestness. Frivolous and luxurious men had for awhile retreated to make way for impassioned and high-wrought spirits;-the interpreters at once of the ancient revelations and of the present judgments of Heaven, the monitors of an ungodly world, and the comforters of those who bent beneath the weight of national and domestic calamities. Such were that memorable race of authors to whom is given collectively the name of the Puritan divines; and such, above all the rest, was Richard Baxter. Intellectual efforts of such severity as his, relieved by not so much as one passing smile: public services of such extent, interrupted by no one recorded relaxation; thoughts so sleeplessly intent on those awful subjects, in the presence of which all earthly interests are annihilated, might seem a weight too vast for human endurance; as assuredly it forms an example which few would have the power, and fewer still the will, to imitate. His seventy-five years unbroken by any transient glance at gayety: his one hundred and sixtyeight volumes, where the fancy never disports herself; a mortal man absorbed in the solemn realities, and absolutely independent of all the illusions of life, appears like a fiction, and a dull one too. Yet it is an exact, and not an uninviting truth.

Never was the alliance of soul and body formed on terms of greater inequality than in Baxter's person. It was like the compact in the fable, where all the spoils and honours fall to the giant's share, while the poor dwarf puts up with all the danger and the blows. The mournful list of his chronic diseases renders almost miraculous the mental vigour which bore him through exertions resembling those of a disembodied spirit. But his ailments were such as, without affecting his nervous energy, gave repose to his animal appetites, and quenched the thirst for all the emoluments and honours of this sublunary state. Death, though delaying to strike, stood continually before him, ever quickening his attention to that awful presence, by approaching the victim under some new or varied aspect of disease. Under this influence he wrote, and spoke, and acted-a dying man, conversant with the living in all their pursuits, but taking no share in their worldly hopes and fugitive emotions. Every returning day was welcomed and improved, as though it were to be his last. Each sermon might be a farewell admonition to his auditory. The sheets which lay before him were rapidly filled with the first suggestions of his mind in the first words which offered; for to-morrow's sun might find him unable to complete the momentous task. All the graces and the negligences of composition were alike unheeded, for how labour as an artist when the voice of human applause might in a few short hours become inaudible! In Baxter, the characteristics of his age, and of his associates, were thus height ened by the peculiarities of his own physical and mental constitution. Their earnestness passed in him into a profound solemnity; their diligence into an unrelaxing intensity of em ployment; their disinterestedness into a fixed disdain of the objects for which other men con

tend. Even the episode of his marriage is in harmony with the rest. He renounced the property with which it would have encumbered him, and stipulated for the absolute command of his precarious and inestimable time. Had this singular concentration of thought and purpose befallen a man of quick sympathies, it would have overborne his spirits, if it had not impaired his reason. But Baxter was naturally stern. Had it overtaken a man of vivid imagination, it would have engendered a troop of fantastic and extravagant day-dreams. But to Baxter's natural vision all objects presented themselves with a hard outline, colourless, with no surrounding atmosphere. Had it been united to a cold and selfish heart, the result would have been a life of ascetic fanaticism. But his was an enlarged, though a calm philanthropy. His mind, though never averted from the remembrance of his own and of others' eternal doom, was still her own sovereign; diligently examining the foundations and determining the limits of belief; methodizing her opinions with painful accuracy, and expanding them into all their theoretical or practical results, as patiently as ever analyst explored the depths of the differential calculus. Still every thing was to the purpose. "I have looked," he says, "over Hutton, Vives, Erasmus, Scaliger, Salmasius, Cassaubon, and many other critical grammarians, and all Gruter's critical volumes. I have read almost all the physics and metaphysics I could hear of. I have wasted much of my time among loads of historians, chronologers, and antiquaries. I despise none of their learning-all truth is useful. Mathematics, which I have least of, I find a pretty and manlike sport; but if I have no other kind of knowledge than these, what were my understanding worth? What a dreaming dotard should I be? I have higher thoughts of the schoolmen than Erasmus and our other grammarians had. I much value the method and sobriety of Aquinas, the subtlety of Scotus and Ockum, the plainness of Durandus, the solidity of Ariminensis, the profundity of Bradwardine, the excellent acuteness of many of their followers; of Aureolus, Capreolus, Bannes, Alvarez, Zumel, &c.; of Mayro, Lychetus, Trombeta, Faber, Meurisse, Rada, &c.; of Ruiz, Pennattes, Saurez, Vasquez, &c.; of Hurtado, of Albertinus, of Lud à Dola, and many others. But how loath should I be to take such sauce for my food, and such recreations for my business. The jingling of too much and false philosophy among them often drowns the noise of Aaron's bells. I feel myself much better in Herbert's temple."

Within the precincts of that temple, and to the melody of those bells, he accordingly proceeded to erect the vast monument of his theological works. Their basis was laid in a series of "aphorisms on justification"-an attempt to fix the sense of the sacred volume on those topics which constitute the essential peculiarities of the Christian system. The assaults with which the aphorisms had been encountered were repelled by his "Apology," a large volume in quarto. The "Apology" was, within a few months, re-enforced by another quarto, entitled his "Confession of Faith." Between

four and five hundred pages of "Disputations" came to the succour of the "Confession." Then appeared four treatises on the "Doctrine of Perseverance," on "Saving Faith," on "Justifying Righteousness," and on "Universal Redemption." Next in order is a folio of seven hundred pages, entitled "Catholic Theology," plain, pure, peaceable, unfolding and resolving all the controversies of the schoolmen, the papists and the Protestants. This was eclipsed by a still more ponderous folio in Latin, entitled, "Methodus Theologa Christianæ," composed, to quote his own words. " in my retirement at Totteridge, in a troublesome, smoky, suffocating room, in the midst of daily pains of sciatica, and many worse." After laying down the nature of Deity, and all things in general, he discloses all the relations, eternal and historical, between God and man, with all the abstract truths, and all the moral obligations deducible from them ;-detecting the universal presence of the trinity, not in the Divine Being only, but in all things psychological and material which flow from the great fountain of life. With an "End of Doctrinal Controversies," a title, he observes, not intended as a prognostic, but as didactical and correctiveterminated his efforts to close up the mighty questions which touch on man's highest hopes and interests. He had thrown upon them such an incredible multitude and variety of cross lights, as effectually to dazzle any intellectual vision less aquiline than his own.

His next enterprise was to win mankind to religious concord. A progeny of twelve books, most of them of considerable volume, attest his zeal to this arduous cause. Blessed, we are told, are the peacemakers; but the benediction is unaccompanied with the promise of tranquillity. He found, indeed, a patron in "His highness, Richard Lord Protector," whose rule he acknowledged as lawful, though he had denied the authority of his father. Addressing that wise and amiable man, "I observe," he says, "that the nation generally rejoice in your peaceable entrance upon the government. Many are persuaded that you have been strangely kept from participating in any of our late bloody contentions, that God might make you the healer of our breaches, and employ you in that temple work which David himself might not be honoured with, though it was in his mind, because he shed blood abundantly, and made great wars." Stronger minds and less gentle hearts than that of Richard repelled with natural indignation counsels which rebuked all the contending parties. Amongst these was "one Malpas, an old scandalouns minister," "and Edward Bagshawe, a young man who had written formerly against monarchy, and afterwards against Bishop Morley, and being of a resolute Roman spirit, was sent first to the Tower, and then lay in a horrid dungeon;" and who wrote a book "full of untruths, which the furious temerarious man did utter out of the rashness of his mind." In his dungeon, poor Bagshawe died, and Baxter closes the debate with tenderness and pathos. "While we wrangle here in the dark, we are dying, and passing to the world that will decide all our controversies, and the safest pas

sage thither is by peaceable holiness." Dr. | the universal antagonist, the Quakers assailed Owen, one of the foremost in the first rank of divines of his age, had borne much; but these exhortations to concord he could not bear; and he taught his monitor, that he who undertakes to reconcile enemies must be prepared for the loss of friends. It was on every account a desperate endeavour. Baxter was opposed to every sect, and belonged to none. He can be properly described only as a Baxterian-at once the founder and the single disciple of an eclectic school, within the portals of which he invited all men, but persuaded none, to take refuge from their mutual animosities.

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Against the divorce of divinity and politics, Baxter vehemently protested, as the putting asunder of things which a sacred ordinance had joined together. He therefore published a large volume, entitled "The Holy Common. wealth; a Plea for the cause of Monarchy, but as under God the Universal Monarch." Far better to have roused against himself all the quills which had ever bristled on all the "fretful porcupines" of theological strife. For, while vindicating the ancient government of England, he hazarded a distinct avowal of opinions, which, with their patrons, were to be proscribed with the return of the legitimate sovereign. He taught that the laws of England are above the king; that Parliament was his highest court, where his personal will and word were not sufficient authority. He vindicated the war against Charles, and explained the apostolical principle of obedience to the higher powers as extending to the senate as well as to the emperor. The royal power had been given "for the common good, and no cause could warrant the king to make the com

him with their tongues. Who could recognise, in the gentle and benevolent people who now bear that name, a trace of their ancestral cha racter, of which Baxter has left the following singular record? "The Quakers in their shops, when I go along London streets, say, alas! poor man, thou art yet in darkness. They have often come to the congregation, when I had liberty to preach Christ's gospel, and cried out against me as a deceiver of the people. They have followed me home, crying out in the streets, the day of the Lord is coming, and thou shalt perish as a deceiver.' They Had Baxter been content merely to establish have stood in the market-place, and under my truth, and to decline the refutation of error, window, year after year, crying to the people, many might have listened to a voice so ear-take heed of your priests, they deceive your nest, and to counsels so profound. But, "while souls; and if any one wore a lace or neat he spoke to them of peace, he made him ready clothing, they cried out to me, 'these are the for battle." Ten volumes, many of them full-fruits of your ministry.' grown quartos, vindicated his secession from the Church of England. Five other batteries, equally well served, were successively opened against the Antinomians, the Quakers, the Baptists, the Millenarians, and the Grotians. The last, of whom Dodwell was the leader, typified, in the reign of Charles, the divines who flourish at Oxford in the reign of Victoria. Long it were, and not very profitable, to record the events of these theological campaigns. They brought into the field Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and Dodwell. The men of learning were aided by the men of wit. Under the nom de guerre of "Tilenus Junior," Womack, the bishop of St. David's, had incurred Baxter's censure for his "abusive, virulent accusations of the synod of Dort." To this attack appeared an answer, entitled, "The Examination of Tilenus before the Triers, in order to his intended settlement in the office of a public preacher in the commonwealth of Utopia." Among the jurors empannelled for the trial of Tilenus, are "Messrs. Absolute," "Fatality," "Preterition," "Narrow Grace, alias Stint Grace," "Take o' Trust," "Know Little," and "Du-monwealth the party which he should exercise bious," the last the established sobriquet for Richard Baxter. But neither smile nor sigh could be extorted from the veteran polemic; nor, in truth, had he much right to be angry. If not with equal pleasantry, he had with at least equal freedom, invented appellations for his opponents;-designating Dodwell, or his system, as "Leviathan, absolute, destructive Prelacy, the son of Abaddon, Apollyon, and not of Jesus Christ." Statesmen joined in the affray. Morice, Charles's first secretary of state, contributed a treatise; and Lauderdale, who, with all his faults, was an accomplished scholar, and amidst all his inconsistencies, a stanch Presbyterian, accepted the dedication of one of Baxter's controversial pieces, and presented him with twenty guineas. The unvarying kindness to the persecuted nonconformist of one who was himself a relentless persecutor, is less strange than the fact, that the future courtier of Charles read, during his imprisonment at Windsor, the whole of Baxter's then published works, and, as their grateful author records, remembered them better than himself. While the pens of the wise, the witty, and the great, were thus employed against

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hostility against." All this was published at
the moment of the fall of Richard Cromwell.
Amidst the multitude of answers which
voked may be especially noticed those of Har-
rington, the author of the "Oceana," and of
Edward Pettit. "The former," says Baxter,
"seemed in a Bethlehem rage, for, by way of
scorn, he printed half a sheet of foolish jests,
in such words as idiots or drunkards use,
railing at ministers as a pack of fools and
knaves, and, by his gibberish derision, per-
suading men that we deserve no other answer
than such scorn and nonsense as beseemeth
fools. With most insolent pride, he carried it
as neither I nor any ministers understood at
all what policy was; but prated against we
knew not what, and had presumed to speak
against other men's art which he was master
of, and his knowledge, to such idiots as we,
incomprehensible." Pettit placed Baxter in
hell, where Bradshawe acts as president, and
Hobbes and Neville strive in vain for the
crown which he awards to the nonconformist
for pre-eminence of evil and mischief on earth.
"Let him come in," exclaims the new Rhada
manthus, "and be crowned with wreaths of

serpents, and chaplets of adders. Let his tri- | umphant chariot be a pulpit drawn on the wheels of cannon by a brace of wolves in sheep's clothing. Let the ancient fathers of the Church, whom out of ignorance he has vilified; the reverend and learned prelates, whom out of pride and malice he has belied, abused, and persecuted; the most righteous king, whose murder he has justified-let them all be bound in chains to attend his infernal triumph to his 'Saint's Everlasting Rest;' then make room, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites, atheists, and politicians, for the greatest rebel on earth, and next to him that fell from heaven." Nor was this all. The "Holy Commonwealth" was amongst the books which the University of Oxford sentenced to the flames which had been less innocently kindled at the same place in a former generation, against the persons of men who had dared to proclaim unwelcome truths. Morley and many others branded it as treason; and the king was taught to regard the author as one of the most inveterate enemies of the royal authority. South joined in the universal clamour; and Baxter, in his autobiography, records, that when that great wit and author had been called to preach before the king, and a vast congregation drawn together by his high celebrity, he was compelled, after a quarter of an hour, to desist, and to retire from the pulpit exclaiming, "the Lord be merciful to our infirmities!" The sermon, which should have been recited, was afterwards published, and it appeared that the passage at which South's presence of mind had failed him, was an invective against the "Holy Commonwealth." After enduring for ten years the storm which his book had provoked, Baxter took the very singular course of publishing a revocation, desiring the world to consider it as non scriptum;-maintaining the while the general principles of his work, and "protesting against the judgment of posterity, and all others that were not of the same time and place, as to the mental censure either of the book or revocation, as being ignorant of the true reasons of them both." We, therefore, who, for the present, constitute the posterity, against whose rash judgment this protest was entered, should be wary in censuring what, it must be confessed, is not very intelligible, except, indeed, as it is not difficult to perceive, motives enough for retreating from an unprofitable strife, even though the retreat could not be very skilfully accomplished.

Two volumes of Ecclesiastical History, the first a quarto of five hundred pages, the second a less voluminous vindication of its predecessor, attest the extent of Baxter's labours in this department of theological literature, and the stupendous compass of his reading. The authorities he enumerates, and from a diligent study of which his work is drawn, would form a considerable library.

Such labours as those we have mentioned, might seem to have left no vacant space in a life otherwise so actively employed. But these books, and the vast mass of unpublished manuscripts, are not the most extensive, as they are incomparably the least valuable, of the produce of his solitary hours.

With the exception of Grotius, Baxter is the first of that long series of writers who have undertaken to establish the truth of Christianity, by a systematic exhibition of the evidence and the arguments in favour of the divine origin of our faith. All homage to their cause, for we devoutly believe it to be the cause of truth! Be it acknowledged that their labours could not have been declined, without yielding a temporary and dangerous triumph to sophistry and presumptuous ignorance. Admit (as indeed it is scarcely possible to exaggerate) their boundless superiority to their antagonists in learning, in good faith, in sagacity, in range and depth of thought, and in whatever else was requisite in this momentous controversy;-concede, as for ourselves we delight to confess, that they have advanced their proofs to the utmost heights of probability which by such reasonings it is possible to scale;-with these concessions may not inconsistently be combined some distaste for these inquiries, and some doubt of their real value.

The sacred writers have none of the timidity of their modern apologists. They never sue for an assent to their doctrines, but authoritatively command the acceptance of them. They denounce unbelief as guilt, and insist on faith as a virtue of the highest order. In their Catholic invitations, the intellectual not less than the social distinctions of mankind are unheeded. Every student of their writings is aware of these facts; but the solution of them is less commonly observed. It is, we apprehend, that the apostolic authors assume the existence in all men of a spiritual discernment, enabling the mind, when unclouded by appetite or passion, to recognise and distinguish the Divine voice, whether uttered from within by the intimations of conscience, or speaking from without in the language of inspired oracles. They presuppose that vigour of understanding may consist with feebleness of reason; and that the power of discriminating between religious truths and error does not chiefly depend on the culture, or on the exercise of the mere argumentative faculty. The especial patrimony of the poor and illiterate—the gospel-has been the stay of countless millions who never framed a syllogism. Of the great multitudes whom no man can number, who before and since the birth of Grotius have lived in the peace, and died in the consolations of our faith, how incomparably few are they whose convictions have been derived from the study of works like his! Of the numbers who have addicted themselves to such studies, how small is the proportion of those who have brought to the task either learning, or leisure, or industry sufficient to enable them to form an independent judgment on the questions in debate! Called to the exercise of a judicial function for which he is but ill prepared-addressed by pleadings on an issue where his prepossessions are all but unalterable, bidden to examine evidences which he has most rarely the skill, the learning, or the leisure to verify, and pressed by arguments, sometimes overstrained, and sometimes fallacious-he who lays the foundations of his faith in such "evidences" will but too com

monly end either in yielding a credulous, and therefore an infirm assent, or by reposing in a self-sufficient and far more hazardous incredulity.

For these reasons, we attach less value to the long series of Baxter's works in support of the foundations of the Christian faith than to the rest of his books which have floated in safety down the tide of time to the present day. Yet it would be difficult to select, from the same class of writings, any more eminently distinguished by the earnest love and the fearless pursuit of truth; or to name an inquirer into these subjects who possessed and exercised to a greater extent the power of suspending his long-cherished opinions, and of closely interrogating every doubt by which they were obstructed.

In his solicitude to sustain the conclusions he had so laboriously formed, Baxter unhappily invoked the aid of arguments, which, however impressive in his own days, are answered in ours by a smile, if not by a sneer. The sneer, however, would be at once unmerited and unwise. When Hale was adjudging witches to death, and More preaching against their guilt, and Boyle investigating the sources of their power, it is not surprising that Baxter availed himself of the evidence afforded by witchcraft and apparitions in proof of the existence of a world of spirits; and therefore in support of one of the fundamental tenets of revealed religion. Marvellous, however, it is, in running over his historical discourse on that subject, to find him giving so unhesitating an assent to the long list of extravagances and nursery tales which he has there brought together; unsupported as they almost all are by any proof that such facts occurred at all, or by any decorous pretext for referring them to preternatural agency. Simon Jones, a stout-hearted and able-bodied soldier, standing sentinel at Worcester, was driven away from his post by the appearance of something like a headless bear. A drunkard was warned against intemperance by the lifting up of his shoes by an invisible hand. One of the witches condemned by Hale threw a girl into fits. Mr. Emlin, a bystander, "suddenly felt a force pull one of the hooks from his breeches, and, while he looked with wonder what had become of it, the tormented girl vomited it up out of her mouth." At the house of Mr. Beecham, there was a tobacco pipe which had the habit of "moving itself from a shelf at the one end of the room to a shelf at the other end of the room." When Mr. Munn, the minister, went to witness the prodigy, the tobacco pipe remained stationary; but a great Bible made a spontaneous leap into his lap, and opened itself at a passage, on the hearing of which the evil spirit who had possessed the pipe was exorcised. "This Mr. Munn himself told me, when in the sickness year, 1665, I lived in Stockerson hall. I have no reason to suspect the veracity of a sober man, a constant preacher, and a good scholar." Baxter was credulous and incredulous for precisely the same reason. Possessing by long habit a mastery over his thoughts, such as few other men ever acquired, a single effort of the will was sufficient to ex

clude from his view whatever recollections he judged hostile to his immediate purpose. Every prejudice was at once banished when any debatable point was to be scrutinized; and, with equal facility, every reasonable doubt was exiled when his only object was to enforce or illustrate a doctrine of the truth of which he was assured. The perfect submission of the will to the reason may belong to some higher state of being than ours. On mortal man that gift is not bestowed. In the best and the wisest, inclination will often grasp the reins by which she ought to be guided, and misdirect the judgment which she should obey. Happy they, who, like Baxter, have so disciplined the affections, as to disarm their temporary usurpation of all its more dangerous tendencies!

Controversies are ephemeral. Ethics, metaphysics and political philosophy are doomed to an early death, unless when born of genius and nurtured by intense and self-denying industry. Even the theologians of one age must, alas! too often disappear to make way for those of later times. But if there is an exception to the general decree which consigns man and his intellectual offspring to the same dull forgetfulness, it is in favour of such writings as those which fill the four folio volumes bearing the title of "Baxter's Practical Works.” Their appearance in twenty-three smart octavos is nothing short of a profanation. Hew down the Pyramids into a range of streets, divide Niagara into a succession of water privileges, but let not the spirits of the mighty dead be thus evoked from their majestic shrines to animate the dwarfish structures of our bookselling generation. Deposit one of those gray folios on a resting-place equal to that venerable burden, then call up the patient and serious thoughts which its very aspect should inspire, and confess that, among the writings of uninspired men, there are none better fitted to awaken, to invigorate, to enlarge, or to console the mind, which can raise itself to such celestial colloquy. True, they abound in undistinguishable distinctions; the current of emotion, when flowing most freely, is but too often obstructed by metaphysical rocks and shallows, or diverted from its course into some dialectic winding; one while the argument is obscured by fervent expostulation; at another the passion is dried up by the analysis of the ten thousand springs of which it is compounded; here is a maze of subtleties to be unravelled, and there a crowd of the obscurely learned to be refuted; the unbroken solemnity may shed some gloom on the traveller's path, and the length of the way may now and then entice him to slumber. But where else can be found an exhibition, at once so vivid and so chaste, of the diseases of the human heart-a detection so fearfully exact, of the sophistries of which we are first the voluntary and then the unconscious victims-a light thrown with such intensity on the madness and the wo of every departure from the rules of virtue-a development of those rules so comprehensive and so elevated — counsels more shrewd or more persuasive—or a proclamation more consolatory of the resources provided by Christianity for escaping the dan

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