lly the same, but with few, if any, of Baxter's
almost flattering supports.

Ib. p. 60.

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

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

Ib. p. 65.

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

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