A Christian Directory, Part 1: Christian Ethics

by Richard Baxter

Object. III. You shall take more leisure, and take other men's judgment of your writings before you thrust them out so hastily.

Answ. 1. I have but a little while to live, and therefore must work while it is day. Time will not stay. 2. I do show them to those that I take to be most judicious, and never refused any man's censure; but it is not many that have leisure to do me so great a kindness. But that I commit them not to the perusal of every objector, is a fault uncurable, by one that never had an amanuensis, and hath but one copy, usually. 3. And if I could do it, how should I be sure that they would not differ as much among themselves, as they do from me? And my writings would be like the picture which the great painter exposed to the censure of every passenger, and made it ridiculous to all, when he altered all that every one advised him to alter. And, to tell you the truth, I was never yet blamed by one side as not sufficiently pleasing them; but I was blamed also by the contrary side, for coming so near them: and I had not wit enough to know which party of the accusers was the wiser. And therefore am resolved to study to please God and conscience, and to take man-pleasing, when inconsistent, for an impossible and unprofitable work; and to cease from man whose breath is in his nostrils, whose thoughts all perish as he passeth off the judicature of his stage to the judicature of God.

Object. IV. Your Ecclesiastical Cases are dangerously reconciling, tending to abate men's zeal against error.

Answ. The world hath long enough escaped the danger of peace and reconciliation. It had been well if they had as long escaped the danger of your conceited, orthodox strife, which hath brought in confusion and all evil works. I take it to be a zeal effectively against love, and against unity, and against Christ, which, with the preachers of extremes, goeth under the name of a zeal against error, and for truth.

Object. V. Are all these numerous directions to be found in Scripture? Show us them in Scripture, or you trouble the church with your own inventions.

Answ. 1. Are all your sermons in the Scripture? and all the good books of your library in the Scripture? 2. Will you have none but readers in the church, and put down preachers? Sure it is the reader that delivereth all and only the Scripture. 3. Are we not men before we are christians? And is not the light and law of nature divine? And was the Scripture written to be instead of reason, or of logic, or other subservient sciences? Or must they not all be sanctified and used for divinity? 4. But I think that as all good commentaries, and sermons, and systems of theology, are in Scripture, so is the Directory here given, and is proved by the evidence of the very thing discoursed of, or by the plainest texts.

Object. VI. You confound your reader by curiosity of distinctions.

Answ. 1. If they are vain or false, shame them by detecting it, or you shame yourselves by blaming them, when you cannot show the error. Expose not yourselves to laughter by avoiding just distinction to escape confusion: that is, avoiding knowledge to escape ignorance, or light to escape darkness. 2. It is ambiguity and confusion that breedeth and feedeth almost all our pernicious controversies; and even those that bring in error by vain distinction, must be confuted by better distinguishers, and not by ignorant confounders. I will believe the Holy Ghost, 2 Tim. ii. 14-16, that logomachy is the plague by which the hearers are subverted, and ungodliness increased; and that orthotomy, or right dividing the word of truth, is the cure. And, Heb. v. 15, discerning both good and evil, is the work of long and well exercised senses.

Object. VII. Is this your reducing our faith to the primitive simplicity, and to the creed? What a toilsome task do you make religion by overdoing? Is any man able to remember all these numberless directions?

Answ. 1. I pray mistake not all these for articles of faith. I am more zealous than ever I was for the reduction of the christian faith to the primitive simplicity; and more confident that the church will never have peace and concord, till it be so done, as to the rest of men's faith and communion. But he that will have no books but his creed and Bible, may follow that sectary, who, when he had burnt all his other books as human inventions, at last burnt the Bible, when he grew learned enough to understand, that the translation of that was human too.