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
