Quotes from Richard Baxter

The sweetest poison doth often bring the surest death (645).

If our rest was here, most of God's providences must be useless. Should God lose the glory of his church's miraculous deliverances, and of the fall of his enemies, that men may have their happiness here?

what a silly, frail, and forward pieces are the best of men (647)!

and the best, if not heedfully used, will prove the word. The better and keener the knife is, the sooner and deeper will it cut thy fingers, if thou take not heed (647).

O blessed be the grace that makes advantages of my corruptions, even to contradict and kill themselves (648).

The work of God needs to be done. Souls must not perish while you give your attention to your worldly business or worldly pleasure, take your ease, or quarrel with your brethren.

The name of this city much helpeth Jew and Gentile to see the state of peace, for this is called Jerusalem, and that in Canaan hath Christ destroyed: this name should clearly have taught bot h the Hebrews not to look and pray daily for to return to Canaan, and pseduo-catholics not to fight for special holiness there (658-9).

I would desire every divine to beware that he tell not the unsanctified, that whoever hath the least degree of love to God for himself, and not as a means to carnal ends, shall certainly be saved ; for he would certainly deceive many thousand miserable souls that should persuade them of this (670).

remember, you cannot decline and neglect your duty, to your own hurt alone; many will be losers by it as well as you.

It is no small matter to stand up in the face of a congregation and deliver a message of salvation or damnation as from the living God in the name of our Redeemer.

My last request is that all the faithful ministers of Christ would, without any more delay, unite and associate for the furtherance of each other in the work of the Lord and for the maintaining of unity and harmony in His churches, and that they would not neglect their brotherly meetings to those ends, nor yet spend them unprofitably, but improve them to their edification and the successful carrying on of the work.

Much more do they want that moral perfection which the blessed partake of; those holy dispositions of mind; that cheerful readiness to do the will of God; that perfect rectitude of all their actions: instead of these, they have that perverseness of will, that loathing of good, that love to evil, that violence of passion, which they had on earth.