ABSTRACT
The Puritan divine Richard Baxter would not have been well pleased to find Reliquiae Baxterianae discussed in a book of essays devoted to English controversial prose. To many contemporaries, however, Baxter sounded far from moderate and the Reliquiae far from conciliatory. Thomas Long, a Prebendary of St. Peter’s, Exeter, who had previously tangled with Baxter, denounced the entire Reliquiae as a pernicious sham in his A Review of Mr. Richard Baxter’s Life. Rather than a history of “Pacificatory Endeavours,” Long saw in Baxter’s autobiography “a virulent invective and grinning Satyr against all that live in conformity to the Ecclesiastical or Civil Laws” which represents Charles I as a Papist, the Cavalier Parliament as tyrannical, the established church as anti-Christian and its clergy as hypocritical time-servers. A man who through many years works at an unpublishable manuscript can contemplate only one readership: posterity.
