ABSTRACT
The last chapter opened by noting that the critique of “enthusiasm” was launched by both Anglican and Dissenting anti-Calvinists. One of the most important of the Dissenting anti-Calvinist critics was the influential Presbyterian minister Richard Baxter. Baxter strongly objected to Patrick’s portrait of the nonconformist in A Friendly Debate, because of its polemical tone and because it conflated the various kinds of nonconformists into one rather caricatured type. Indeed, although he was a nonconformist, Baxter was also an anti-Calvinist critic who had important ties with members of the established Church, including some of the latitudinarians. He attempted throughout his career to articulate a position on salvation that moved away from some of the key assumptions and conclusions of Calvinist theology, and provided a critique of nonconformist spiritual sensibilities similar to Patrick’s. His theological orientation entailed a significant departure from the evangelical Calvinist approach to the care and consolation of melancholy found in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century works. In some ways, it was even less sympathetic towards the religious melancholic than Patrick’s.
