PREFACE.. R. RICHARD BAXTER, the author of the Saint's Rest, so well known to the world by this, and many other excellent and useful writings, was a learned, laborious, and eminently holy divine, of the 17th cen- tury. He was born near Shrewsbury, in 1615, and died at London, in 1691. His ministry in an unsettled state, was for many years employed with great and extensive success, both in London, and in several parts of the country ; but he was no where fixed so long, or with such entire sa- tisfaction to himself, and apparent advantage to others, as at Kidderminster. His abode there was indeed in- terrupted partly by his bad health, but chiefly by the calamities of a civil war, yet in the whole it amount- ed to sixteen years; nor was it by any means the result of his own choice, or that of the inhabitants of Kidderminster, that he never settled there again, af- ter his going from thence in 1660. Before his com- ing thither, the place was overrun with ignorance and profaneness but, by the divine blessing on his wise and faithful cultivation, the fruits of righteousness sprung up in rich abundance. He at first found but a single instance or two of daily family prayer in a whole street, and, at his going away, but one family or two could be found in some streets that continued to neglect it. And on Lord's day, instead of the open profanation to which they had been so long. accus-
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