LIFE OF RICHARD BAXTER. 191 asked them, whether they would continue unresolved till Mr. Tombes and I had done our writings, seeing it 'was some years since Mr. Blake and he began, and had not ended yet. But no reasoning served the turn with them ; they still called for mywrit- ten arguments." The negotiatidn was concluded by a proposal on the part of Bax- ter to hold a public discussion in Mr. Tombes' church at Bewdley, to which those ofthe other party readily assented. " So Mr. Tombes and I agreed to meet at his church on the first dayof January, 1649. And in great weaknessthither I came, and from nine o'clock in the morning till five at night, in a crowd- ed congregation, we continued our dispute; which was all spent in managing one argument, from infants' right to church-membership to their right to baptism ; of which he often complained, as ifI as- saulted him in a new way, which he had not considered of before. But this was not the first time that I had dealt with Anabaptists, few having so much to do with them in the army as I had. In a word, this dispute satisfied all my own people, and the country that came in, and Mr. Tombes' own townsmen, except about twenty, whom he had perverted, who gathered into his church ; which never increased to above twenty-two, that I could learn. " This, however, was not the end of the discussion. it was pro- longed by the press. Volume after volume came forth ; and still neither of the combatants was driven from the field. These dis- putants have both gone where they are at peace with each other, andwhere no principles of elose communion bar their mutual fel- lowship ; but the dispute is still unfinished. We have seen the diligence of Baxter as a pastor, and the la- bor andsolicitude which he bestowed upon the general interests of the church. As yet, however, only part of his great industry while at Kidderminster has been distinctlynoticed. All this labor, all that he did as a minister, except his private conference with fami- lies, was only his recreation; and the work of his spare hours. "My, writings," he says, in a passage already quoted from his Piarrative,f "were 'my chiefest daily labor; which yet went the more slowly on, that I never one hour had an amanuensis to dic- tate to." The following enumeration of the works published by him, dun. ing the period of about thirteen years now under review, will af- ford evidence that the preceding statement is not a mere rhetori- cal flourish, The enumeration is limited to those works which were published during his residence at Kidderminster. 1. " Aphorisms of Justification, with their Explications. " Narrative, Pait L p. 96. VOL. I. 16 t See p i0.
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