LIFE OF RICHARD BAXTER. 205 party, who contrived toget a proclamation from the king command- ing the laws against the nonconformists to be put in execution, and especially the law banishing the ejected ministers from all corpo- rate towns. Thus the persecution was renewed, in the beginningof the year 1669 ; and the prisons again began to be filled with ministersof the gospel. Baxter mentions several of hisneighbors who were among the sufferers, one for teaching a few children," another " for 'teaching two knights' sons in his own house;" though he himself still escaped. Possibly one reason of this indulgence was the inti- macy which he had formed about this time with one of the most illustrious men of that or any other age, whose relations to the government, as well as his personal character, might have checked for while the malice of informers. "The last year of my abode at Acton," he says, "I had the happiness of a neighbor whom I cannot easily praise above his worth. This was Sir Matthew Hale, lord chief baron of the ex- chequer, whomall the judges and lawyers of England admired for his skill in law, and for his justice, and scholars honored for his learning, and I highly valued for his sincerity, mortification, self- denial, humility, conscientiousness,and his close fidelity in friend- ship. When he Caine first to town, I came not near him (lest, being a silenced and suspected person with his superiors, I should draw him also under suspicion, and do him wrong) till I had notice round about of his desire ofmy acquaintance. And I scarce ever conversed so profitably with any other person in my life." "The conference which I had frequently with him, mostly about the immortality of the soul, and other philosophical and foundation points, was so edifying, that his very questions and objections did help me to more light than other men's solutions. Those who take none for religious, who frequent not private meetings, &c., took him for an excellently righteous,moral man : but I, who heard and read his serious expressions of the concernmentsof eternity, and saw his Iove to all good men, and the blamelessness of his life, thought better of his piety than of my own. When the people crowded in and out of my house to hear, he openly showed me so great respect before them at the door, and never spake a word against' it, as was no small encouragement to the common people to go on ; though the other sort muttered that a judge should seem so far to countenance that which they took to be against the law." The arm ofthe law, however, soon fell heavily on Baxter, not- withstanding this intimacy of his with the most illustrious of its ministers. The king himself---so Dean Ryves, the parson of the parish, afterwards said by wayof apology senta message to the bishop of London, ordering him to see that Baxter's meeting was
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