58 - LIFE OF RICHARD BAXTER. °' In this fury of, the rabble, I was advised . to withdraw awhile from home ; whereupon I went to Gloucester. As I passed but through a corner of the suburbs of Worcester, they that knew me not, cried, ' Down with the round-heads ;' and I was glad to spur on to be gone. But when I came to Gloucester, among strangers also that had never known me, I found a civil, courteous, and reli- gious people, as different fromWorcesteras if they had lived under another government."* , The county of Gloucestershire was as unanimous for the cause of the parliament as Worcester was for the cause ofthe king. But Baxter saw in the religious aspect of Gloucester, during his short residence there, the beginnings of a spirit of division and sectari- anism, which afterwards produced in that ,city the most unhappy effects. First, there were a few Baptists, who, laboring to draw disciples after them, occasioned an undesirable controversy. Then came a good man, zealous for Independency, who formed another separating party. Afterwards, Antinomianism was introduced. And by such means the solid piety of the place was dwindled and withered away. After he had been at Gloucester about a month, some of his friends came to him from Kidderminster, inviting him to return. Their argument was, that the people would be sure to put the most unfavorable construction on his continued absence. So, in the hope of retaining his influence and prolonging his usefulness, even in those stormy times, he went again to his work. "When I came home," he says, "I found the beggarly drunk- en rout in a very tumultuating disposition; and the superiors that were for the king did animate them ; and the people of the place who were accounted religious, were called round-heads, and openly reviled, and threatened as the king's enemies, though they had never meddled in any cause against the king. Every drunken sot that met any of them in the streets, would tell them, ' We shall take an order with the Puritans ere long.' And just as at their shows, and wakes, and stage-plays, when the drink and the spirit of riot did work together in their heads, and the crowd encouraged one another, so it was with them now : they were like tied mastiffs newly loosed, and flew in the face of all that was religious, yea, or civil, winch came in their way." "Yet, after the Lord's day, when they.heard the sermon, they would awhile be calmed, till they came to the' alehouse again, or heard,any of their leaders hiss them on, or heard a rabble cry, ' Down with the round-heads.' When the wars began, almost all these drunkards went into the king's army, and were quickly killed, so that scarce aman of them came home again and survived the war."t * Narrative, Part I. pp. 40, 41. t Narrative, Part I. p. 42.
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