See therefore that you live upon God's approval as that which you chiefly seek, and will suffice you: which you may discover by these signs.
1. You will be most careful to understand the Scripture, to know what doth please and displease God.
2. You will be more careful in the doing of every duty, to fit it to the pleasing of God than men.
3. You will look to your hearts, and not only to your actions; to your ends, and thoughts, and the inward manner and degree.
4. You will look to secret duties as well as public and to that which men see not, as well as unto that which they see.
5. You will reverence your consciences, and have much to do with them, and will not slight them: when they tell you of God's displeasure, it will disquiet you; when they tell you of his approval, it will comfort you.
6. Your pleasing men will be charitable for their good, and pious in order to the pleasing of God, and not proud and ambitious for your honour with them, nor impious against the pleasing of God.
7. Whether men be pleased or displeased, or how they judge of you, or what they call you, will seem a small matter to you, as their own interest, in comparison to God's judgment. You live not on them. You can bear their displeasure, censures, and reproaches, if God be but pleased. These will be your evidences.
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| Richard Baxter (1615–1691) |
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| Richard Baxter was an English Puritan minister and scholar ordained in the Anglican Church. He eventually grew to reject the Church of England’s episcopacy and was imprisoned on the charge of having libeled the Church in his Paraphrase of the New Testament. Among Baxter's voluminous works are The Saints' Everlasting Rest, The Reformed Pastor, and A Call to the Unconverted. He was a peacemaker who sought unity among Protestants, and yet he was a highly independent thinker—and at the center of every major controversy in England during his lifetime. |
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