Cultivating a Virtuous Life

Richard Baxter (1615–1691) was an English Puritan pastor and one of the most widely read Christian writers of his century. He had almost no university training and was largely self-taught. Ordained in the Church of England, he spent nearly twenty years as minister at Kidderminster, a weaving town in the English Midlands. During England’s Civil War he also served as a chaplain to Parliament’s army.

Baxter was above all a working pastor. He and an assistant met with the families of the town one household at a time, about fifteen a week, teaching them the faith and asking about their souls. He described that approach in The Reformed Pastor (1656), still read by ministers today. He also wrote the devotional classic The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650). In an age of bitter church quarrels, he pleaded for unity around the essentials. He called himself a “mere Christian,” a phrase C. S. Lewis later borrowed for Mere Christianity.

In 1662 Baxter was among some two thousand ministers forced from their pulpits for refusing to conform to the restored Church of England. He was later jailed twice, the second time for about eighteen months in his old age. While barred from the pulpit he wrote A Christian Directory, so that “when I could not preach the Gospel as I would, I might do it as I could.”

Baxter believed virtue grows from a right relationship with God, the way good fruit grows from a good tree. He never meant his directions to be memorized all at once. They are a guide to turn to “upon every necessary occasion.” This class takes one area of life each week and asks each person to put one practice to work.