General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1887 Original Publisher: W. Kent Subjects: England Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER XI. 1646 – 1659. DURING the period of his ministry at Kidderminster, Baxter wrote one of the most useful of his practical works, Gildas Salvianus, The Reformed Pastor. Gildas and Salvianus were two writers of the fifth and sixth centuries. The former, surnamed
the Wise, a Welsh monk, is the oldest British historian (a. d. 511); the latter was a Presbyter of Marseilles (a. d. 426), author of
De Gubernatione Dei, etc. Baxter says of them:
I pretend not to the sapience of Gildas, nor to the sanctity of Salvian, as to the degree; but by their names I offer an excuse for plain dealing. If it was used in a much greater measure by men so wise and holy as these, why should it in a lower measure be disallowed in another? At least from hence I have this encouragement, that the plain dealing of Gildas and Salvian being so much approved by us now they are dead, how much soever they might be despised or hated while they were living by them whom they did reprove, at the worst I may expect some such success in times to come. The book was one of the sermons, of prodigious length, customary during the years of the Commonwealth, written for a day of humiliation which the clergy of the county had agreed to keep at Worcester, at the beginning of December, 1655. At that time in England there were no Sunday-schools for the children of the poor. The idea of employing some part of the Lord’s Day for the instruction of the labourers’ children seems to have been originated byCardinal Borromeo, in Italy, in the sixteenth century; but his was a single effort of b…