Page:The Methodist Hymn-Book Illustrated.djvu/434

 422 THE METHODIST HYMN-BOOK ILLUSTRATED

adds a note, This covenant, my dear wife, in her former sickness, subscribed with a cheerful will. The hymn was sung to her during her last illness.

In ver. 2 Baxter s last line is, That shall have the same pay.

Baxter was born at Rowton, Shropshire, 1615, and became curate of Kidderminster in 1640. He was chaplain to one of Cromwell s regiments, and wrote his Saints Everlasting Rest during a time of feeble health. He was offered the bishopric of Hereford by Charles 1 1, but refused it. After the Act of Unifor mity he became a Nonconformist. He died December 8, 1691. Baxter issued over two hundred and fifty separate publications. His reply to Judge Jeffreys taunt, Richard, I see the rogue in thy face, was nobly severe, I had not known before that my face was a mirror. In 1685 ne was imprisoned for eighteen months on a charge of sedition based on his Paraphrase of the New Testament.

Baxter s Saints 1 Everlasting Rest was written when he was so feeble that two men had to support him in the pulpit. Weakness and pain, he told some one, helped me to study how to die ; that set me on studying how to live, and that on studying the doctrine from which I must fetch my motives and comforts ; beginning with necessities, I proceeded by degrees, and am now going to see that for which I have lived and studied.

Baxter was a champion of music in those stiff Puritan times. I have made a psalm of praise in the holy assembly the chief delightful exercise of my religion and my life, and have helped to bear down all the objections which I have heard against Church music, and against the I49th and I5oth Psalms.

Professor Clerk Maxwell, Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge, frequently quoted this hymn in his last illness in 1879. He said, I think men of science as well as other men need to learn from Christ, and I think Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that their view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable of.

Hymn 825. Thou, Lord, on whom I still depend.

CHARLES WESLEY (i).

Short Hymns on Select Passages of Scripture, 1762 ; Works, xiii. 223. Rev. ii. 10, u, 17.

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