¹ <https://www.oed.com>, accessed 5 December 2024. This entry is unrevised and dates from 1887.

² As noted seventy-five years ago by Geoffrey F. Nuttall: Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge: a study in tradition (Friends of Dr Williams’s Library 5th lecture), London 1951, 2.

³ Richard Baxter, Church-history of the government of bishops and their councils, abbreviated, London 1680, sig. b1. Accordingly, in 1672 Baxter declined to apply for a licence to preach under the Declaration of Indulgence by any denominational label but instead applied as one whose religion ‘is meerly Christian’: RB iv. 286; CCRB ii. 140. A full edition of the letters is in preparation for Oxford University Press under the general editorship of Johanna Harris and Alison Searle.

⁴ RB ii. 52.

⁵ See further N. H. Keeble, ‘“Take heed of being too forward in imposing on others”: orthodoxy and heresy in the Baxterian tradition’, in David Loewenstein and John Marshall (eds), Heresy, literature and politics in early modern England, Cambridge 2006, 282−305.

⁶ Richard Baxter, Christian concord: or, The agreement of the associated churches and pastors of Worcestershire, London 1653. For the Worcestershire Association and the mid-century association movement see William A. Shaw, A history of the English Church during the civil wars and under the commonwealth, 1640−1660, London 1900, ii. 252−74, 440−56; Geoffrey F. Nuttall, Richard Baxter, London 1965, 64–76, and ‘The Worcestershire association: its membership’, this Journal i (1950), 74–100; Joel Halcomb, ‘The association movement and the politics of church settlement during the interregnum’, in Elliott Vernon and Hunter Powell (eds), Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic world, c. 1635−66, Manchester 2020, 174−9; and Polly Ha, ‘Freedom of association and ecclesiastical independence’, in Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and Joel Halcomb (eds), Church life: pastors, congregations, and the experience of dissent in seventeenth-century England, Oxford 2019, 101–18.

⁷ RB ii. 557, 561. For this strain in seventeenth-century English theology, and for Baxter’s theological thought see Alan Clifford, Atonement and justification: English evangelical theology, 1640–1790, Oxford 1990; David P. Field, Rigide Calvinism in a softer dresse: the moderate Presbyterianism of John Howe, 1630−1705, Edinburgh 2004; Michael A. G. Haykin and Mark Jones (eds), Drawn into controversie: reformed theological diversity and debates within seventeenth-century British Puritanism, Göttingen 2011; Michael J. Lynch, John Davenant’s hypothetical universalism, Oxford 2021; Jonathan D. Moore, English hypothetical universalism: John Preston and the softening of reformed theology, Grand Rapids, Mi 2007; J. I. Packer, The redemption and restoration of man in the thought of Richard Baxter, Vancouver 2001; and Dewey D. Wallace Jr, Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660−1714, Oxford 2011.

⁸ Baxter defends his high regard for Amyraldus in Certain disputations of right to sacraments, London 1657, pref., sigs B1v–C2v; cf. CCRB i. 117−18.

⁹ RB ii. 192, i. 444, citing Rupert Meldenius, as noted in n. 803. Baxter left among his papers a summary statement of the Reconcilers’ position: ‘The Church reformation desired by the Reconcilers: in ten articles. Written by Richard Baxter … For the use of posterity’, 1661 (Dr Williams’s Library, Richard Baxter treatises, v. 161); Alan Argent, The Richard Baxter treatises: a catalogue and guide, Woodbridge 2018, 134−5.

¹⁰ RB i. 373; ii. 16; i. 429; ii. 14.

¹¹ On this controversy see Hans Boersma, A hot pepper corn: Richard Baxter’s doctrine of justification in its seventeenth-century context of controversy, Zoetermeer 1993; Tim Cooper, Fear and polemic in seventeenth-century England: Richard Baxter and Antinomianism, Aldershot 2001; and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘Richard Baxter’s Apology (1654): its occasion and composition’, this Journal iv (1953), 69–76.

¹² John Crandon, Mr. Baxter’s aphorisms exorized and anthorized, London 1654, sigs A2v–A3r.

¹³ William Robertson, ’Iggeret Hammashkil: or, An admonitory epistle unto Mr Rich. Baxter, and Mr Tho. Hotchkiss, London 1655, 2, 64, cf. 29, 48, 51, 56, 58, 63, 65–6, 69, 70, 122–3, 141. Robertson was a graduate of Edinburgh University (title-page) but he has not been further identified.

¹⁴ John Tombes, Anti-paedobaptism: or, The third part, being, a full review of the dispute concerning infant-baptism, London 1657, 514.

¹⁵ Thomas Pierce, The new discoverer discover’d by way of answer to Mr Baxter his pretended discovery of the Grotian religion, London 1659, 168.

¹⁶ John Rogers, Diapoliteia: a Christian concertation with Mr. Prin, Mr. Baxter, Mr. Harrington, for the true cause of the Commonwealth, London 1659, sig. B2v, 6.

¹⁷ Baxter, Church-history of the government of bishops, sig. a4.

¹⁸ [Anon.], The spirit of popery speaking out of the mouths of phanatical protestants, or the last speeches of Mr. John Kid and Mr. John King, two Presbyterian ministers, who were executed for high treason and rebellion, at Edinburgh, August the 14th 1679: with animadversions, and the history of the archbishop of St Andrews his murder, London 1680, pref., unsigned first page and sig. 1*v.

¹⁹ Richard Baxter, A third defence of the cause of peace, London 1681, 1st pagination, 110.

²⁰ Roger L’Estrange, The casuist uncas’d: in a dialogue betwixt Richard and Baxter, with a moderator between them for quietnesse sake, London 1681, 3, 50, 42. L’Estrange finds particularly rich pickings in Baxter’s 1658 A holy commonwealth and in the series of six defences of the Nonconformists that he published between 1679 and 1681 (on which see N. H. Keeble, ‘Rewriting the public narrative: the publishing career of Richard Baxter 1662–96’, in Tessa Whitehouse and N. H. Keeble (eds), Textual transformations: purposing and repurposing books from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge: essays in honour of Isabel Rivers, Oxford 2019, 97−114, esp. pp. 103–11).

²¹ [Samuel Young], Vindiciae anti-Baxterianae: or, Some animadversions on a book, intituled Reliquiae Baxterianae, London 1696, 111.

²² Thomas Edwards, The parasalene dismantled of her cloud: or, Baxterianism barefac’d: drawn from a literal transcript of Mr. BAXTERs, and the judgment of others, in the most radical doctrines of faith; compar’d with those of the orthodox, both conformist and Nonconformist; and transferred over by way of test, unto the papist and quaker, London 1696, 24–46, 223–33; Richard Baxter, Rich: Baxter’s confession of his faith, London 1655, 151─87.

²³ Christ alone exalted: being the complete works of Tobias Crisp, London 1690. In his prefatory epistle ‘To the Christian Reader’, Samuel animadverted on Pinners’ Hall lectures by ‘the Captain of those that oppose such Doctrines’ as were preached by his father, that is, Baxter (sigs A3v−A4v). The republication of Crisp’s sermons prompted Baxter to resume his lifelong campaign against Antinomianism in The scripture gospel defended, and Christ, grace, and free justification vindicated against the libertines, London 1690.

²⁴ [Anon.], A censure of three scandalous pamphlets, London 1699, 3, 4.

²⁵ Ibid. 29, 30, 31, 32.

²⁶ A Presbyterian, An apology for congregational divines: against the charge of 1. Crispianism or Antinomianism, London 1698, 15. On Daniel Williams, the Crispian controversy and its consequences see Roger Thomas, ‘Parties in Nonconformity’, in C. G. Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short and Roger Thomas, The English Presbyterians: from Elizabethan Puritanism to modern Unitarianism, London 1968, 93−112 at pp. 107−8, and ‘Presbyterians in transition’, 113−74 at pp. 117−23, 127−30, and Roger Thomas, ‘The break-up of Nonconformity’, in Geoffrey F. Nuttall and others, The beginnings of Nonconformity, London 1964, 33−60 at pp. 39−60.

²⁷ [Anon.], Three contending brethren, Mr. Williams, Mr. Lob, Mr. Alsop, reconcil’d, and made friends; by an occasional conference with three notorious hereticks, Mr. Humphreys, Mr. Clark, Dr Crisp, London 1698, 3, 4, 22.

²⁸ His title-page describes England as ‘Minister of the Gospel in Sherborne in Dorsetshire’. He is not included among the Nonconformists listed in Alexander Gordon (ed.), Freedom after ejection: a review (1690−1692) of Presbyterian and Congregational Nonconformity in England and Wales, Manchester 1917, but from An answer to a letter of Mr. John England’s, London 1704, by the vicar of Sherborne, James Lacy, it appears that he was a ‘Nonconformist Teacher’ there (sig. A2v). England’s Letter is not known to be extant.

²⁹ John England, Mans sinfulness and misery by nature asserted … whereunto is added a disputation concerning the headship of Adam and Christ, and the imputation of the sin of the one, and the righteousness of the other, London 1700, 383, 417–18.

³⁰ Idem, A reply to Mr. Samuel Clifford: wherein his scurrillous and abusive reflections, (under pretence of vindicating the late Reverend Mr. Baxter,) are shewed to be groundless: and the old protestant doctrine, of justification … is … vindicated, London 1702, sig. A2v. England was responding to Clifford’s An account of the judgment of the late Reverend Mr. Baxter: concerning the imputation of Adams sin, and Christs righteousness, London [1701], itself a reply to England’s Mans sinfulness.

³¹ Nuttall, Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge, 2.

³² [Charles Leslie], A case of present concern: in a letter to a member of parliament, [London 1703?], 2, 4, 1, 12; [Isaac Sharpe], Animadversions on some passages of Mr. Edmund Calamy’s abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s history, London 1704, 39. Sharpe would appear to be the schoolmaster and curate in Stepney recorded in the CCED at <theclergydatabase.org.uk>, ID 102570.

³³ Richard Baxter, Practical works, London 1707, p. viii. As noted in RB iv. 370, Calamy identified himself as the author of this unattributed preface in his autobiography, An historical account of my own life, ed. J. T. Rutt, London 1829, ii. 68.

³⁴ Edmund Calamy, An abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s history of his life and times: with an account of many others of those … who were ejected after the restauration … and a continuation of their history, till the year 1691, London 1702, pref., sig. a2v. Roger Thomas was in no doubt that the moderate, middle-way man Calamy was recognised as a Baxterian by his contemporaries (‘Presbyterians in transition’, in Bolam, Goring, Short and Thomas, English Presbyterians, 111−74 at pp. 134−5).

³⁵ Daniel Neal, The history of the Puritans or Protestant non-conformists … with an account of their principles, London 1732−8.

³⁶ Nuttall, Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge, 3. Elsewhere, Nuttall described Baxter as ‘Doddridge’s master and (now) mine’: ‘A personal appreciation’, in Geoffrey F. Nuttall (ed.), Philip Doddridge, 1702−51: his contribution to English religion, London 1951, 154−63 at p. 154.

³⁷ Robert Strivens, Philip Doddridge and the shaping of Evangelical dissent, London 2015, 21−45, instancing (pp. 21−2) other twentieth-century ecclesiastical historians who used the term to denote ‘a middle way between opposing theological extremes’ within dissent.

³⁸ Quoted from the manuscript in Tessa Whitehouse, The textual culture of English Protestant dissent, 1720−1800, Oxford 2015, 59−60, and by Strivens, Philip Doddridge, 24, from The correspondence and diary of Philip Doddridge, D.D., ed. John Doddridge Humphreys, London 1829−31, i. 156.

³⁹ Letters to and from the Rev. Philip Doddridge D. D., ed. Thomas Stedman, Shrewsbury 1790, 285 (quoted in Strivens, Philip Doddridge, 24).

⁴⁰ For examples see Strivens, Philip Doddridge, 24−5. It was this phrase in Doddridge that prompted Alan Clifford’s Atonement and justification, which argues, inter alia, that Baxter’s views were in many respects more faithful to Calvin than John Owen’s and ‘a legitimate expression of Reformation theology’ (pp. vii, 197), a view that had been advanced by Alexander Gordon, Heads of English Unitarian history with appended lectures on Baxter and Priestley, London 1895, 98, which held that although ‘as a divisive appellation, Baxterian, even within the present century, was employed as a term of theological reproach, to denote a kind of halfway house between Calvinism and Arminianism … I have no hesitation in expressing the conclusion that Baxter’s Calvinism differed from that of the Westminster divines, simply by the purity of its adhesion to the original type, unaffected by the anti-Arminian reaction’. See further the appendix on Doddridge’s moderate (Baxterian) Calvinism in Alan Clifford, The good doctor: Philip Doddridge of Northampton: a tercentenary tribute, Norwich 2002, 253−63. This references Gordon’s view.

⁴¹ Alexander Gordon, Philip Doddridge and the catholicity of the old dissent, London [1951], 13. This lecture had first been published in 1922 in Gordon’s Addresses, biographical and historical.

⁴² Correspondence of Doddridge, i. 368, 426; The works of Philip Doddridge, ed. E. Williams and E. Parsons, London 1802−5, v. 536 (all quoted in Clifford, The good doctor, 136, 137). Doddridge did also say that ‘I am in all the most important points a Calvinist’: Correspondence of Doddridge, i. 439.

⁴³ Correspondence of Doddridge, i. 438−9 (quoted in Gordon, Philip Doddridge, 31).

⁴⁴ Victoria county history of Wiltshire, at <https://british-history.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol8/pp/124-128>.

⁴⁵ Correspondence of Doddridge, iv. 534; Doddridge manuscripts, quoted by Jeremy Goring, ‘The break-up of the Old Dissent’, in Bolam, Goring, Short and Thomas, English Presbyterians, 175−218 at p. 207 (Doddridge as a leader of the ‘Middle Way Men’ is discussed at pp. 186−8).

⁴⁶ [William Oldys et al. (eds)], Biographia Britannica: or, The lives of the most eminent persons who have flourished in Great Britain and Ireland, London 1747−66, i/ii. 557−65. This article is signed ‘E’ signifying John Campbell.

⁴⁷ Alan Ruston, ‘Andrew Kippis (1725−1795)’, ODNB at <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-15642>, accessed 19 February 2025.

⁴⁸ Andrew Kippis, with the assistance of other gentlemen, Biographia Britannica: or, The lives of the most eminent persons who have flourished in Great Britain and Ireland … the second edition, with corrections, enlargements, and the addition of new lives, London 1778−[95?], ii. 10–22 at p. 22. This article is signed ‘K’ for Kippis. Only five volumes of this revised second edition (1778–93) and an incomplete sixth volume ([1795?]), reaching the letter F, were published: Isabel Rivers, ‘Biographical dictionaries and their uses from Bayle to Chalmers’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their readers in eighteenth-century England: new essays, London 2001, 135–69 at p. 167 n. 73.

⁴⁹ John Peter Bernard, Thomas Birch, John Lockman and other hands, A general dictionary, historical and critical: in which a new and accurate translation of that of the celebrated Mr. Bayle … is included; and interspersed with several thousand lives never before published, London 1734−41, iii. 49−57. For the role of eighteenth-century biographical dictionaries in shaping the understanding of dissent, and for their entries on Baxter in particular see Isabel Rivers, ‘The idea of Puritan literature’, in Johanna Harris and Alison Searle (eds), The Puritan literary tradition, Oxford 2024, 1−17 at pp. 9−11, which is drawn on here, and, for a more wide-ranging account, her ‘Biographical dictionaries and their uses’, which (at pp. 149, 152, 156) identifies the authorship of initialled articles in the General dictionary and in the two editions of Biographia Britannica.

⁵⁰ Biographia Britannica, i/ii. 563. Campbell takes this detail, with acknowledgement, from Edmund Calamy’s Continuation of the account of the ministers … ejected and silenced after the restoration, London 1727, ii. 932, a continuation, that is, of the second volume of the second, enlarged, edition (1713) of his redaction of the Reliquiae in his 1702 Abridgment of Mr. Baxter’s history of his life and times: Sir John’s legacy ‘of a good sum of Money’ to students and young ministers was for those ‘who were neither for Domination, nor unnecessary Separation, but of Mr. Baxter’s Principles; as Sir John was pleas’d to express it’.

⁵¹ Biographia Britannica, 2nd edn, ii. 22.

⁵² For Coleridge’s high regard for Baxter see RB i. 117−20.

⁵³ The notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, London 1957−62, i/i [text], 1176. Coburn was mistaken in her suggestion that ‘Baxterians appears to be Coleridge’s coinage for that liberal Nonconformity of which Richard Baxter (1615−91) was an eminent representative’ (i/ii [notes], n. 1181).

⁵⁴ William Orme, The life and times of Richard Baxter: with a critical examination of his writings, London 1830, i. 85−6. This biographical and critical study appeared also as the first volume of Orme’s twenty-three-volume edition of The practical works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, London 1830.

⁵⁵ Surveying eighteenth-century developments, Alasdair Raffe takes issue with the notion of ‘an inevitable drift to Arminianism among Presbyterians’ as a result of the ‘powerful support’ among Dissenters for ‘the Baxterian system’: ‘The idea of a slippery slope towards heterodoxy was … part of the evangelical reading of Presbyterian history’: ‘Presbyterians’, in Andrew C. Thompson (ed.), The Oxford history of dissenting traditions, II: The long eighteenth century, c.1689−c.1828, Oxford 2018, 11−29 at pp. 19−21.

⁵⁶ See H. K. Short, ‘Presbyterians under a new name’, in Bolam, Goring, Short and Thomas, English Presbyterians, 219–86 esp. pp. 219–35.

⁵⁷ Gordon, Heads of English Unitarian history, 31. See also the appended lecture (pp. 56−101) on ‘Baxter as a founder of liberal Nonconformity’; cf. Roger Thomas on rationalism and the parallel between Locke and Baxter in Bolam, Goring, Short and Thomas, English Presbyterians, 108–12, 137–41, 144–7.

⁵⁸ Gordon, Heads of English Unitarian history, 40.

⁵⁹ Priestley described what he called ‘the Baxterian scheme’ as a middle way between Calvinism and Arminianism in his An history of the corruption of Christianity, London 1782, i. 324, quoted (approvingly) in Nuttall, Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge, 2−3.

⁶⁰ Memoirs of Dr Joseph Priestley to the year 1795, written by himself: with a continuation by his son Joseph Priestley, London 1806, 11−12. The ‘academy’ was Doddridge’s academy, moved to Daventry on his death in 1751, at which Priestley enrolled in November 1752. For this episode and identifications of the persons mentioned see David Wykes, ‘Joseph Priestley, minister and teacher’, in Isabel Rivers and David Wykes (eds), Joseph Priestley, scientist, philosopher and theologian, Oxford 2008, 20−48 at pp. 21−4, and Robert E. Schofield, ‘Joseph Priestly (1733−1804)’, ODNB at <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-22788> accessed 19 February 2025, and his The enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: a study of his life and work from 1733 to 1773, University Park, Pa 1997, 1−14, 31−5. Priestley’s son Joseph adds a long note in the Memoirs on Baxterians explaining that Baxter ‘attempted a Coalition between the doctrines of Calvin and Arminius’: this ‘compromising doctrine … may be seen in his very learned and unintelligible work entitled Catholick Theology’.

⁶¹ [Stephen Lobb], The growth of error: being an exercitation concerning the rise and progress of Arminianism, and more especially Socinianism, London 1697, 2−3.

⁶² James Stephen, Essays in ecclesiastical biography, London 1849, ii. 44 (one of two examples of usage given in OED). Quite contrary (if no more accurate) had been the assessment of David Bogue and James Bennett, The history of dissenters, from the revolution to the year 1808, 2nd edn, London 1833, i. 423: ‘Being himself moderate in respect to forms of church government, [Baxter] prevailed on his neighbours, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists to unite with him; and, by his influence, everything was conducted with harmony and love.’

⁶³ See n. 51 above.

⁶⁴ C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, London 1952, p. vi; RB v. 527.

⁶⁵ RB ii. 39−41.

⁶⁶ CCRB ii. 222.