Richard Baxter (1615–91) has come down to us as ‘the late seventeenth century scourge of matrimony’ (pp. 18, 347) for his stance against clerical marriage, and even marriage in general, yet he himself married Margaret Charlton in September 1662. In this fine book, a revision of his PhD thesis (for which I was an examiner), Seth Osborne wrestles with this typical Baxterian idiosyncrasy. While he never issued a blanket injunction against clerical marriage, Baxter had no trouble identifying all the ways in which marriage was deleterious to effective and responsible pastoral ministry, leaving the reader to think that clerical marriage was permissible only in the rarest of circumstances. Yet he married, and seems to have gained from his wife's support and partnership, all the while maintaining his stance. How can this be?
The first chapter lays down the challenge. The second explores Puritan views of marriage and the influences on Baxter's thinking. He embraced the kind of spiritual calculus of William Ames in particular, in which the believer must ask in any given moment not just ‘What is a good thing I can do right now?’ but ‘What is the best thing I can do right now?’ While marriage might be good for ministers, it was far from clear that it was the best. As chapter iii makes clear, that was especially true for Baxter's rigorous model of pastoral ministry, which required the minister and his paid assistant to meet with each willing family in the parish to evaluate their understanding of their faith and the condition of their souls. The effective implementation of this ideal was hugely expensive in time and money. It was far easier for the minister to meet these costs if he was unmarried. So while Baxter agreed that clerical marriage was a good thing in itself, it was unlikely to be the best.
The fourth chapter introduces the ‘particularities’ of Richard Baxter: the human touches that help to round out our understanding of why he thought and acted in the way he did. One of Osborne's most interesting insights is that Baxter's chronic ill health and persistent sense of impending death constrained his ability to think and plan for a long life – a logical precondition for marriage. Also, Baxter's early experience of friendship, which involved grievous disappointment, made him distrustful and cautious about forming deep bonds with any other human, even one's wife. Such profound relationships could easily distract from the only relationship that mattered: the believer's covenant partnership with God.
The next chapter engages with Baxter's Christian directory (1673), a massive work in casuistry that encompasses all dimensions of the life of faith, including marriage and family. Here lies one of Osborne's most helpful contributions to understanding Baxter aright. Building on the scholarship of N. H. Keeble and John F. Brouwer, Osborne identifies three ‘overarching and interconnected principles’ that ‘stood at the center of Baxter's theology of the Christian life’ (pp. 213–14). First, the Christian faith pre-eminently concerned the inward affections and the heart. Second, faithful Christian living required an unbending focus on the future life in heaven. Third, following Ames, the believer was required to choose not just what was good in any given moment, but what was best. Taken together, these three principles explain Baxter's particular intensity of focus and practice even among Puritans. All this allows Osborne to conclude that The Christian directory reflects Baxter's own idiosyncratic view rather than embodying some sort of Puritan norm.
The seventh chapter returns to the opening challenge: did Baxter's marriage contradict his long-held principles regarding clerical celibacy? Osborne argues that Baxter was remarkably consistent but the changing context and fortunes of the first two years of the Restoration period – his removal from pastoral ministry and the crushing of all his dreams for national reformation – meant that, in his view, celibacy was no longer the best thing for him to do in that given moment.
The final chapter is in some ways the most interesting. We are reliant only on Baxter's point of view, of course, but the relationship between Richard and Margaret seems to have been both happy and fruitful. Margaret enjoyed a striking level of freedom and independence (in seventeenth-century terms) and provided enormous practical, moral and spiritual support to Richard, who continued to be involved in pastoral ministry wherever opportunity arose. Why, then, did he continue to advocate for clerical celibacy even after her death in 1681? Here Osborne returns to the singular nature of Baxter's calculus and the impact of his determination to prioritise public ministry over private and family needs, including the needs of his own wife. Notwithstanding her support to his ministry, which he viewed as the exception to the rule, he continued to insist that the demands of marriage, on balance, acted to the detriment of God's call to pastoral ministry, whatever its form.
There are two ways in which the book might have been improved. First, there is little in the way of feminist critique throughout, and if any subject merits that attention, this one does. (Though to be fair to Osborne, the field of Puritan studies in general is hardly known for its feminist critique.) Second, the book retains the feel of a PhD, with many pages dominated by footnotes citing extensive secondary sources, so it is rather overloaded with evidence of comprehensive reading. These two critiques, however, do little to undermine what remains a prodigious achievement. Osborne provides an accurate, comprehensive and compelling account of Richard Baxter and his wife, Margaret, and he makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of Baxter and his world.
