I’ve bought more books. Not from Amazon – from those second-hand places where books are piled precariously and the one you want is at the bottom, and to get it you have to risk the whole Babel tower of them landing on your head like a judgement from heaven. One of the books I saw, seized and rapidly paid for, was by Richard Baxter the Puritan – not a killjoy, not a censorious policeman of others’ behaviour, not as someone once defined Puritans, a person who lives with the constant worry that someone somewhere is enjoying themselves.
It was an edited version of his Autobiography, an account of the Civil War, his pastoral labours in Kidderminster, and the trivia of domestic gossip that makes an autobiography of a human being interesting. So, keeping in mind I had to remove it from the bottom of a perilously leaning pile of miscellaneous literary curiosities, here’s his take on why we should believe God watches over us bibliophiles, to keep us safe when we walk through valleys of deepest darkness, and books precariously heaped around us:
Another time as I sat in my study, the weight of my greatest folio books broke down three or four of the highest shelves, when I sat close under them, and they fell down on every side of me, and not one of them hit me save one upon the arm; whereas the place, the weight and the greatness of the books was such, and my head just under them, that it was a wonder they had not beaten out my brains, one of the shelves right over my head having the six volumes of Dr Walton’s Oriental Bible, and all Augustine’s works, and the Bibliotheca Patrum and Marlorate etc.
I love that picture of Baxter lost in writing the several million words he wrote with a quill and ink, late into the night burning the midnight candle, and getting the fright of his life as his 17th century IKEA bookshelves collapsed and nearly brained him! As a pastor he is legendary for thoroughness and psychological precision in spiritual direction; as a controversialist he feared no argument if it was about the freedom of the Gospel and the independence of the church; as a writer and a fellow bibliophile he wrote exhaustively.
And when asked to assess the worth of his writings as he lay dying he said, ‘I was but a pen in God’s hand, and what credit is due to a pen?’
Such great spirits are undeservedly neglected today. It was Baxter who gave C S Lewis the title of his bestseller, Mere Christianity. The same C S Lewis in one of his best essays, urged contemporary Christians to read old books at least as often as we do new books, otherwise said Lewis, we are guilty of chronological snobbery, a phrase he might have offered as a definition of overstated postmodern prejudice against premodern wisdom.
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