Richard Baxter
A Christian Directory,
Practical Works, vol. 1, pp. 257-259.
Direct. I. ‘As you must never be unfurnished of holy store, so you must prudently make choice of your particular subject.’ As the choice of a fit text is half a good sermon; so the choice of the fittest matter for you, is much of a good meditation. Which requireth some good acquaintance both with the truth, and with yourselves.
Direct. II. ‘To this end you must know in their several degrees, what subjects are in themselves most excellent to be meditated on.’ As the first and highest is the most blessed God himself, and the glorious person of our Redeemer, and the New Jerusalem or heaven of glory, where he is revealed to his saints. And then, the blessed society which there enjoyeth him, and the holy vision, love, and joy, by which he is enjoyed. And next is the wonderful work of man’s redemption, and the covenant of grace, and the sanctifying operations of the Holy Ghost, and all the graces that make up God’s image on the soul. And then is the state and privileges of the church, which is the body of Christ, for whom all this is done and prepared. And next is the work of the Gospel, by which this church is gathered, edified, and saved. And then, the matter of our own salvation, and our state of grace, and way to life. And then, the salvation of others. And then, the common, public good, in temporal respects. And then, our personal, bodily welfare. And next, the bodily welfare of our neighbours. And lastly, those things that do but remotely tend to these. This is the order of desirableness and worth, which will tell you what should have estimative precedency in your thoughts and prayers.
Direct. III. ‘You must also know what subject is then most seasonable for your thoughts, and refuse even an unseasonable good.’ For good may be used by unseasonableness to do hurt. It may be thrust in by the tempter, on purpose to divert you from some greater good, or to mar some other duty in hand: so he will oft put in some good meditation to turn you from a better, or in the midst of sermon or prayer: or if he see you out of temper to perform a duty of meditation, or that you have no leisure, without neglecting your more proper work, he will then drive you on, that by the issue he may discourage and hurt you, and make the duty unprofitable and grievous to you, and make you more averse to it afterwards. Untimely duty may be no duty, but a sin, which is covered with the material good. As the Pharisees’ sabbath-rest was, when mercy called them to violate it.
Direct. IV. ‘Examine well, and determine of the end and use of your meditations, before you set upon them, and then labour to fit them to that special end.’ The end is first in the intention, and from the love of it the means are chosen and used. If it be knowledge that you are to increase, it is evidence of truth, with the matter to be known, in a convincing, scientifical way, that you must meditate on. If it be divine belief that is to be increased or exercised, it is divine revelations, both matter, and evidence of credibility which you have to meditate on. If you would excite the fear of God, you have his greatness, and terribleness, his justice, and threatenings to meditate on. If you would excite the love of God, you have his goodness, mercy, Christ, and promises to meditate on. If you would prepare for death and judgment, you have your hearts to try, your lives to repent of, your graces to discover, and revive, and exercise, and your soul’s diseases to feel, and the remedies to apply: so whenever you mean to make any thing of a set meditation, determine first of the end, and by it of the means.
Direct. V. ‘Clear up the truth of things to your minds as you can, before you take much pains to work them on your affections, lest you find after that you did but misinform yourselves, and bestow all your labour in vain, to make deluding images on your minds, and bring your affections to bow before them.’ As many have done by espousing errors, who have laid out their zeal upon them many years together, and made them the reason of hatred, and contention, and bitter censurings of opposing brethren; and have made parties, and divisions, and disturbances in the church for them, and after so many years zealous sinning, have found them to be but like Michal’s image, a man of straw instead of David; and that they made all this filthy pudder but in a dream.
Direct. VI. ‘Next labour to perceive the weight of every thing you think on, be it good or evil: and to that end be sure, that God and eternity be taken in, in every meditation, and all things judged of as they stand related to God, and to your eternal state; which only can give you the true estimate and sense of good and evil: there will still the life and soul, and power be wanting in your most excellent meditations, further than God is in them, and they are divine.’ When you meditate on any Scripture-truth, think of it as a beam from the Eternal Light; indited [written] by the Holy Ghost, to lead men by obedience to felicity. Behold it with reverence as a letter or message sent from heaven; and as a thing of grand importance to your souls. When you meditate of any grace, think on it as a part of the image of God, implanted and actuated by the Holy Ghost, to advance the soul into communion with God, and prepare it for him. When you meditate on any duty, remember who commandeth it, and whom you are chiefly to respect in your obedience; and what will be the end of obeying or disobeying. When you meditate on any sin, remember that it is the defacing or privation of God’s image, and the rebel that riseth up against him in all his attributes, to depose him from the government of the soul and of the world; and foresee the end to which it tendeth. Take in God, if you would feel life and power in all that you meditate on.
Direct. VII. ‘Let your ordinary meditations be on the great and necessary things; and think less frequently on the less necessary matters.’ Meditation is but a means to a further end; it is to work some good upon the soul: use therefore those subjects which are most powerful and fit to work it. Great truths will do great works upon the heart. They are usually the surest and most past controversy and doubt: there is more weight, and substance, and power in one article of the creed, or one petition of the Lord’s Prayer, or one commandment of the decalogue, to benefit the soul, than in abundance of the controverted opinions which men have troubled themselves and others with in all ages. As one purse of gold, will buy more than a great quantity of farthings. Meditating on great and weighty truths, makes great and weighty Christians. And meditating inordinately on light and controverted opinions, makes light, opinionative, contentious professors. Little things may have their time and place, but it must be but little time and the last place; except when God maketh any little thing to be the matter of our lawful calling and employment (as all the common matters of the world are little). And then they may have a larger proportion of our time, though still they must have the lowest place in our estimation and in our hearts.
Direct. VIII. ‘Whenever you are called to meditate on any smaller truth or thing, see that you take it not as separated from the greater, but still behold it as connected to them, and planted and growing in them, and receiving their life and beauty from them; so that you may still preserve the life and interest of the greatest matters in your hearts, and may not mortify the least, and turn it into a deceit or idol.’ We are to climb upwards, and not to descend downwards: and therefore we begin at the body of the tree, and so pass up to the few and greatest boughs; and thence to the smaller numerous branches, which as they are hard to be discerned, numbered and remembered, so are they not all strong enough to bear us; but are fitted rather to be looked on, than trodden and rested on. But if you take them not as growing from the greater boughs, but cut them off, they lose their life, and beauty, and fruitfulness. If all the controversies in the church had been managed, with due honour and preservation of holiness, charity, unity, peace, and greater truths; and if all the circumstantials in religion had been ordered with a salvo, and due regard, and just subserviency to the power and spirituality of holy worship, the Christian world would have had more life, and strength, and fruitfulness, and less imagery, unholy, ludicrous compliment, and hypocrisy.
Direct. IX. ‘Let the end and order of your meditations be first for the settling of your judgments, and next for the resolving and settling of your wills, and thirdly for the reforming and bettering of your lives; and but in the fourth place, after all these, for the raising of your holy passions or lively feeling; which must have but its proper room and place.’ But indeed where some of these are done already, they may be supposed, and we may proceed to that which is yet to do. As if you know what is sin and duty but to do it not, your meditation must be, not to make you know what you knew not, but first to consider well of what you know, and set the powerful truth before you; and then labour hereby to bring your wills to a fixed resolution of obedience. But if it be a truth whose principal use is on the will and affections (as to draw up the heart to the love of God, by the meditating on his attractive excellencies), then the most pains must there be taken. Of which see Chap. iii. Direct. 11.
Direct. X. ‘Turn your cogitations often into soliloquies; methodically and earnestly preaching to your own hearts, as you would do on that subject to others if it were to save their souls.’ As this will keep you in order, from rambling and running out, and will also find you continual matter, (for method is a wonderful help both to invention, memory and delight) so it will bring things soonest to your affections: and earnest pleading of convincing reasons with our own hearts, is a powerful way to make the fire burn, and to kindle desire, fear, love, hatred, repentings, shame, sorrow, joy, resolution, or any good effect. Convictions, upbraidings, expostulations, reprehensions, and self-persuasions may be very powerful: when a dull way of bare thinking is but like a dull way of preaching, without any lively application, which little stirs the hearers. Learn purposely of the liveliest books you read, and of the best and liveliest preachers you hear, to preach to your hearts, and use it orderly, and you will find it a most powerful way of meditating.
Direct. XI. ‘Turn your meditations often into ejaculatory [spontaneous] prayers and addresses unto God: for that will keep you reverent, serious and awake, and make all the more powerful, because the more divine.’ When you meditate on sin, turn sometimes to God, by penitent lamentation, and say, ‘Lord, what a wretch and rebel was I to entertain such an enemy of thine in my heart? and for nothing to offend thee and violate thy laws! O pardon, O cleanse me, O strengthen me! Conquer and cast out this odious enemy of thee and me.’ So when you are seeking to excite or exercise any grace, send up a fervent request to God to shew his love and power upon thy dead and sluggish heart, and to be the principal agent in a work which is so much his own. Prayer is a most holy duty, in which the soul hath so nearly to do with God, that if there be any holy seriousness in the heart, it will be thus excited: a dull and wandering mind will bear some reverence to God; and therefore interests him in all.
Direct. XII. ‘Let every meditation be undertaken in a humble sense of thy own insufficiency, with a believing dependence on thy Head and Saviour, to guide and quicken thee by his Holy Spirit, and to cover the infirmities of thy holiest thoughts.’ Whatever good is written upon our hearts, must be “written by the Spirit of the living God:” and this “trust we must have through Christ to Godward: not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves: but our sufficiency is of God.” How heavily will all go on, or rather how certainly shall we labour in vain, and cast off all, if Christ cast us off, and leave us to ourselves! Think not that your life and strength are radically in yourselves: go to him by renewed acts of faith, by whom you must be quickened.
Direct. XIII. ‘Let not your holy thoughts be so seldom as to keep you strange to the matter of your meditations, nor so short as to be gone before you have made any thing of it.’ Now and then a cursory thought, will not acquaint the soul with God, nor bring it to a habit and temperament of holiness. Whereas that which you think on frequently and seriously, as your business and delight, will become the nutriment and nature of your souls: as the air which we daily breathe in, and the food which we daily live upon, do our bodies. And you will find that as use will breed skill and strength, so it will cause such acquaintance and familiarity, as will very much tend to the fruit and comfort of the work. Whereas they that only cast now and then a look at God and holiness, do lose so quickly the little which they get, that it makes no great alteration on them.
Direct. XIV. ‘Yet do not overdo in point of violence or length; but carry on the work sincerely according to the abilities of your minds and bodies; lest going beyond your strength, you craze your brains, and discompose your minds, and disable yourselves, to do any thing at all.’ Though we cannot estimatively love God too much, yet is it possible to think of him with too much passion, or too long at once: because it may be more than the spirits and brain can bear: and if once they be overstrained, if they break not, like a lute-string screwed too high, they will be like a leg that is out of joint, that can pain yon but not bear you. While the soul rideth on so lame or dull a horse, as the body is, it must not go the pace which it desireth, but which the body can bear; or else it may quickly be dismounted, or like one that rideth on a tired horse. It is not the horse that goeth at first with chafing heat, and violence, which will travel best: but you must put on in the pace that you are able to hold out. You little know how lamentable and distressed a case you will be in, or how great an advantage the tempter hath, if once he do but tire you by overdoing!
Direct. XV. ‘Choose not unnecessarily or ordinarily the bitterest or most unpleasant subjects for your meditation, lest you make it grow a burden to you; but dwell most on the sweet delightful thoughts of the infinite love of God revealed by Christ, and the eternal glory purchased by him, and the wonderful helps and mercies in the way.’ As it is the Gospel which Christ’s ministers must preach to others, so it is the Gospel which in your meditations, you must preach most to yourselves. It is love and pleasure which you must principally endeavour to excite: and you must do it by contemplating amiableness and felicity, the objects of love and pleasure. For the thoughts of terror, and wrath, and misery, are unfit to stir up these: though to the unconverted, dull, secure, presumptuous, or sensual sinner, such thoughts are very necessary to awake him, and prepare him for the thoughts of love and peace. It is the principal part of this art, to keep off loathing and averseness, and to keep up readiness and delight.
Direct. XVI. ‘When you are in company, let out the fruit of your secret meditations, in holy, edifying discourse.’ Gather not for yourselves only, but that you may communicate to others. The “good scribe instructed to the kingdom of God,” must “bring forth out of his treasure things new and old.” That is good which doth good. God is communicative; and the best men are likest to him: may, a fluent discourse sometimes is a great instructor to ourselves, and bringeth those things into our minds with clearness, which long meditation would not have done. For one thing leadeth in another; and in a warm discourse the spirits are excited, and the understanding and memory are engaged to a close attention: so that just in the speaking, we have oftentimes such a sudden appearance of some truth, which before we took no notice of, that we find it is no small addition to our knowledge, which comes in this way. As some find that vocal prayer doth more excite them, and keep the mind from wandering, than mere mental prayer doth: so free discourse is but a vocal meditation. And what man’s thoughts are not more guilty of disorder, vagaries and interruptions, than his discourse is?
Direct. XVII. ‘Obey all that God revealeth to you in your meditations, and turn them all into faithful practice; and make not thinking the end of thinking.’ Else you will but do as the ungodly, and the disobedient in their prayers, who offer to God the “sacrifice of fools, and consider not that they do evil.” Away with the sin, and do the duty, on which you think.
Direct. XVIII. ‘Think not that the same measure of contemplation and striving with your own affections, is necessary to all; but that an obediential, active life may be as acceptable to God, when he calleth men to it, as a more contemplative life.’