Few persons could have been subjected in early life to a greater variety of influence than Richard Baxter. His father having been a gambler, became, before the birth of his illustrious son, a pious man, and trained up his offspring in godly discipline. Whilst over his home a religious atmosphere diffused itself, the people in the village spent the greater part of most Sundays in dancing round the Maypole. After four successive curates of worthless character, there followed a grave and eminent man who expected to be made a Bishop. Having been placed under each of them at school, Richard afterwards had for his tutor a Royalist chaplain, who did all in his power to make the youth hate Puritanism. Baxter’s religious impressions were deepened by reading the works of a Jesuit, which an evangelical Protestant had revised, and by the perusal of evangelical books from the pens of Sibbs and Perkins. The youth’s first associations in life were with the Episcopal Church, and he was then a Conformist in practice and principle. He studied Richard Hooker, and did not come in contact with Nonconformists, until just before he attained his majority. He spent, as a young man, a month at Whitehall, with the chance of becoming a courtier. Accident brought him within an inch of the grave, and he suffered so much from illness, that at twenty he had the symptoms of fourscore. No classic, no mathematician, he plunged into the study of logic and metaphysics, and soon formed an intimate acquaintance with Aquinas and Scotus, Durandus and Ockham. He had omnivorous habits of reading, and it is curious to notice the variety of authors whom he cites or enumerates. He was a self-taught man, and when Anthony Wood inquired of him by letter, whether he had been educated at Oxford, Baxter replied, “As to myself, my faults are no disgrace to any University, for I was of none: I have little but what I had out of books, and inconsiderable helps of country tutors. Weakness and pain helped me to study how to die: that set me on studying how to live; and that set me on studying the doctrine from which I must fetch my motives and comforts; and beginning with necessaries, I proceeded to the lesser integrals by degrees, and now am going to see that which I have lived and studied for.”[535]