Richard Baxter was an old man at the time of the Revolution, weighed down by suffering; and the Toleration Act came too late to give scope to energies which, had the event happened twenty years earlier, would have been ardently spent in tilling the newly-opened fields of labour. Yet, when the adoption of the Doctrinal Articles of the Church was required as the condition of exercising a Nonconformist ministry, the trembling hand of the veteran theologist could not resist an impulse to write down scholastically the sense in which the Articles were to be subscribed. It was his own sense, yet it was also, as he believed, one in which many of his brethren concurred. Few, it is said, took notice of his explication, and at this we are not surprised, as his explication contains more in the way of suggestive thought than of explicit definition. His metaphysics, warmed by zeal for practical religion, appear distinctly in this farewell effort. He has something abstruse to say as to the glorified body of Christ, and upon some other points; and he lays down a dictum, often repeated since in a wider sense than he specifies, with regard to legislation in Church and State: “God’s laws are the supreme civil laws, man’s laws are but by-laws.” He also insists upon the doctrine of the Apostle James, as well as the doctrine of the Apostle Paul; and, after charitably saying, “all were not accursed that hoped well of Socrates, Antonine, Alexander, Severus, Cicero, Epictetus, Plutarch,” and others, he adds, “there is no name, that is, no Messiah, to be saved by, but Christ.”[214] [Sidenote: NONCONFORMISTS.] [Sidenote: 1691.]