Baxter, like most scholastic logicians, had a sneaking affection for puns. The cause is,--the necessity of attending to the primary sense of words, that is, the visual image or general relation expressed, and which remains common to all the after senses, however widely or even incongruously differing from each other in other respects. For the same reason, schoolmasters are commonly punsters. "I have indorsed your Bill, Sir," said a pedagogue to a merchant, meaning he had flogged his son William.--My old master the Rev. James Bowyer, the 'Hercules furens' of the phlogistic sect, but else an incomparable teacher,--used to translate, 'Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu',--first reciting the Latin words, and observing that they were the fundamental article of the Peripatetic school,--"You must flog a boy, before you can make him understand;"--or, "You must lay it in at the tail before you can get it into the head." Ib. p. 45. Then, that the will must follow the practical intellect whether right or wrong,--that is no precept, but the nature of the soul in its acting, because that the will is 'potentia cæca, non nata ad intelligendum, sed ad volendum vel nolendum intellectum'. This is the main fault in Baxter's metaphysics, that he so often substantiates distinctions into dividuous self-subsistents. As here;--for a will not intelligent is no will. Appendix. III. p. 55. And for many ages no other ordinarily baptised but infants. If Christ had no Church then, where was his wisdom, his love, and his power? What was become of the glory of his redemption, and his Catholic Church, that was to continue to the end? But the Antipoedo-Baptists would deny any such consequences as applicable to them, who are to act according to the circumstances, in which God, who ordains his successive manifestations in due correspondence with other lights and states of things, has placed them. He does not exclude from the Church of Christ (say they) those whom we do not accept into the communion of our particular Society, any more than the House of Lords excludes Commoners from being Members of Parliament. And we do this because--we think that such promiscuous admission would prolong an error which would be deadly to us, though not to you who interpret the Scriptures otherwise. 'In fine.'