of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, into whose name (or power) they were baptised.  That the Apostles’ Creed received additions after the Apostolic age, seems almost certain; not to mention the perplexing circumstance that so many of the Latin Fathers, who give almost the words of the Apostolic Creed, declare it forbidden absolutely to write or by any material form to transmit the ‘Canon Fidei’, or ‘Symbolum’ or ‘Regula Fidei’, the Creed [Greek:  kat’ hexochaen], by analogy of which the question whether such a book was Scripture or not, was to be tried.  With such doubts how can the Apostles’ Creed be preferred to the Nicene by a consistent member of the Reformed Catholic Church?

Ib. p. 67.

They think while you (the Independents) seem to be for a stricter discipline than others, that your way or usual practice tendeth to extirpate godliness out of the land, by taking a very few that can talk more than the rest, and making them the Church, &c.

Had Baxter had as judicious advisers among his theological, as he had among his legal, friends; and had he allowed them equal influence with him; he would not, I suspect, have written this irritating and too egometical paragraph.  But Baxter would have disbelieved a prophet who had foretold that almost the whole orthodoxy of the Non-conformists would he retained and preserved by the Independent congregations in England, after the Presbyterian had almost without exception become, first, Arian, then Socinian, and finally Unitarian:  that is, the ‘demi-semi-quaver’ of Christianity, Arminianism being taken for the ‘semi-breve’.

Ib. p. 69.

After this I waited on him (Dr. John Owen) at London again, and he came once to me to my lodgings, when I was in town near him.  And he told me that he received my chiding letter and perceived that I suspected his reality in the business; but he was so hearty in it that I should see that he really meant as he spoke, concluding in these words, “You shall see it, and my practice shall reproach your diffidence” * * *.  About a month after I went to him again, and he had done nothing, but was still hearty for the work.  And to be short, I thus waited on him time after time, till my papers had been near a year and a quarter in his hand, and then I advised him to return them to me, which he did, with these words, “I am still a well-wisher to those mathematics;”—­without any other words about them, or ever giving me any more exception against them.  And this was the issue of my third attempt for union with the Independents.

Dr. Owen was a man of no ordinary intellect.  It would be interesting to have his conduct in this point, seemingly so strange, in some measure explained:  The words “those mathematics” look like an innuendo, that Baxter’s scheme of union, by which all the parties opposed to the Prelatic Church were to form a rival Church, was, like the mathematics, true indeed, but true only in the idea, that is, abstracted from the subject matter.  Still there appears a very chilling want of open-heartedness on the part of Owen, produced perhaps by the somewhat overly and certainly most ungracious resentments of Baxter.  It was odd at least to propose concord in the tone and on the alleged ground of an old grudge.