1683 RICHARD BAXTER. Rare Attack on Richard Baxter - Savoy Conference and Act of Uniformity.

A very nicely preserved example of the most substantive anti- Baxter publication in the decades long feud by George Morley, Bishop of Worcester, and Kidderminster’s much-loved puritan pastor, Richard Baxter.

The core of their dispute was rooted in the Savoy Conference of 1661, one of the most consequential ecclesiastical events of the Restoration period. The Conference, convened to reconcile Anglicans and Puritans/Presbyterians after the Restoration of Charles II, involved 12 Anglican bishops and 12 representative Puritan and Presbyterian ministers, with the object of revising the Book of Common Prayer. The conference resulted in Baxter's Reformed Liturgy, though it was cast aside without consideration, and afterward Bishop Morley prohibited Baxter from preaching in the Diocese of Worcester.

The failure of the Savoy Conference was catastrophic for the Puritans and Presbyterian movements, leading ultimately to the Act of Uniformity and the ousting of 2,000 ministers from their churches in August and September of 1662.

Morley's Vindication revisits and documents his case that Baxter had misrepresented the proceedings of 1661, particularly with regard to who ultimately bore responsibility for the conference's failure. The text specifically addresses the management of the conference at the Savoy, the Dissenters' answers written in Baxter's own hand, and what Morley characterized as Baxter's "gross shuffling" and his "strangely peevish and absurd" final answer.

One of the most theologically interesting threads in the Vindication concerns a specific doctrinal assertion. Morley charged Baxter with having asserted something about sin being sinful "per accidens" (sinful incidentally, or by accident of circumstance. This touches on the broader and well-known controversy about Baxter's distinctive and disputed theology of justification. Baxter's Aphorisms on Justification (1649) taught quite clearly that faith justifies because it obeys, a position many Reformed critics saw as "Neonomian," i.e., treating the gospel itself as a new law.

More broadly, the volume is a window into the deep bitterness that persisted between conformists and nonconformists well into the 1680s, a full two decades after the Act of Uniformity. Morley (who died in 1684, just a year after publication) was in his mid-eighties when he published this work. That he devoted such enormous energy to it at that age speaks to how personal and unresolved the wounds from the Restoration settlement remained.

[Richard Baxter, Act of Uniformity of 1662, The Great Ejection, Savoy Conference]. Morley, George. The Bishop of Winchester's Vindication of Himself from Divers False, Scandalous and Injurious Reflexions made upon him by Mr. Richard Baxter in several of his Writings. London, Printed by M. Flesher for Joanna Brome, 1683. 535pp + 15pp.

A very good example in handsome late 20th century half calf binding with marbled boards, feeling quite appropriate overall. Very minor worm intrusions at top edge not visible from the page, textually very clean with only light stains and foxing on the foredge as shown.