Richard Baxter

Richard Baxter came to Kidderminster in 1641 as a young minister in a rough weaving town, and stayed long enough to change it. His method was not clever: he and his assistant worked through the parish register household by household, spending an hour with each family, roughly fourteen families a week, until they had covered some eight hundred homes a year. He wrote The Reformed Pastor to explain it to other ministers, and pastors have been reading it ever since. He was often ill and often expected to die, which is how The Saints' Everlasting Rest got written. When the Act of Uniformity came in 1662 he refused to conform and lost his living along with roughly two thousand other ministers. He kept writing anyway — around 140 books — and in 1685 an aging Baxter was hauled before Judge Jeffreys and jailed for eighteen months on a charge of libeling the church.