The Work
The Saints' Everlasting Rest was first published in 1650 by Thomas Underhill and Francis Tyton (London). Baxter wrote the work while recovering from a serious illness at Eaton Constantine in Shropshire, during a period of relative quiet before the English Civil War reached its final phase. The full title is The Saints' Everlasting Rest: or, A Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in their enjoyment of God in Glory. In its original form the work runs to nearly 900 pages and is divided into four parts; later editions abridged it considerably. The Puritan Board edition (2015) offers the full text in a modern typeset. Benjamin Fawcett's eighteenth-century abridgment (1759) was the version that circulated most widely in subsequent centuries.
Biblical Engagement
Hebrews 4:9 ("There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God") provides the work's central text and organizing metaphor. Baxter expounds this verse exhaustively: the "rest" (sabbatismos in Greek -- the only occurrence of this word in the New Testament) is the believer's final enjoyment of God in the heavenly state. The rest of Canaan (Psalm 95:11), the Sabbath rest (Genesis 2:2-3), and the rest promised in Matthew 11:28-29 ("Come unto me... and I will give you rest") are all types and foretastes of this ultimate rest.
Revelation 21:4 ("And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away") provides Baxter's vision of the positive content of the saints' rest. His meditation on this verse is one of the most sustained and elaborate in seventeenth-century devotional literature. He imagines the removal of every present suffering, the reunion with the saints who have died, and the unmediated vision of God.
Philippians 3:20 ("For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ") and Colossians 3:1-2 ("If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth") provide the theological rationale for "heavenly meditation" -- the deliberate practice of imaginative contemplation on heaven as a spiritual discipline. Baxter argues that the Christian's primary citizenship is already in heaven; regular meditation on that heavenly home is therefore not escapism but the proper exercise of one's truest identity.
The fourth part of the work -- which contains Baxter's pioneering method for heavenly meditation -- is structured around the disciplines of meditation as he derived them from his reading of the Psalms, particularly the meditative pattern of Psalm 63:6 ("When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches") and Psalm 77:3-12. He argues that meditation on heaven should involve the understanding (knowing what heaven is), the memory (recalling past experiences of divine grace), and the affections (stirring up joy, desire, hope, and love through the imagination).
Author and Context
Richard Baxter (1615-1691) was born in Rowton, Shropshire, to a Protestant family. He was largely self-educated in theology, reading widely in the Fathers, the scholastics, and the Reformers. He was ordained by the Bishop of Worcester in 1638 and served as a curate and then lecturer in Kidderminster, where his ministry transformed the town's religious and moral life in ways that became legendary.
The Saints' Everlasting Rest was written during a period of serious illness. Baxter believed he might be dying and wrote the work as a meditation to prepare his own soul for death. Its composition was hasty -- he wrote it without his library at hand -- but this gave it an immediacy and emotional directness that more scholarly works lacked.
Baxter's theological position was unusual for his time: he was neither a strict Calvinist (he rejected double predestination and unconditional reprobation) nor an Arminian, holding a mediating position he called "Catholic theology." He was ejected from his Kidderminster living under the Act of Uniformity (1662), along with approximately two thousand other Nonconformist ministers, and spent the rest of his life as a Nonconformist minister, frequently prosecuted and briefly imprisoned.
Critical Reception
The work was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of Puritan devotional literature. It went through multiple editions in the seventeenth century and was widely read among Puritans in both England and New England. John Wesley read and admired it; his abridgment helped introduce it to Methodist readers in the eighteenth century. Its influence on the Evangelical Revival and on the tradition of Protestant devotional literature is substantial.
Theological Significance
Baxter's contribution to the tradition of meditation is significant. His method of "heavenly meditation" -- using the imagination deliberately to make heaven vivid and present to the mind -- is unusual in Reformed Protestant tradition, which was generally suspicious of the imagination as a faculty prone to deception. Baxter drew on the Ignatian tradition of imaginative meditation (without acknowledging it as such) and produced a Protestant version of the Jesuit spiritual exercises applied to eschatology. This approach influenced John Wesley, who developed similar practices of "mental prayer" within Methodism.
Legacy
The Saints' Everlasting Rest was one of the most widely read devotional works in the English-speaking Protestant world for two centuries. Its eschatological focus -- the deliberate cultivation of longing for heaven as a spiritual practice -- represents a tradition that has been somewhat neglected in contemporary evangelical spirituality, which tends to focus on present transformation. The work invites recovery as a counterbalance to the this-worldly focus of much contemporary Christian living.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Hebrews 3:7-4:11 (the rest of God and the Sabbath rest), Revelation 21-22 (the new Jerusalem), Philippians 3:17-21 (citizenship in heaven), Colossians 3:1-4 (setting the mind on things above), and Psalms 63, 73 (Asaph's vision of the final blessedness of the righteous), and Matthew 11:28-30 (Jesus's invitation to rest).
Further Reading
- Geoffrey Nuttall, Richard Baxter (1965) -- a concise and reliable biography. - Tim Cooper, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity (2011) -- situates Baxter within the broader context of seventeenth-century English Nonconformity. - Joel Beeke and Randall Pederson, Meet the Puritans (2006) -- a valuable reference guide to Puritan writers, including an entry on Baxter.