Margaret and Richard Baxter: A Puritan Love Story
Most of what we know of Margaret Baxter, we glean from her husband’s memorial to her, written one month after her death. Baxter published it as A Breviate of the Life of Margaret, The Daughter of Francis Charlton, and Wife of Richard Baxter. Later, John T. Wilkinson reprinted it with the beautiful title Richard Baxter and Margaret Charlton: A Puritan Love Story.
Baxter prefaces his memorializing of Margaret with the candid admission that,
“it was written, I confess, under the power of melting grief.”
Knowing the likely criticism for such openness, Baxter continues,
“. . . and therefore perhaps with the less prudent judgment; but not with the less, but the more truth; for passionate weakness poureth out all, which greater prudence may conceal.”
According to Baxter, Christians, of all people, should be the most honest about pain.
In our grieving, we should not conceal the truth of tears this side of heaven.
In Depths of Grief
It was not simply the shock and nearness of Margaret’s death that left her husband so frank. Years later in his autobiography, Baxter expresses how his wife’s death left him “in depth of grief.”
Interestingly, the original
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