Here, as promised, is the second quote from Richard Baxters’ ‘The Reformed Pastor’ on what I am calling ‘The Preacher and….Himself’.

“O brethren, watch therefore over your own hearts: keep out lusts and passions, and worldly inclinations; keep up the life of faith, and love, and zeal: be much at home, and be much with God. If it be not your daily business to study your own hearts, and to subdue corruption, and to walk with God - if you make not this a work to which you constantly attend, all will go wrong, and you will starve your hearers; or if you have an affected fervency, you cannot expect a blessing to attend it from on high. Above all, be much in secret payer and meditation. Thence you must fetch the the heavenly fire that must kindle your sacrifices: remember, you cannot decline and neglect your duty, to your own hurt alone; many will be losers by it as well as you. For your people’s sakes, therefore, look to your hearts…..But, besides this general course of watchfulness, methinks a minister should take some special pains with his heart, before he is to go to the congregation: if it be then cold, how is he likely to warm the hearts of his hearers? Therefore, go then specially to God for life: read some rousing, awakening book, or meditate on the weight of the subject of which you are to speak, and on the great necessity of your people’s souls, that you may go in the zeal of the Lord into his house. Maintain, in this manner, the life of grace in yourselves, that it may appear in all your sermons from the pulpit, - that every one who comes cold to the assembly, may have some warmth imparted to him before he depart.”