. . Twice a year
I catechised the parish, and once a year I visited their families. My
method of visitation was this. I made a particular application of my
doctrine in the pulpit to the family, exhorted them all to lay all these
things to heart, exhorted them also to secret prayer, supposing they kept
family worship, urged their relative duties upon them,' etc. etc. And
then at his leaving Ettrick, he writes: 'Thus I parted with a people
whose hearts were knit to me and mine to them. The last three or four
years had been much blessed, and had been made very comfortable to me,
not in respect of my own handful only, but others of the countryside
also.' Jonathan Edwards called Thomas Boston 'that truly great divine.'
I am not such a judge of divinity as Jonathan Edwards was, but I always
call Boston to myself that truly great pastor. But my lazy and deceitful
heart says to me: No praise to Boston, for he lived and did his work in
the quiet Forest of Ettrick. True, so he did. Well, then, look at the
populous and busy town of Kidderminster. And let me keep continually
before my abashed conscience that hard-working corpse Richard Baxter.
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