A Saint or a Brute: A Major Puritan Work by Richard Baxter on Holiness and Salvation (1662)

BAXTER, Richard   A saint or a brute. The certain necessity and excellency of holiness &c. So plainly proved, and urgently applyed as by the blessing of God may convince and save the miserable, impenitent, ungodly sensualists if they will not let the Devil hinder them from a sober and serious reading and considering.

Quarto. 19cm x 14cm. [16], 23, [1], 328, 339-384pp collates complete despite the hiatus in pagination at 328. There is a part title, dated but register and pagination are continuous. Text pages are very good, crisp with wide margins, occasional marks. Original C17th leather boards rebacked in style over raised bands with hand-lettered label. A very good, near fine copy.

This is one of Richard Baxter’s most searching and uncompromising devotional works — a passionate summons to repentance, holiness, and the transformed life of the regenerate Christian. Few Puritan titles match the arresting power of its original name: A Saint or a Brute, a phrase that encapsulates Baxter’s central conviction that there is no neutral ground in the moral life. One either lives as a new creature in Christ or sinks into brutish sensuality and spiritual ruin.

Written at the height of Baxter’s pastoral and theological powers, the work is both doctrinally rigorous and intensely practical. Baxter addresses what he saw as the great spiritual disease of his age: nominal Christianity — a profession of faith without inward regeneration or outward holiness. With relentless logic and urgent moral appeal, he argues that holiness is not an optional ornament of the Christian life but its very essence, and that without it no one shall see the Lord.

The treatise unfolds as a sustained moral and spiritual assault on impenitence, worldliness, and sensual religion. Baxter treats the necessity of sanctification, the marks of true conversion, the danger of spiritual self-deception, and the eternal consequences of a life lived without repentance. Throughout, his tone is not merely polemical but deeply pastoral: he writes as a physician of souls, labouring to awaken the conscience and rescue the reader from eternal loss.

Few works better display Baxter’s unique genius: the fusion of scholastic precision with burning evangelical urgency. The book stands alongside The Call to the Unconverted, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, and The Christian Directory as one of the great monuments of English Puritan practical divinity.

Richard Baxter (1615–1691)

Richard Baxter was the most influential English Puritan pastor and devotional writer of the seventeenth century. Best known for his long ministry at Kidderminster, where he famously reformed the moral and spiritual life of the town, Baxter combined tireless pastoral labour with extraordinary literary productivity.

He was a leading figure in the Puritan movement during the Civil War and Interregnum, served as chaplain to the Parliamentary army, and later became one of the most prominent victims of Restoration nonconformist persecution. After 1662 he was repeatedly imprisoned and fined for preaching without licence, yet continued to write prolifically until his death.

Baxter’s devotional works were among the most widely read religious books in the English-speaking world for over a century, shaping Protestant piety in Britain, Europe, and colonial America.