Richard Baxter - The Godly Home

For many years, I have hoped that someone would reissue a fresh edition of this valued compendium of the callings and opportunities of family living. In a day when many Christians are confused about the callings of Christian living in the home, Baxter gives clear job descriptions for husbands, wives, and even children. It is my prayer that Baxters robust biblical vision for the family will inspire and encourage many, just as it did in the seventeenth century.

Tedd Tripp, pastor, conference speaker,
author of Shepherding a Childs Heart

Richard Baxters Christian Directory was one of the most compendious books of spiritual advice to be published in the seventeenth century. Its massive size, however, has hindered its usefulness in engaging a wide, evangelical audience. In The Godly Home, Randall J. Pederson has sought to remedy this by producing a volume that, with fresh urgency, presents Baxters wisdom on family life and worship. Pedersons sensitive editorial care is to be commended. This is a work to be read and reread. I hope it reaches a wide audience and serves to awaken Christians to the need of an enduring godly legacy.

Crawford Gribben, Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in
Early Modern Print Culture, Trinity College, Dublin;
author of Gods Irishmen: Theological Debates in
Cromwellian Ireland

Baxters The Godly Home is a treasure of godly information and advice desperately needed in todays world. Few areas are more in need of reformation than the home and family, and this updating of Baxters prose is very welcome indeed. For too long, this excellent piece has been buried in the massive Directory, and its resurrection under the skillful hand of Randall Pederson is both timely and welcome. Let us hope that a new reformation begins in the home and that this publication will aid to that end.

Derek Thomas, John E. Richards Professor of Theology,
Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson);
Minister of Teaching, First Presbyterian Church,
Jackson, Mississippi

The Puritans elevated the concept that our homes and families should be like little churches and godly enclaves more than anyone else in church history. They preached scores of sermons and wrote numerous books on how to live as Christian husbands, wives, and children. One of the most important among these books was written by Richard Baxter and has long been buried in miniscule print in his A Christian Directory. In The Godly Home, Randall Pederson has masterfully edited Baxters tour de force on the duties of husbands, wives, children, and teenagers in building God-glorifying homes. Though a few items in this book may seem outdated, the vast majority of it provides solid, convicting, and instructive biblical advice. If every Christian family, by the Spirits grace, conscientiously practiced the godly piety Baxter commends in this book, homes, churches, and nations would be truly transformed for good and we would see better days ahead.

Joel R. Beeke, President, Puritan Reformed Theological
Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan

The Godly Home
Copyright 2010 by Crossway Books
Published by Crossway Books
a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers
1300 Crescent Street
Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Amy Bristow

Cover photo: iStock

First printing, 2010

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible: English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked kjv are from the King James Version of the Bible.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-1344-2 PDF

ISBN: 978-1-4335-1345-9

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-1346-6

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-2041-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baxter, Richard, 16151691
[Christian economics]
The Godly home / Richard Baxter ; edited by Randall J. Pederson. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1344-2 (tpb)
1. FamilyReligious life. 2. Christian lifePuritan authors. I. Pederson, Randall J., 1975 . II. Title
BV4526.3.B39 2010
248.4dc22 2009015136

VP 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated by the editor to
JAMES DOLEZAL,
a friend and kindred spirit in the things of
God and men

Contents

Chapter One
Directions about Marriage

Chapter Two
Worship of God in Families: Is It by Divine Appointment?

Chapter Three
Directions for the Holy Government of Families

Chapter Four
Motives to Persuade Men to the Holy Government of Families

Chapter Five
Motives for a Holy and Careful Education of Children

Chapter Six
Mutual Duties of Husbands and Wives Toward Each Other

Chapter Seven
Duties of Husbands to Their Wives

Chapter Eight
Duties of Wives to Their Husbands

Chapter Nine
Duties of Parents to Their Children

Chapter Ten
Duties of Children to Their Parents

Chapter Eleven
Duties of Children and Youth to God

Chapter Twelve
Directions for the Right Teaching of Children

J. I. Packer

If someone was planning to produce an encyclopedia, that is, an exhaustive work of reference, on some subject, or indeed, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, on all subjects together, how would you expect him to go about it? Surely, by recruiting a team of assistants, by ensuring access to a good library, by stocking up with some lavishly equipped computers, and by acquiring for comparative purposes copies of all those earlier works of reference that the new project was intended to outclass. How could one hope to do a good job otherwise?

Back in the eighteenth century, when a group of booksellers-publishers (in those days these two trades were one) engaged Samuel Johnson to produce a definitive English dictionary, they gave him money to hire and pay a team of researchers, to rent premises in which they could all work together, and to purchase what they needed for their task. The investment, we know, paid off. Johnsons dictionary was a landmark from the start and became the foundation on which all later English dictionaries were built.

When the Puritan Richard Baxter (16151691) produced his encyclopedia of the Christian life, however, the story was rather different.

In 1664 Baxter was a pastor out of a job. His ministry at Kidderminster in the English Midlands, where he had served (with a five-year absence as a Civil War chaplain) since 1641, and which had been marvelously fruitful in evangelism, nurture, and church community-building, had been terminated by the anti-Puritan Act of Uniformity in 1662. Since then he had resided in Acton, a few miles outside London, living, it seems, on book royalties and rents from the small property he owned. He was married to a woman twenty years younger than himself who had some money of her own. His mind went back to urgings from the late Archbishop Usher that he should write a directory for the several ranks of professed Christians and to his own plan, formed some years before, of writing a Family Directory, which he began to compose. The project took him something like a year. He had no secretary, copyist, or pastoral peers to help him, and he was far from my library and all my books, save an inconsiderable parcel which wandered with me, where I went. But what came out of the hopper of his fantastically fertile and fast-moving mind was a treatise of a million and a quarter words that, when finally published in 1673, bore the following title: