Seventeenth-century England was a political/religious battleground, and Presbyterian Richard Baxter was no stranger to the conflict. Sympathetic to Cromwell’s cause, he was forced to leave his Kidderminster parish since it was situated in Catholic Royalist country. But when Cromwell was victorious, Baxter found himself at odds with some of his policies. Conflict followed conflict, and, as a 70-year-old man in ill health, Baxter spent two years in prison for alleged offenses in his Paraphrase on the New Testament. Still, he was unwavering in his call to pray for those in authority, as this passage from A Christian Directory shows. […]

  What caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? Historians have debated this question for centuries and offered numerous and varied explanations. One has a strangely contemporary ring: Rome collapsed because the vitality of her empire and the loyalty of her subject peoples were extinguished by big government and oppressive taxation.1