Note 95 — Chapter V
Reading edition
Baxter's account of this committee betrays his dislike to the "over-orthodox Doctors Owen and Cheynell." He introduces a rather triumphant description of his own hair-splitting as "one merry passage which occasioned laughter."
Some were, he says, for making it "a fundamental that he who alloweth himself or others in a known sin cannot be saved." Baxter wagered he would make them strike that out. "I told them that the Parliament took the Independent way of separation to be a sin; and when this article came before them, they would say, 'By our brethren's own judgment we are all damned men, if we allow the Independents or any other sectaries in their sin.' They gave me no answer, but left out the fundamental."—Life and Times, ii. 197-9.