' Asty, p. iii. Orme, p. 9.
"^ Bogue and BenneL's History of Dissenters, ii. 211, 226.
HIS STUDENT-LIFE. XXV
And here let us pause for a moment, to look at the circumstances of another student, who was destined at a future day to shine with Owen in the same brisjht constellation. While Owen was walkinsc amid the majestic structures and academic shades of Oxford, or bend- ing over the midnight page, Richard Baxter might have been seen amid the enchanting scenery of Ludlow Castle, or, later still, in the small village of Wroxeter, with little help or guidance from man, but, under the promptings of an indomitable will, and with an omnivorous appetite for knowledge, allowing no difficulties or discouragements to damp the ardour of his pursuits. Without the advantage of the sys- tematic training of a university, or the command of the rich stores of its libraries, this was almost compensated to his athletic soul by the more discursive and varied range which both his tastes and his ne- cessities thus gave to his studies. In the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, and Duns Scotus, which to most minds would have been dry and barren as the sands of the desert, his acute intellect found higfh exercise and real delight, and rejoiced in whetting and exercising on them its dialectic powers, until he could rival in subtle and shadowy distinctions those ghostly schoolmen. Two years the senior of Owen, he was also "in Christ" before him ; and while the Oxford student was still feeding the fires of an earth-born ambition, Baxter had learned from Sibbs' Bruised Reed, and from his Bible, the art of holy medi- tation; and, even in the later years of his stfident-life, might have been seen at that hour when it was too dark to read and too early to light his lamp, devoting its sacred moments to thinking of heaven and anticipations of the " saints' everlasting rest." ^ But the same grace was soon to descend upon the soul of Owen, and, co-operating with providential occurrences, to withdraw him for ever from the poor day- dreams of a mere earthly ambition. While he was measuring out for himself a course which, if successful, would probably have made him a secular churchman, and even an intolerant persecutor, Christ had said of him, " I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake." Let us now trace the influences and events which brought about in the mind and outward circumstances of Owen this mighty change.
We have no minute information regarding the means by which his mind was first turned with serious personal interest to the supreme subject of religion. Perhaps the dormant seeds of early instruction that had been lodged in his mind under the roof of the humble vicar- age now began to live ; perhaps some of those truths which he was storing in his mind as matter of mere intellectual furniture and ac- complishment had unexpectedly reached his heart ; or the earnest struggles on religious questions that were beginning to agitate the ' Jenkyn's Essay on the Life of Baxter, pp. iii.-v.
XXVI LIFE OF DR OWEN.
kingdom bad, in some measure, arrested the sympathy of the young recluse ; or thoughts of a more serious kind than he had yet enter- tained had arisen in his mind, he knew not how, like invisible and life-awakening spring- breezes; or all these things combined may have been employed as influences in bringing him at length to " seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness." At all events, we have Owen's own testimony to the fact, that in the later years of his uni- versity life, the Di\4ne Spirit began to work in his soul a new class of thoughts and emotions ; and though it was not until a later period that he entered upon the full peace and holy liberty of the kingdom of God, he was brought even then to submit his life to the supreme control of religious principle, and to ask, " What wilt thou have me to do?"
While his mind was undergoing this great change, events were occurring in the government of the university which were fitted to put his religious principle to the test, and to try it, as it were,. by fire. William Laud having, by a succession of rapid advancements, been raised to the chancellorship of Oxford, hastened to introduce into it those Romish innovations which, as the privy councillor and principal adviser of Charles, and the intimate associate of Strafford, he had already done much to infuse into the general ecclesiastical policy of the nation. The naturally arrogant and domineering spirit of this nar- row-minded ecclesiastic, whom even Clarendon describes as "rough of temper, impatient of contradiction, and arbitrary," ^ had far more to do with those oppressive measures which marked liis fatal ecclesias- tical supremacy, than those mistaken views of the rights of conscience which at this period dragged so many better and more amiable men into the ranks of persecutors. Accordingly, we find him requhing the adoption, by the university, of many of those rites and ceremonials which savoured the most strongly of Popish superstitious, and in some instances were identical with them, and which the Reformers of England had soonest renounced and most severely condemned ; the l^enalty of resistance to this demand being nothing less than expul- sion from the university.