Reading Baxter

The Christian mind must be trained in righteousness if one must glorify God in all aspects of life. I'm doing something ambitious with my reading and spiritual life: I'll be reading Richard Baxter's "A Christian Directory: Or, A Sum of Practical Theology and Cases of Conscience." Inspired largely by Tim Challies, who engages his readers to read Christian classics, I decided to slowly and meditatively take up this habit. It helps that my pastors are fans of the Puritan writers, quoting them a lot during preaching.

The book's subtitle is "Directing Christians How To Use Their Knowledge and Faith; How To Improve All Helps and Means, and To Perform All Duties; How To Overcome Temptations, and To Escape or Mortify Every Sin."

This is an ambitious project—the book comes in four volumes—and even Baxter himself had to write,

The book is so big that I must make no longer preface than to give you this necessary, short account, I. Of the quality; II. And the reasons of this work.

I'll be quoting and writing a few things about the book here and there. I don't expect to finish soon, with all the readings I need to do for work. But I'm quite excited.

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I've been having difficulties formatting the .txt document from Gutenberg. It turns out that it's better to use html as the base file in in Calibre, prior to converting it epub or mobi, so the formatting is still preserved.

If we provide a HTML file for the ebook you are interested in, it is best to convert that file, rahter than the TEXT file, to MOBI or EPUB format as required.