Baxter was an establishmentarian. It is good that kings and queens should be nursing fathers and mothers to the Church. He lamented in his Reformed Pastor that magistrates did not make adequate provision of Reformed pastors throughout the England of his day.
Yet, he did not lay the main blame at the feet of civic leaders. The fault was with the laziness of the ministry. “It is we who are to blame, even we, the ministers of the gospel, whom they should thus maintain. For those ministers that have small parishes, and might do all this private part of the work [pastoral care, mainly through catechizing], yet do it not, or at least few of them. And those in great towns and cities, that might do somewhat, though they cannot do dall, will do just nothing but what accidentally falls in their way, or next to nothing; so that the magistrate is not awakened to the observance or consideration of the weight of our work” (Reformed Pastor, pp. 184-85, emphasis mine). Like Chalmers some 150 years after him, his establishmentarianism was no fawning dependence of the Church on the State. Rather, the Church ought to rise to the calling of its own Master, with or without the aid of the magistrate. Yet, both Baxter and Chalmers believed that the diligence of the ministry could induce the State to its duty of patronizing the heavenly Kingdom.
West Port Experiment 
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