Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Baxter

Urgency is the engine of this line, and Baxter cranks it to a near-audible whine. “As never sure to preach again” strips the sermon of its usual institutional safety net. The pulpit isn’t a weekly appointment; it’s a last will and testament delivered in public. That first clause also smuggles in a critique of routine religion: if you assume you’ll always get another Sunday, your words soften into professional speech. Baxter is trying to burn the complacency out of both preacher and congregation.

The second line lands harder because it collapses hierarchy. “A dying man to dying men” refuses the fantasy that the minister stands outside the crisis he names. He’s not dispensing moral advice from a clean distance; he’s in the same mortal queue. The subtext is accountability: if he is as perishable as his listeners, then his rhetoric can’t be ornamental, and his message can’t be tailored to social comfort. Death becomes the democratizing fact that cancels status and polite euphemism.

Context matters: Baxter is a Puritan-era pastor writing in a 17th-century England rattled by civil war, plague years, and political-religious crackdowns. Life expectancy was a daily argument. His intent isn’t to romanticize doom; it’s to weaponize finitude against distraction, hypocrisy, and delay. The line works because it makes preaching less like performance and more like triage: speak the truth you’d risk sounding extreme for, because time is already running.