'When the sons of Zebedee came to our Lord, and their mother asked for them supremacy in his kingdom, he refused the request, and availed himself of the occasion to explain the great principle of Equality or Brotherhood by which his kingdom upon earth should be governed. "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them; but it shall not be so amongst you" (no dominion, no authority shall be exercised in the church of Christ, excepting his own). "But whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister" (in the sense of waiting upon you).

"And

whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant. Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." (Matt. xx. 25—28.)

When the Redeemer saw the ambition and love of distinction manifested by the Scribes and Pharisees, he availed himself of the opportunity to explain the two great principles by which his kingdom on earth was distinguished, namely, 1. His own Supremacy or Headship, as the "first-born among many brethren;" and 2. The equality of all the brethren, save only himself. "Be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ. But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant." Then follow the promise and the judgment, which shall be consequent upon the VOL. II. ENLARGED SERIES.

obedience and disobedience to these great commandments of the gospel. "And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted." (Matt. xxiii. 8—12.)

Here the Redeemer cannot be referring to the relationships in this world of master and servant, or father and child. We must look, therefore, for another meaning, and in these gracious words we find the principles on which Christ Jesus will govern his kingdom or church upon

earth.

1. There is to be no dominion vested in one brother over the other brethren: no authority in one believer to which other believers are to submit.

2. Christ is the one Master, God is the one Father, and none are to assume even the name of master or father in the church of the living God. Much less shall any follower of Christ exercise the authority implied in these names or titles.

3. That no dignity or exaltation in the kingdom or church of Christ shall be sought for any of the brethren, save the respect, and love, and affection inseparable from ministrations and services hum. bly performed for the brethren.

Here, then, we discover the manifest distinction, the marked contrast which was to be observed between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdoms of monarchs and of princes; and we have a beautiful commentary on the words of our Lord, when he declared before Pilate: "My kingdom is not of this world.”ꞌ

'In the passages quoted in this lecture, and in various other parts of the New Testament, we have a clear revelation of the oneness, the union, the brotherhood of believers. The wisdom, the heavenly wisdom of the Institution may be seen in many considerations of deep interest and high importance, to the peace and prosperity of the church of Christ Jesus upon earth, to which we will now shortly allude.

No laws can be made, because there is no legislative body, no superior, no king, except Jesus the Great Head of the church; the brotherhood, the church of God, cannot make a single law, but can only obey the laws which Christ has already made.

Again, for the same reason, the brother. hood of believers, the church of Christ, cannot make or decree a single rite, or ceremony, or institution. Consequently, the churches are kept pure, and are generally, perhaps universally, found looking only to the holy scriptures for laws, rites, ceremonies, and institutions, so long as the equality, and union, and brotherhood is maintained.

Again, errors will prevail so long as man is a fallible being, but when the equality of believers is maintained amongst the brethren, that is in the church of Christ, it follows of necessity, that the error, whatever may be its nature, is the error of the individual believer, or individual believers who embrace it. When the individuals die, the error dies with them. It can have no standing-place or permanency in the church, by reason of its not being upheld by superiority or authority. The household of God, the church of the living God, or the brotherhood, is the pillar and ground of the truth. But the moment that error, or rather those who maintain error, are allowed to assume superiority or authority amongst the brethren, the oneness, the union, the equality belonging to the church of God is destroyed, and error obtains a standing-place, or principle of permanency in the household of faith. That which should be the pillar and ground of the truth is polluted, and such churches, or unions of believers, do not partake of the character of the brotherhood, or church of the living God. They become corrupt churches, and when once the plague-spot is found on the body, who can foretell the extent of the malady? Error can only maintain its ground by rapid strides in the paths of opposition to the Great Head of the church; and the word of God will be read with prejudice, or made secondary, and the office of the Holy Spirit, who guides into all truth, will be unperformed, until the error becomes a general disease, and the opponents of Christ exalt themselves against all that

is called God. The first step appeared a little one, a trivial deviation from the truth, and probably was expedient, or rather appeared to be expedient; but when the little error, the trivial deviation, was maintained by destroying the equality of the brotherhood, at that moment the Institution of Christ was overturned, and a crime of deep malignity was perpetrated.

Again, the brotherhood and equality of believers, is "the bond of peace" which Christ Jesus established in his church. Let ambitious men introduce amongst the brethren the principle of superiority, or of authority, of one brother over his brethren, or of any combination of brethren over the body of believers, and distrust, and disunion, and discord will prevail in that church. The unity of the Spirit is no longer maintained, because the bond of peace has been destroyed.

Again, until the oneness, the union, the equality of believers in the church of God shall be held up before the world, an unbelieving world will not be convinced and brought into the fold of Christ. Exhibit the division, the disunion, the oppression of one body of christians against their brethren to the world, and infidels will increase, and many will refuse to listen to the gospel, falsely alleging that these are the fruits of christianity: but exhibit the bond of peace in its salutary exercise, the love of believers one toward another, the true specimen of brotherhood in all its fulness and beauty, and the world will be converted. Such is the testimony of our Lord :— "Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also who shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one: as thou, Father art in me, and I in thee: that they also may be one in us." And why, we would ask, are believers to be one? That this oneness may be hid away, and that they may love each other, and enjoy sweet communion in private together. No doubt that was one most merciful design; but there was a further aspect, bearing on the world's welfare. Therefore our Saviour said, "That they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." The oneness, the brotherhood of believers, and the prominent exhibition of the love and peace that is bestowed in connexion with this Institution, is indispensable to the universal prevalence of Christ's kingdom upon earth.

Let it not therefore be said, that the subject of this lecture is political. With great humility I submit to you, that I am this night preaching before you A PROMI

NENT AND ESSENTIAL PART OF THE GOSPEL OF THE SON OF GOD.'-Extracted from Mr. Richardson's Anti-StateChurch Lecture at Leeds.

Dear Sir,

In a series of letters to godly Statechurch men, I address the present one to you. You have laid aside the sword of man, that minister to human lusts, for "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." You have given up the profession which sends millions of souls suddenly, in the very act of manslaying, to their Maker's bar, for the profession which seeks to "save men's lives," and to win them to Christ ere they stand before his judgment-seat. You, in a word, have given up compulsion for persuasion, and the time past of your life will enable you very fully to appreciate the difference between a church which needs for its support the sword which you formerly wore, and a church which entirely rejects it. Let me, then, ask your candid consideration of this proposition, ANY CHURCH WHICH

RESORTS FOR ITS SUPPORT TO THE COMPULSORY POWERS OF THE STATE, IS NOT CHRIST'S CHURCH. Observe, my proposition allows christians and christian churches, according to apostolic example, to appeal unto Cæsar," if they are not offenders against any law which it pertains to Cæsar's province to make, and "no man (invested with civil authority) may deliver us into the hands" of unjust or outrageous men. The question is totally altered, however, when we demand not protection merely, but pecuniary support and civil honours.

Throughout the whole of God's word, no trace can be found of compulsion in purely religious matters; no, not even in the Old Testament. Under the professedly inferior dispensation of the law of Moses, which was not even "the very image," but only "the shadow of good things to come," force was never resorted to by God to support his religious worship. Every punishment affecting person or property was inflicted for offences against the state and society, not for sins against God. Jehovah was both the civil king, and the God, of the Jews; hence many offences against him were treason as well as irreligion. How doubly weighty, then, the lesson taught us by God's leaving the support of his worship and ministers, even where he was the supreme civil ruler,

(1) James iii. 1.

entirely to the free-will offerings of the people. The very tithes themselves could not be exacted by law! How fearful, therefore, the guilt and profanity of some, who pretend to compare English tithes to Jewish tithes, tithes extorted by physical force, to tithes asked as a voluntary offer. ing! Under the Jewish economy, in the only recorded case of priests "taking by force" what should have been a voluntary offering, it is added, Wherefore the sin of the young men was very great before the Lord, for men abhorred the offering of the Lord. 2 And who, my dear sir, can conceive of the amount of abhorrence generated towards the worship of God, by the forcible exaction of tithes, church-rates, Easter dues, &c. in this country? "compulsory church" is a fruitful mother, not only of heartburnings, strifes, and lasting illwill, but also of infidelity itself.

A

The

But we, my dear sir, live under a more spiritual dispensation than the Jewish. You are a minister of the gospel, not of the law; of grace, not of terror. Almighty author and finisher of our faith has not only not sanctioned, he has explicitly disallowed the employment of force in his service. He told the disciples, who wished him to employ the terrors of Elijah against those who rejected him, that they did not "know what manner of spirit they were of;" that he came not to raise himself like a worldly conqueror, at the cost of human lives, "but to save them." If ever there could have been a time when it was allowable to draw the sword in Christ's cause, it was when the king himself of Zion was in the hands of traitors and tyrants, yet even then he told Pilate, "so entirely is my kingdom dissimilar from worldly kingdoms, that on the occasion when every loyal subject feels called upon beyond any other to fight, namely, when his Sovereign is in personal danger, my servants are not to fight." Yet we, my dear sir, have seen men, women, and babes, shot in gathering tithes in the name of the "United Church of England and Ireland!!!" Again, Paul has explicitly told us in his Master's name, that "the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but spiritual, and mighty (not through human and military skill), but through God (not to the spoiling of the

goods of Dissenters, or of haling men and women and committing them to prison), but to the pulling down of strong holds;" i. e. as the apostle adds, "casting down imaginations," &c. But surely, my dear sir, it is needless to quote passages to prove to any christian, that taking property by force for the support of Christ's ministers, is flagrant treason against a fundamental law of his kingdom. I have only to remind you, that every Statesupported church is guilty of this awful crime, and to call upon you and every spiritually-minded man to renounce all connection with the State-church, as such. Use, indeed, its modes of worship, if they aid your approach to God, but have no fellowship with its depending for support, not on the cheerful giver, but on the constable and the magistrate, the soldier and the bayonet.

There is no evading the fact, that a State-church differs from all other churches essentially, by its resorting to force. Some Dissenters use your very liturgy itself. All evangelical Dissenters hold, in the main, the doctrines of the thirty-nine articles; but none support their worship, or maintain a monarch of their own opinions on the throne, by an appeal to force. This appeal to force, then, is an essential distinction of your church in this country. Acts of parliament capable of being enforced; decisions of Ecclesiastical courts, and other Judges capable of being enforced; votes of parish vestries capable of being enforced, such are some distinctive differences between your church and all other churches in the land.

My dear sir, if there be a pious clergyman in the Church of England, if there be a liberal one towards Dissenters, it is yourself; to such as you, then, we must appeal; ought you not to denounce, to

disown, all fellowship with this carnal principle of force ?

You will surely not reply, "But while it is law we must abide by it." Law, human law, is itself force; all the police and prisons, all the artillery and bayonets of the land are at its command; by these, and these alone, does law differ from the resolutions which any body of men may see fit to pass. That body, and that body only, which grasps the supreme physical force in any country is the law-giving body; its laws may be as unjust as primogeniture laws, corn-laws, or game-laws, as ecclesiastical taxes, or the income tax in its present state; but an unjust law is law still, for it can compel submission. Human laws do not ask your approval, they demand your obedience, and demand it at your peril, herein differing entirely from Christ's laws, which are disobeyed if they are only disapproved. To introduce human law at all into religion is, therefore, necessarily to introduce force, an element which we have shewn to be unknown in the Old Testament church, and forbidden in Christ's church. All acts, then, of parliament establishing your church, from the time of Henry the VIII. downwards, and every legal fiat of a monarch or a magistrate, combine to prove it so far an antichristian church, to degrade it from the rank of a church, Christ "purchased with his own blood," to that of a statesman's church, purchased with the gold of taxation, too often, formerly, with the blood of the saint.

With the most cordial esteem for all I have ever heard of your christian and ministerial character,

Believe me, dear Sir,

Yours in our common Lord,
A FELLOW-CHRISTIAN.

GEORGE FOWNES, A.M. was a native of Shropshire, and received the rudiments of his education at Shrewsbury. Having the misfortune while young to lose his father by death, his mother sent him to the university of Cambridge, where he rose to eminence as a scholar and took his degree. The first scene of his ministerial labours was High Wycombe, in the county of Buckingham. In this place he remained several years, but resigned his living just before the restoration of Charles II. After this he was engaged as a lecturer in

London, and as an assistant to Mr. Palmer in Pinner's-Hall.

It was in the year 1679 that he went to Bristol, to supply the Baptist Church in Broadmead, with the view of becoming its pastor; and his preaching was so much thought of by the people, that when a church-meeting was called for the purpose of giving him an invitation, "a cloud of naked hands were erected towards the ceiling" in his favour. Before coming to a decision on the subject, he paid them a second visit; they renewed the invitation;

after which, the records of the church say, "he owned our call to be the voice of our Lord Jesus Christ unto him, and therefore was willing, as the Lord should help him, to serve the church while he lived."

He had not been long settled over the church in Broadmead, when "the ninth" persecution broke out against it with great fury. Fownes was disturbed in the midst of his sermon by the entrance of one Hellier (a drunken lawyer and a ringleader in the persecution), and other agents of the bishop, who forced him out of the pulpit by main strength. "Sit down," said the preacher, "and let me alone till I have done, and I will go with you;" but they demanded silence, and insisted upon his going with them as a prisoner. "Show me your warrant,' " said Fownes. After

looking it over, he found his name was not in it, and, therefore, refused to go. Being thus without authority to act, Hellier left the place, and ran himself out of breath to get another warrant; but in the meantime, the friends advised their beloved pastor to withdraw for safety; so that when the lawyer came back, the bird had escaped from the snare of the fowler.

Though defeated in this instance, these valorous sons of the Church renewed their disturbances week after week with varied success; but on one memorable occasion the civil, the spiritual, and the military authorities joined their forces to crush the Baptists, when assembled for divine worship in their humble meeting-house. The mayor and his officers, the sheriff and a deputy-lieutenant, the town clerk, the bishop's secretary, and others, marched down to attack Broadmead, while Fownes was in the act of preaching. See the conquering heroes come! Illustrious defenders of the Church! Forcing his way to the pulpit, and opening the door, the mayor cried with a loud voice, "Sirrah, come down." He obeyed, and was sent to Newgate, with several of his flock. Forbidden to worship God in their own chapel, these prisoners for conscience' sake prayed and sang praises to him in jail; but when tidings of this reached the sheriff, he came down in haste, with soldiers and artillery men, just as though the French had landed to besiege the city. What! conventicles in the prison itself! Sectaries daring to imitate the example of Paul and Silas in the jail at Philippi! Tradition says the sheriff stormed at the jailor; and it was enough to make the bishop forget the meekness and gentleness which became his order.

When the trial came on at the quarter sessions, the prisoners employed counsel, who pleaded their cause with such ability, that a verdict was given in their favour, and their discharge was ordered on payment of certain fees. Under some pre

tence, however, their pastor was kept in prison, and afterwards removed to London, where he got off through a defect in the mittimus. The corporation, as well as the conventicle act, being now in full operation, Fownes was not allowed to live within five miles of the city; hence he met his flock secretly for religious worship, sometimes in the open air, or in the woods, frequently at Kingswood, or wherever a place of safety could be found. What meetings! What preaching ! What

communions, under these circumstances! Midnight hymns! Prayer in the woods! What scenes of angelic admiration! The word of the Lord must have been precious in those days.

"Cold mountains and the midnight air
Witness'd the fervour of their prayer;
The desert their temptations knew,

Their conflicts, and their victories too."

On

In the month of September, 1682, Fownes was preaching and administering the Lord's Supper in the woods, though spies and informers were prowling about in search of prey. At one of these secret meetings, held on Redcliff-Hill, they found it necessary to use every precaution, lest their enemies should come upon them unawares; hence "the women came wearing neither white aprons nor pattens.' another occasion they met in the woods, in the month of January, at nine in the morning, and after spending two hours in communion with Him who is not confined to temples made with hands, they separated, having heard tidings that officers were coming in search of them at twelve o'clock. Constables and others were now busy in the pursuit of Fownes, who had managed thus far to keep out of their reach by living at a distance from the city, and by meeting his friends secretly according to previous arrangement. He had many narrow escapes. He was in perils often. From many dangers the Lord had delivered him; but at last he fell into the hands of his persecutors. He had made an engagement to meet his people in the wood as usual; and, though suffering from ill health, he came at the appointed time. It was the last meeting. Hark! the wood resounds with hymns of praise to the Redeemer! the voice of the shepherd is heard in prayer for his flock, and his sermon was founded upon the words, "I suffer trouble as an evil doer, but the word of God is not bound." Suddenly the sentinels gave an alarm! Horsemen and footmen are coming! Save yourselves from this untoward generation! Linger not! Fly! Fownes mounted a horse, and rode off in haste; but the enemy pursued, overtook, and made him prisoner. On the day following, he was taken before three magistrates, who sent him to Gloucester jail for