stinctions relative to tithes, whether they may be rectorial, or vicarial, or whether they may belong to lay-persons. I have already developed enough of their history for my purpose. I shall therefore hasten to state those other reasons, which the Quakers have to give, why they cannot pay other ministers of the Gospel for their spiritual labours; or rather, why they cannot consent to the payment of tithes as the particular species of payment demanded by the Church. SECTION III. The other reasons, as deducible from the history of Tithes, are the following-first, that they are not in equity dues of the Church-secondly, that the payment of them being compulsory, it would, if acceded to, be an acknowledgment that the civil magistrate had a right to use force in matters of religion—and thirdly, that, being claimed upon an act, which holds them forth as of divine right, any payment of them would be an acknowledgment of the Jewish religion, and that Christ had not yet actually come. THE other reasons, which the Quakers have to give for refusing to support other ministers ministers of the Gospel, may be now de duced from the nature of tithes, as explained in the former section. The primitive members of this Society resisted the payment of tithes for three reasons; and first, because they were demanded of them as dues to the Church. Against this doctrine they set their faces as a religious body. They contended, that if they were due at all, they were due to the poor, from whom they had been forcibly taken, and to whom in equity they still belonged; that no prince could alter the nature of right and wrong; that tithes were not justly due to the Church because Offa wished them to be so to expiate his own crimes, or because Ethelwolf wished them to be so from a superstitious notion that he might thus prevent the incursions of the Danes; or because Stephen wished them to be so, as his own grant expresses, on the principle that "the bonds of sin might be dissolved, and that he might have a part with those, who by a happy kind of commerce exchanged heavenly things for earthly ;" or because the Popes of Rome wished them to be so, from whose jurisdiction all the subjects of England were discharged by law. They They resisted the payment of them, because, secondly, tithes had become of a compulsory nature, or because they were compelled to pay them. They contended on this head, that tithes had been originally free-will offerings, but that by violence they had been changed into dues to be collected by force; that nothing could be more clear than that ministers of the Gospel, if the instructions of Jesus to his Disciples were to be regarded, were not authorized even to demand, much less to force, a maintenance from others; and that any constrained payment of these, while it was contrary to his intention, would be an infringement of their great tenet, by which they held that, Christ's kingdom being of a spiritual nature, the civil magistrate had no right to dictate a religion to any one, nor to enforce payment from individuals for the same; and that any interference in those matters, which were solely between God and man, was neither more nor less than a usurpation of the prerogative of God. They resisted the payment of them, because, thirdly, they were demanded on the principle, as appeared by the preamble of the the Act of Henry the Eighth, that they were due, as under the Levitical law, by divine right. Against this they urged, first, that if they were due as the Levitical tithes were, they must have been subject to the same conditions. They contended, that if the Levites had a right to tithes, they had previously given up to the community their own right to a share of the land; but that the clergy claimed a tenth of the produce of the lands of others, but had given up none of their own. They contended also, that tithes by the Levitical law were for the strangers, the fatherless, and the widows, as well as for the Levites; but that the clergy, by taking tithes, had taken that which had been for the maintenance of the poor, and had appropriated it solely to their own use, leaving the poor thus to become a second burthen upon the land. But they contended that the principle itself was false. They maintained that the Levitical priesthood, and tithes with it, had ceased on the coming of Jesus Christ, as appeared by his own example and that of his Apostles; that it became them, therefore, as Christians Christians to make a stand against this principle; for that, by acquiescing in the notion that the Jewish law extended to them, they conceived they would be acknowledging that the priesthood of Aaron still existed, and that Christ had not actually come. This latter argument, by which it was insisted upon that tithes ceased with the Jewish dispensation, and that those, who acknowledged them, acknowledged the Jewish religion for Christians, was not confined to the early Quakers, but admitted among many other serious Christians of those times. The great John Milton himself, in a treatise, which he wrote against tithes, did not disdain to use it: "Although," says he, “hire to the labourer be of moral and perpetual right, yet that special kind of hire, the tenth, can be of no right or necessity but to that special labour, to which God ordained it. That special labour was the Levitical and ceremonial service of the Tabernacle, which is now abolished: the right, therefore, of that special hire must needs be withal abolished, as being also ceremonial. That tithes were ceremonial is plain, not being given to the Levites till they had been VOL. III. L first |