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 them 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 first

VOL. III.

L

first offered an heave-offering to the Lord. He, then, who by that law brings tithes into the Gospel, of necessity brings in withal a sacrifice and an altar; without which, tithes by that law were unsanctified and polluted, and therefore never thought of in the first Christian times, nor till ceremonies, altars, and oblations had been brought back. And yet the Jews, ever since their temple was destroyed, though they have rabbies and teachers of their law, yet pay no tithes, as having no Levites to whom, no temple where to pay them, nor altar whereon to hallow them; which argues that the Jews themselves never thought tithes moral, but ceremonial only. That Christians, therefore, should take them up when Jews have laid them down, must needs be very absurd and preposterous."

Having now stated the three great reasons, which the early Quakers gave in addition to those mentioned in a former section, why they could not contribute towards the maintenance of an alien ministry, or why they could not submit to the payment of tithes as the peculiar payment demanded by the Established Church, I shall only observe, that these are still insisted upon

by

"

by their descendants, but more particularly the latter, because all the more modern Acts upon this subject take the Act of Henry the Eighth as the great ground-work or legal foundation of tithes; in the preamble of which it is inserted, that "they are due to God and the Church.' Now this preamble the Quakers assert has never been done away, nor has any other principle been acknowledged instead of that in this preamble, why tithes have been established by law. The Quakers, therefore, conceive that tithes are still collected on the foundation of divine right, and therefore that it is impossible for them as Christians to pay them; for that by every such payment they would not only be acknowledging the Jewish religion for themselves, but would be agreeing in sentiment with the modern Jews, that Jesus Christ has not yet made his appearance upon earth.