fallacious, in as much as it is liable to conduct, and has conducted many persons into acknowledged errors and impiety.

About the middle of the second age of Christianity, Montanus, Maximilla, and Priscilla, with their followers, by adopting this enthusiastical rule, rushed into the excess of folly and blasphemy. They taught that the Holy Spirit, having failed to save mankind, by Moses, and afterwards by Christ, had enlightened and sanctified them to accomplish this great work. The strictness of their precepts, and the apparent sanctity of their lives, deceived many; till at length, the two former proved what was the spirit that guided them, by hanging themselves. (1). Several other heretics became dupes of the same principles in the primitive and the middle ages; but it was reserved for the time of religious licentiousness, improperly called the Reformation, to display the full extent of its absurdity and impiety. In less than five years after Luther had sounded the trumpet of evangelical liberty, the sect of Anabaptists arose in Germany and the Low Countries. They professed to hold immediate communication with God, and to be commanded by him to despoil and kill all the wicked, and to establish a kingdom of the just, (2) who to become such, were all to be re-baptized. Carlostad, Luther's first disciple of note, embraced this UltraReformation; but its acknowledged head, during his reign, was John Bockhold, a tailor of Leyden,

(1) Euseb. Eccles. Hist. 1. v. c. 15.

(2) Cum Deo colloquium esse et mandatum habere se dicebant, ut, impiis omnibus interfectis, novum constituerent mundum, in quo pii solum et innocentes viverent et rerum potirentur.'- Sleidan. De Stat. Rel. et Reip.

Comment. 1. iii, p. 45.

who proclaimed himself King of Sion, and, during a certain time, was really sovereign of Munster, in Lower Germany. Here he committed the greatest imaginable excesses, marrying eleven wives at a time, and putting them, and numberless others of his subjects to death, at the motion of his supposed interior spirit. (1). He declared that God had made him a present of Amsterdam and other cities, which he sent parties of his disciples to take possession of. These ran naked through the streets, howling out, "Woe to Babylon; woe to the wicked;' and, when they were apprehended, and on the point of being executed for their seditions and murders, they sang and danced on the scaffold, exulting in the imaginary light of their spirit. (2). Herman, another Anabaptist, was moved by his spirit to declare himself the Messiah, and thus to evangelize the people, his hearers: Kill the priests, kill all the magistrates in the world. Repent: your redemption is at hand.' (3). One of their chief and most accredited preachers, David George, persuaded a numerous sect of them, that 'the doctrine both of the Old and the New Testament was imperfect, but that his own was perfect, and that he was the True Son of God.' (4). I do not notice these impieties and other crimes for their singularity or their atrociousness, but because they were committed upon the principle and under a full conviction of an individual and uncontrollable inspiration, on the part of their dupes and perpetrators.

(1) Hist. Abrég. de la Réform. par Gerard Brandt, tom. i. p. 46. Mosheim, Eccles. Hist, by Maclaine, vol. iv. p. 452. (2) Brandt, p. 49, &c. (3) Idem, p. 51.

(4) Mosheim, vol. iv. p. 484.

Nor has our own country been more exempt from this enthusiastic principle than Germany and Holland. Nicholas, a disciple of the above-mentioned David George, came over to England with a supposed commission from God, to teach men that the essence of Religion consists in the feelings of divine love, and that all other things relating either to faith or worship, are of no moment. (1). He extended this maxim even to the fundamental precepts of morality, professing to continue in sin that grace might abound. His followers, under the name of the Familists, or The Family of Love, were very numerous at the end of the sixteenth century, about which time, Hackett, a Calvinist, giving way to the same spirit of delusion, became deeply persuaded that the spirit of the Messiah had descended upon him; and having made several proselytes, he sent two of them, Arthington and Coppinger, to proclaim, through the streets of London, that Christ was come thither with his fan in his hand.

This

spirit, instead of being repressed, became still more ungovernable at the sight of the scaffold and the gibbet, prepared in Cheapside for his execution. Accordingly he continued, till the last, exclaiming : 'Jehova, Jehova; don't you see the heavens open, and Jesus coming to deliver me?' &c. (2). Who has not heard of Venner, and his Fifth Monarchymen? who, guided by the same private spirit of inspiration, rushed from their meeting-house in Coleman-street, proclaiming that they would acknow

(1) Ibid. Brandt.

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(2) Fuller's Church Hist, b. ix. p. 113. Stow's Annals

A.D. 1591.

ledge no sovereign but King Jesus, and that they would not sheath their swords, till they had made Babylon (that is monarchy) a hissing and a curse, not only in England, but also throughout foreign countries; having an assurance that one of them would put a thousand enemies to flight, and two of them ten thousand.' Venner being taken and led to execution, with several of his followers, protested it was not he, but Jesus, who had acted as their leader.' (1). I pass over the unexampled follies, and the horrors of the Grand Rebellion, having detailed many of them elsewhere. (2). It is sufficient to remark that, while many of these were committed from the licentiousness of private interpretation of Scripture, many others originated in the enthusiastic opinion which I am now combating, that of an immediate individual inspiration, equal, if not superior, to that of the Scriptures themselves. (3).

It was in the midst of these religious and civil commotions that the most extraordinary people, of all those who have adopted the fallacious rule of private inspiration, started up at the call of George Fox, a shoemaker of Leicestershire. His fundamental propositions, as they are laid down by the most able of his followers, (4) are, that The Scriptures are not the adequate, primary Rule of Faith and Manners, but a secondary Rule, subordinate to the Spirit, from which they have their excellency

(1) Echard's Hist. of Eng. & c.

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(2) Letters to a Prebendary. Reign of Charles I. (3) See the remarkable history of the Military preachers at Kingston Ibid.

(4) Robert Barclay's Apology for the Quakers.

and certainty' (1): that the testimony of the Spirit is that alone by which the true knowledge of God hath been, is, and can be revealed' (2): that all true and acceptable worship of God is offered in the inward and immediate moving and drawing of his own Spirit, which is neither limited to places, times, nor persons.' (3). Such are the avowed principles of the people called Quakers: let us now see some of the fruits of those principles, as recorded by themselves in their founder and first apostles.

George Fox tells of himself, that at the beginning of his mission he was 'Moved to go to several Courts and Steeple-houses (churches) at Mansfield, and other places, to warn them to leave off oppression and oaths, and to turn from deceit, and to turn to the Lord.' (4). On these occasions the language and behaviour of his spirit, was very far from the meekness and respect for constituted authorities of the Gospel Spirit, as appears from different passages in his Journal. (5). He tells us of

(1) Propos. III. In defending this proposition, Barclay cites some of the Friends, who being unable to read the Scriptures, even in the vulgar language, and being pressed by their adversaries with passages from it, boldly denied, from the manifestation of truth in their own hearts, that such passages were contained in the Scripture, p. 82.

(2) Propos. II.

(3) Propos. XI.

(4) See the Journal of George Fox, written by himself, and published by his disciple Penn, son of Admiral Penn, folio, p. 17.

(5) I shall satisfy myself with citing part of his letter, written in 1660, to Charles II. King Charles, Thou camest not into this nation by sword, nor by victory of war, but by the power of the Lord.- -And if thou dost bear the sword in vain, and let drunkenness, oaths, plays,