Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/393

1660.] —that Christianity is a thing so spiritual, so entirely a gift of God to every man that is born, that no other man in the shape of king, bishop, or priest, has a right to come between this divine gift and the human soul; consequently, no state religion, no state priest, no state compassion for their support, can be justified; consequently, all tithes, church rates, Easter offerings, and such things are anti-Christian, and to be resisted by every constitutional means. He saw clearly that Christianity proclaimed the civil freedom of every rational creature; it enjoined obedience to good government, but discountenanced by its very benevolence and its celestial maxim—"Do to others as ye would be done to"—all tyranny and slavery. On the same grounds he was thoroughly satisfied of the nature of that most fatal of infatuations—war.

Rev. John Owen, D.D.

Whatever his sagacious mind once embraced as truth, he had the integrity and boldness to proclaim everywhere. He advanced into the presence of princes, and declared it there with the same ease and freedom as amongst his own peers. It may well be imagined, that when numbers began to flock around him, and from every class of society, clergy, soldiers, magistrates, gentlemen, and men of the general mass, that his system would bring down upon him and his followers the unmitigated vengeance of the persecuting hierarchy. His was no partially reforming system; it did not object to this or that dogma, this or that ceremony in the state religion, but it assailed, root and branch, state religion itself. It was a system peculiarly odious to priests, because it was an entirely disinterested one, for it went even to declare that nothing should be received for preaching, where it could be at all dispensed with, nothing in any case without the consent of the people. The state clergy saw, that if it succeeded, priestcraft was gone for ever: royalty, on its restoration, saw that it would lop off the right arm of despotism—craft paid to preach the divine right of kings, and passive obedience of the people. But Fox and his friends were prepared to speak, write, and suffer for it. He himself traversed a great part of the kingdom, visited America and Holland, holding immense meetings in the open air, and addressed many letters to various princes and