Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/280

 possessing a heavenly calling and citizenship, could not lawfully share.

The theory of course could not be thoroughly carried out. Some few municipal offices may be imposed on a citizen without his consent, and he may be compelled to serve on a jury. In these cases the Brethren held it not lawful to resist the civil power, from which it may be inferred that they considered only the voluntary discharge of civil functions to be sinful. It is a pity that the views of the early Quakers as to the lawfulness of oaths were not equally accommodating. Still, so far as the law left them a bare choice, they avoided all the offices upon which society depends for its maintenance. They filled no civil or municipal office, if they could help it; they never sat in Parliament, and if by some rare self-assertion one of them voted at an election, he was regarded with the most intense disapproval.

There is very little pure theory anywhere, and it is probable that the Brethren were largely influenced by what they saw, or thought they saw, of Christians almost secularised by absorption in political aims. Granting, as we surely must, that this is a real danger, it may be doubted if the Brethren took the best measures to heal the disorder. Total abstinence is not the universal panacea. It may be the best cure for drunkenness, but surely not for gluttony. But to the Brethren their course was clear, as being derived from the essence of the Christian calling; and therefore, in the true spirit of the earliest and most genuine disciples of monachism, they fled into the desert to establish a huge cenobitic fraternity, to pass their days in holy contemplation, and to await the Second Advent.

A very little reflexion suffices to show how complete an innovation such principles in the midst of