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, 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 for 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 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."