The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers: Intermixed with Several Remarkable Occurrencs.Sewel, William
History
The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers: Intermixed with Several Remarkable Occurrencs.
Sewel, William
Society of Friends -- History -- Early works to 1800
In the meanwhile G. Fox returned into Lancashire, and went to
Ulverstone, where Lampitt before mentioned was priest. He now seeing
how the people called Quakers did set up meetings, and met in private
houses, said they forsook the temple, and went to Jeroboam’s calves
houses; whereas formerly he had preached of a people, that would own
the teachings of God, and that men and women should come to declare
the gospel. Now it was told him, that the old mass houses, which were
called churches, were more like Jeroboam’s calves houses; though man
strove to persuade people that such a building was the house of God:
whereas Christ was the head of the church, and never was called the
head of an old house; and that the apostle speaking of Christ said,
“Whose house we are,” Heb. iii. 6. This passage puts me in mind,
how some of the parliament soldiers, observing, over some of the
steeple-house doors, these words of the patriarch Jacob, when God had
appeared to him in a dream, ‘This is none other but the house of God,
and this is the gate of heaven,’ could not endure to see this gross
conceit concerning those buildings, but rased out the words, ‘of God,’
and ‘of heaven;’ so that nothing was left, but ‘This is none other but
the house, and this is the gate:’ and certainly their zeal was more
reasonable than the conceit of those, who think that in the gospel
days a building of lime and stone, may be called the house of God. It
seems also a silly conceit, to call a meeting-house, furnished with a
steeple, a church; and to deny that name to the congregation-houses
of dissenters, calling them, and them only, meeting-houses. But this
notion hath kept up the esteem of those mass-houses; and the priests,
that they might not lose their gain of burials, have endeavoured to
keep people in the belief, that the ground of these buildings was
holy; and this save occasion to the people called Quakers, to call
those buildings, steeple-houses. Now since a fantastical man I very
well knew in Holland, conversing there among the people of that
persuasion, undertook to translate that denomination into Dutch,
_Gespitste huyzen_, it gave occasion to some Latin writers in Germany,
to complain, that the Quakers scornfully called their temples _Domus
acuminatas_.[2] And though Croese says also in _Historia Quakeriana_
concerning them, _Templa cuncti Quakeri contumeliosè vocabant æedes
pyramidatas_,[3] yet he knew better. But this digression has led me
off from G. Fox, whom I left at Ulverstone, where he went to the
steeple-house whilst priest Lampitt was preaching. And when G. Fox
began to speak, John Sawrey the justice came to him, and said, if
he would speak according to the scriptures, he should speak. G. Fox
told him he should speak according to the Scriptures, and bring the
Scriptures to prove what he had to say. But then Sawrey, contradicting
himself, said he should not speak; and incensing the people against
him, they fell upon G.
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