The Religious Life of LondonRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
Religion
The Religious Life of London
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
London (England) -- Religion; Religious thought -- England -- London
Triumphantly they ask—
“When the Lord would speak,
Think ye he needs the Latin or the Greek?”
Of course not. And thus in turn they all preach and pray with a zeal
which literally is not according to knowledge. If a man cannot say he
lives without sin, they set him down as no Christian. At one time they
held that as the Spirit of God only teaches one thing, that if true
so-called Christians disagreed in Church matters, one of them was a child
of the devil; and as they were not at all backward in applying this
doctrine, they were split up as fast as they gathered together. They
have a great deal of the Methodist leaven amongst them, and at prayer, or
while speaking is going on, express their feelings in a way which, to a
stranger, may be considered unnecessarily noisy. Their leaders seem to
be a small tradesman in the Southwark Road, and a little, pale, wizened
female, whose utterances and prayers are of the most extraordinary
character—a sort of sing-song, now rising and then dropping, in a way
which in a secular personage and on secular subjects would be ludicrous
in the extreme. But they profess to have no leaders. They have elders,
who are simply elders. They become such by lapse of time alone.
As to their organization, I much question if they have any. One brother
assured me there were rules, but as the price was fourpence, and as trade
was slack, he had been unable to procure a copy of them. In answer to
our appeal, an elder said there were such, but they were under lock and
key, and he could not find them for us; whereupon another brother reached
out a New Testament, with the assurance that there, and there alone, were
their rules. What information we could get we had to fish out by
questions. As to Church membership, they have no preliminaries. All who
come are of the Church; those whom the Lord calls will join them, and if
the Lord has not called them they will soon drop away. They consider
that every service is the sacrament, and they have no special form. In
the same way they have no baptism—infant or adult, creeds, confessions of
faith, forms of prayer, ministers set apart and trained to preach;—all
these things they have done away with. By communion as brother with
brother, and sister with sister, they can cherish the true Christian
life. If one of them lack anything, let him or her ask of God. How
familiarly and at times irreverently they pray, the reader can well
imagine. It is difficult to say common things with propriety, says the
old Latin proverb. It is more difficult to introduce them into prayer,
to inform the Lord that Brother Jones would have been present had he not
been unable to come, and to explain the peculiarly distressing
circumstances of Sister Smith. For acting on the world outside, they
have great faith in out-of-door preaching, an exercise in which they take
great delight, and for which they consider themselves peculiarly
qualified.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account