United States or Honduras ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He sentenced Bartholomew Legate to be burned alive in Smithfield as a blasphemous heretic, and did his best to compel the States of Holland to take the life of Professor Vorstius of Leyden. He persecuted the Presbyterians in England as furiously as he defended them in Holland.
A narrow loch, scarcely half a mile wide, separates Island McGill from the mainland of Ireland; and, once across this loch, one finds himself in an entirely different country. The Scotch impression is strong, and the people, to commence with, are Presbyterians.
Within the territory of this Margravate were found the most extraordinary arrangements in church affairs which existed in any part of the Lutheran Church in Germany. In the Duchies of Cleve, Julich and Berg, the Presbyterians or Reformed from the Netherlands, welcomed as refugees, had secured a full, self-governing, Presbyterial system in the congregation, classis and synod.
Sore had been the complaints of the Presbyterians over this limitation of the powers of Church discipline, as well as over the negligence of Parliament in not having yet passed such an Act against Heresies and Blasphemies as might enable the State to use the sterner discipline of fines, imprisonment, scourging, and hanging, in aid of true Christianity.
The Irish Parliament nearly at the same time made great steps towards uniting the people by relieving the Presbyterians from the Test Act and from the restrictions on their marriages, and the Catholics from those parts of the penal code which chiefly restrained their worship, their education, and their industry.
They have a small library "not so many books as we would like;" and one of the sisters told me that she got books from a circulating library at Lebanon, and as a special indulgence was allowed to read novels sometimes, which, she remarked, she found useful to set her to sleep. They have two cabinet-organs, and believe in cultivating music. The founders of this society were mostly Presbyterians.
So, if the reader wants to know about the religious tenets of the Presbyterians, or the Mormons, or the Buddhists, or the doctrines of the Catholic Church, and asks the librarian's opinion about any controverted question of belief, he is to be answered only by the statement that the library is there to supply information, not opinions, and then pointed to the religious cyclopaedias, which give full summaries of all the sects.
That Protestantism was the religion of the English pale, and of the Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, not of the Irish people, was a fact outside his thoughts. He saw two things clearly enough. One was the strength and beauty of the religious faith by which the Cleavers and their friends lived.
Thomas Scott for one declaring that "a peace with so perfidious and implacable a prince" was an impossibility; and, in fact, the Treaty was carried by the Presbyterians against the implied protest of the Independents. This Petition, said to have been penned by Henry Marten, was not merely a denunciation of the Treaty; it was a detailed democratic challenge.
The Baptists were strong, the Presbyterians were strenuous, the Episcopalians were exclusive, while the Congregationalists were at ebb-tide through the rascality of a preacher who had recently decamped and thrown a blanket of disgrace over the whole denomination for ten miles up the creek. Thus were things when Henry Ward Beecher assumed his first charge.
Word Of The Day