while it was contrary to his intention, would be an infringement of their great tenet, by which they hold, that, Christ’s kingdom being of a spiritual nature, the civil magistrate had no right to dictate a religion to any one, nor to enforce payment from individuals for the same, and that any interference in those matters, which were solely between God and man, was neither more nor less than an usurpation of the prerogative of God.

They resisted the payment of them, because, thirdly, they were demanded on the principle, as appeared by the preamble of the act of Henry the eighth, that they were due as under the Levitical law by divine right.

Against this they urged, first, that, if they were due as the Levitical tithes were, they must have been subject to the same conditions.  They contended that, if the Levites had a right to tithes, they had previously given up to the community their own right to a share of the land, but that the clergy claimed a tenth of the produce of the lands of others, but had given up none of their own.  They contended also, that tithes by the Levitical law were for the strangers, the fatherless, and the widows, as well as for the Levites, but that the clergy, by taking tithes, had taken that which had been for the maintenance of the poor, and had appropriated it solely to their own use, leaving them thus to become a second burthen upon the land.

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,