or refusing to withdraw when ordered by the Speaker to do
so; and Sir Benjamin Hall imagined no impossibility.

CH.

* * * * *

THE AGAPEMONE.

Like most other things, the "Agapemone" wickedness, which has recently
disgusted all decent people, does not appear to be a new thing by any
means. The religion-mongers of the nineteenth century have a precedent
nearly 300 years old for this house of evil repute.

In the reign of Elizabeth, the following proclamation was issued
against "The Sectaries of the Family of Love:"--

"Whereas, by report of sundry of the Bishops of this Realm, and others
having care of souls, the Queen's Majesty is informed, that in sundry
places of her said Realm, in their several Dioceses there are certain
persons which do secretly, in corners, make privy assemblies of
divers simple unlearned people, and after they have craftily and
hypocritically allured them to esteem them to be more holy and
perfect men than other are, they do then teach them damnable heresies,
directly contrary to divers of the principal Articles of our Belief
and Christian Faith and in some parts so absurd and fanatical, as by
feigning to themselves a monstrous new kind of speech, never found in
the Scriptures, nor in ancient Father or writer of Christ's Church, by
which they do move ignorant and simple people at the first rather to
marvel at them, than to understand them but yet to colour their sect
withal, they name themselves to be of the _Family of Love_, and then
as many as shall be allowed by them to be of that family to be elect
and saved, and all others, of what Church soever they be, to be
rejected and damned. And for that upon conventing of some of them
before the Bishops and Ordinaries, it is found that the ground of
their sect, is maintained by certain lewd, heretical, and seditious
books first made in the Dutch tongue, and lately translated into
English, and printed beyond the seas, and secretly brought over
into the Realm, the author whereof they name H.N., without yielding
to him, upon their examination, any other name, in whose name they
have certain books set forth, called _Evangelium Regni, or, A Joyful
Message of the Kingdom; Documental Sentences, The Prophecie of the
Spirit of Love; a Publishing of the Peace upon the Earth_, and such
like.

"And considering also it is found, that these Sectaries hold opinion,
that they may before any magistrate, ecclesiastical or te