that tithes had been originally free
will-offerings, but that by violence they had been changed into dues,
to be collected by force; that nothing could be more clear, than that
ministers of the Gospel, if the instructions of Jesus to his disciples
were to be regarded, were not authorized even to demand, much less to
force, a maintenance from others; and that any constrained payment of
these, 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