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, without
which tithes by that law were unsanctified and polluted, and therefore
never thought of in the first Christian times, nor till ceremonies,
altars, and oblations had been brought back. And yet the Jews, ever
since their temple was destroyed, though they have rabbies and teachers
of their law, yet pay no tithes, as having no Levites to whom, no temple
where, to pay them, nor altar whereon to hallow them; which argues, that
the Jews themselves never thought tithes moral, but ceremonial only.
That Christians therefore should take them up, when Jews have laid them
down, must needs be very absurd and preposterous."

Having now stated the three great reasons, which the early Quakers gave,
in addition to those mentioned in a former section, why they could not
contribute towards the maintenance of an alien ministry, or why they
could not submit to the payment of tithes, as the peculiar payment
demanded by the established church, I shall only observe, that these are
still insisted upon by their descendants, but more particularly the
latter, because all the more, modern acts upon this subject take the act
of Henry the eighth as the great ground-work or legal foundation of
tithes, in the preamble of which it is inserted, that "they are due to
God and the church." Now this preamble, the Quakers assert, has never
been done away, nor has any other principle been acknowledged instead of
that in this preamble, why tithes have been established by law. The
Quakers therefore conceive, that tithes are still collected on the
foundation of divine right, and th