The Metropolitan Tabernacle - Godfrey Holden Pike

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER I. HE Long Parliament was but a few weeks old when, according to Fuller, Southwark produced "the firstfruits of Anabaptistical insolence." If the truth must be told, Englishmen generally were fast progressing in what the old chronicler would have accounted impudence. A short time prior to the date alluded to, a crowd of citizens, five hundred strong, marched to Lambeth for the avowed purpose of unearthing "William the Fox"; and although that adept at priestcraft and "thorough," opportunely retreated to Whitehall, and so eluded the apprentices' vigilance, those riotous visitors inflicted upon the palace some substantial marks of vengeance which otherwise they had intended for the prelate's body. Nor at Lambeth only was the indignation of the populace vented, for while the pews of the church were being destroyed, anathemas against Bishops and the High Commission had been shouted down the aisles of Old St. Paul's. Such were the "Our worst things are often our best things." tumults and sorrows of that great national storm which only sufficed to clear the political atmosphere of England. But the Society referred to by the historian Fuller was not composed of Baptists exclusively; it was rather one of those mixed Nonconformist communities, comparatively common in an era when the strength ensured by imity was used in resisting the common foe. On a particular day eighty persons were congregated at a certain house in the Borough. Having grown bold with the times, they shrank not from supplementing their customary religious exercises with denunciations of Anglicanism, priestcraft, and (so far as it disastrously affected Christianity) statecraft also. It is no wonder if the vibration of such semi-treason was felt even at Waltham...