‘you won’t go to Dublin.’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘that I won’t’—and we spent one of the happiest Sundays I ever recollect, in thinking on the Lord’s goodness, in so caring for us as to stop our way up, when He does not wish us to go. Some thought it right; others thought it foolish; it mattered not to us, we had not a doubt it was of the Lord.”
His mind was evidently moving rapidly in its new direction. Little time elapsed before he had definitely renounced all thought of ordination in the Church of England. His friend, Mr. Hake, asked him if he did not “hold war to be unlawful”. The answer was affirmative. “He then further asked,” says Groves, “how I could subscribe that article which declares, ‘It is lawful for Christian men to take up arms at the command of the civil magistrate’. It had till that moment never occurred to me. I read it; and replied, ‘I never would sign it’; and thus ended my connexion with the Church of England, as one about to be ordained in her communion.”
His churchmanship died slowly. “I was still,” he tells us, “so far attached to the Church of England, that I went to London, to arrange my going out as a layman, for the Church Missionary Society; but as they would not allow me to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, when no other minister was near, it came to nothing. My mind was then in great straits; for I saw not yet my liberty of ministry to be from Christ alone, and felt some ordination to be necessary, but hated the thought of being made a sectarian. But, one day the thought was brought to my mind, that ordination of any kind to preach the gospel is no requirement of Scripture. To me it was the removal of a mountain. I told dearest M. my discovery and my joy;[1] she received it as a very little thing—indeed she had received the truth in such power, that
- ↑ The italics are mine.
