tantism involved. The Quakers, to whom in mode of worship, simplicity of dress, and general unworldliness, the Brethren bore a strong resemblance, seized on the first opportunity of playing their part in political life, and have played it to this day strenuously, to the unquestionable profit of the nation. The same may be said of numerous representatives of all the dissenting bodies, and certainly not less of the Evangelical Church party, to which the Brethren have always been in the habit of considering themselves the most nearly akin. It is strange indeed to think what companions the Brethren threw over in choosing their social part. Sir John Eliot, dying in the Tower for liberties on which the cherished liberties of the Brethren were surely founded, manifesting a spirit as devout as their own in a conversation as edifying, was, according to them, the victim of a gigantic, pitiable delusion in supposing that he could serve God in the Parliamentary activities of his life, or the slow martyrdom of his death. They would have allowed that if his desire to serve God was genuine it would not fail of a gracious recognition from Him; but the political exertions that seem to others to have been evidently blessed by God for the preservation and extension of the Gospel, the Brethren believe to have been under His ban.
Again, the heroic Parliamentary struggle of the “Clapham sect”—of William Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay and their friends—which resulted in the suppression of the slave trade, and ultimately of slavery itself beneath the British flag, was, according to the Brethren, an unholy work. They would have pronounced it “morally excellent,” for they were in full sympathy with its objects, but they thought it work that God had reserved for unclean hands; it was not for heavenly
