Church History - Part 5

You are listening to David Porson podcasts. This is a series of 11 talks covering church history, part five, 17th century, the fight for freedom of worship. I've read many versions of the Bible in the pulpit from time to time, but I've never read this one before. There's going to be a certain difficulty. It's an old English language and spelling and all the S's are F's. And in fact, this Bible, which I have in the pulpit tonight, was printed in the year 1607. Now, we've had many versions of the Bible here that I've read to you after the authorised version, but tonight I'm going to try and read one from before the authorised version, the King James, which was produced in 1611. You'll notice some similarities, some differences, but I think you'll be glad that the authorised version came out when it did and got us going on more modern English. I want to read from Paul's letter to the Philippians because this letter is written from prison, and during the 17th century, many wonderful writings came out of prison. The most famous, of course, was John Bunyan's Pilgrims' Progress, but here is a Christian writing from prison, and writing a letter just full of joy and love for others. So, Philippians chapter one, and if I get stuck, you'll bear with me. Paul and Timothyus, the servants of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in Christ Jesus, which are at Philippi, with the bishops and deacons. Grace be with you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. I thank my God, having you in perfect memory. Always in all my prayers for all you, praying with gladness, because of the fellowship which ye have in the gospel from the first day unto now. And I am persuaded of this same thing that he that has begun this good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. As it becomeeth me so to judge of you all, because I have you in remembrance, that both in my bans and in my defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are part of my grace. For God is my record, how I long after you all from the very heart root in Jesus Christ. And this I pray that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment, that ye may discern things that differ one from another, that ye may be pure and without offence until the day of Christ. Filled with the fruits of righteousness which are by Jesus Christ unto the glory and praise of God. I would ye understood, brethren, that the things which have come into me are turned rather to the furthering of the gospel, so that my bans, I think we would call it today bans, so that my bans in Christ are famous throughout all the judgment hall and in all other places. In so much that many of the brethren in the Lord are bowled and through my bans and have more frankly speak the word. No, I've missed a word there. Yes, I think and have more frankly speak the word. Some preach Christ even through envy and strife and some also of goodwill. The one part preach Christ of contention and not purely, supposing to add more reflection to my bans, but the others of love knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel. What then? Yet Christ is preached all in many ways, whether it be under pretence or sincerely, and I therein joy, ye and will joy. For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer and by the help of the spirit of Jesus Christ. As I heartily look for and hope that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all confidence as always, so now Christ shall be magnified in my body whether it be by life or by death. For Christ is to me both in life and in death, advantage. And whether to live in the flesh were profitable for me and what to choose, I know not. For I am greatly in doubt of both sides, desiring to be loosed and to be with Christ which is best of all. Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you. And this I am sure of that I shall abide and with you all continue for your furtherance and joy of your faith. That ye may more abundantly rejoice in Jesus Christ for me by my coming to you again. Only let your conversation be as it becomeeth the gospel of Christ, that whether I come and see you or else be absent I may hear of your matters, that ye continue in one spirit and in one mind fighting together through the faith of the gospel. And in nothing fear your adversaries which is to them a token of perdition and to you of salvation and that of God. For unto you it is given for Christ that not only you should believe in him but also suffer for his sake, having the same fight which he saw in me and are here to be in me. So reads the word of God from that. One of the oldest English translations I suppose largely based on the work of William Tindle let us pray. Our Father we pray that each one of us may learn something that eat this evening that will help us to be a better Christian. We pray that if there are any here who are not yet Christians, who would sincerely like to be and who feel their need of a Savior, that they too may come to a step nearer to him and may feel that it has been good to be here. We ask it in his name and for his sake. Amen. I think one of my problems with history at school was the fact that a year beginning with the figure 16 belonged to the 17th century and I'm sure you've had that problem too. Now let me make it clear that by the 17th century I mean 1600 to 1700. In other words all the 16 arts and the great difference between 1600 and 1700 is this and this is its importance for us. In 1600 we would not have been allowed to meet here tonight to worship as we are doing but in 1700 we would. And I'm going to try and show you tonight how that change occurred and how liberty of worship came to this land of ours so that for the last two to three hundred years we've been able to meet like this and worshipers we felt we ought with no one hindering us, no one dragging us off to prison, no one executing us because we did this and it is in this century that the battle was fought and finally won. Now let me begin with the state of play at the beginning of the century. There were by this time three groups of professing Christians in England and I'm going to speak only about England it was the most important place in this century. There were three parties if you like of Christians there were no Roman Catholics not officially they'd now been banned by law. If they were there they were secret sympathizers but officially there were no more Romans. There were two groups within the Church of England and one outside it. The two groups in the Church of England we call Anglicans and Puritans. The Anglicans accepted what Queen Elizabeth virtually worked out as a kind of compromise a mixture of things that used to be done by the Romans and things that the Reformers did and the Anglican mixture and I'll not use the word "madal tonight" let me just use the Anglican mixture was followed by many people in this country particularly by those who regretted some of the reformation but within the Church of England was another group of people represented by Richard Baxter who's him with just some who were called Puritans because they desired to see a much purer Church of England they wanted to abolish vestments they wanted to abolish crucifixers they wanted to abolish candles they wanted worship to be plain and simple to be pure and above all instead of worship being at the center they wanted the word of God to be at the center and they were tremendous battle readers they did it in their own homes as families they did did it privately as individuals, but above all they wanted to see in the church regular and consistent Bible study. Richard Baxter is a very good case in point, not only did he give them two or three hours Bible study on Sunday, but he went from house to house and gave each family 20 minutes Bible study in their home. And he had a road from went down a street in and out of each house just giving them Bible study. That's the secret of his effect on Kiddaminstead. So here we have the Anglicans and the Puritans. The Anglicans still using quite a lot of the rights and ceremonies that had been used for centuries and the Puritans wanting to make it quite simple, as simple as it was in Geneva or Scotland and to make the Church of England as simple as the Church of Scotland. Then outside the Church of England was a third group. We call them independence because they wanted to be independent of the Church. They were called separatists because they separated from the Church. They were called brownists because a man called Brown was a great leader among them. And above all they were called congregationalists because they believed that each congregation should order its own affairs under the Lord. Now here is the state of play then and of the congregational at the beginning of the century John Milton would be a fairly good case in point. The congregationals or independents as they were called rejected the idea of a national church, of a state church and their slogan was reformation without tearing for any. In other words we're not going to wait till they change the Parliament or change the church. We're going to get right on ahead and live by the Bible in our local congregation. Of course many of them paid for it with their lives. Green barrel, sorry Greenwood and barrel were two of them who paid for that with their lives but that group grew. Now that I'm going to look at the reign of each king or queen in England over this century and ask what happened in England during this century and the funny thing is that most of it happened in Buckingham shire or a great deal happened in the children hills. And after I've spoken this evening I think there may be one or two of you who would like to get in a car and go tour of the county to see the things that I'm going to talk about. Now it may interest you in your own locality. The first king is James the First. He had already been king of Scotland as James the sixth but now he came south and became the king of England as well as Scotland and changed from James the First to James the sixth. Now he had two ideas from the very beginning which he had not spoken about publicly. One was he believed in the divine right of kings to rule religion and the second was he believed in the divine right of bishops to rule the church. Now he kept very dark about this north of the border and you still have to keep fairly dark about both those things north of the border and the scots were taken in and is rather a shift to character who could change overnight in his views apparently. Deluded the scots into thinking that he'd make a good king and when he came south the English thought that he would follow the Puritan line, that he would purify the church of England very quickly they got a very big shock. He said Presbyteries agree as well with Manike as God in the devil and his watchword for his reign in England was no bishop no king and there then began a most difficult period within the Church of England. James certainly took the side of the Anglicans very very strongly and he wouldn't listen to government by representative bodies of believers. The king should rule the church and the bishop should rule the church and he had a very good archbishop to help him in this. Now to do this in the year 1604, three years before that Bible was printed, he called together a conference of leading Christians in this country to Hampton Court, the palace where the mazes just downriver from here and in Hampton Court James ridiculed, insulted and left at the Puritans. He said your kill joys you don't like sports and Sunday right I will make laws saying that it's perfectly all right to have sports and then detainment on Sundays and he girded them like this and what they went through in his ridicule was just nobody's business we have an account of it that there was a Puritan man there by name of Reynolds. He was a famous professor from Oxford and he was a courteous saintly gentleman and all this ridicule and all this laughter didn't disturb him one bit he just stood his ground and when James had run out of infective this man Dr. Reynolds said your majesty I have a suggestion it is about time that we had a new English Bible and this suggestion was taken up almost to the surprise of King James and from the Hampton Court conference for seven years people worked hard on this Bible and we came I haven't even got it here I'm sure some of you have we had the King James's version so called not because he started the idea or because he did it but because he happened to be King at the time and it was presented to him on completion what we call the authorised version you see in America they call it the King James version because they don't know so much about King James as we do but here we call it the authorised because he authorised it and the Bible which you have used mostly in your lifetime and which has been used for 350 years in this country was the result of one of the Puritans at the Hampton Court Palace conference and that Bible came out in the year 1611 that year was momentous for England something else happened in that year the first Baptist church in England was founded in 1611 same year that the Bible came out the authorised version I'll tell you how that happened in a moment a last following that conference King James issued a royal proclamation of conformity and said every clergyman must accept the bishops there must be complete conformity complete uniformity right through the church and 1500 vickers refused to sign it 300 of them were thrown into jail straight away and others suffered it was the first rift in the English church and at that time there came back into the church of England vestments and rights and ceremonies which had not been seen since the beginning of the reformation they have stayed ever since the result was that the Puritans made for Ireland some of them fled west and the church of Ireland has always been nearer to the reformation than the church of England as a result the archbishop of Ireland at that time was a man called Asher and he was a great man for working out dates and if you've got an authorised version that has at the head of Genesis 1 the year BC 4000 and 4 which God never wrote in the Bible you're looking at something the archbishop Asher wrote in the Bible and here it was it worked out that Adam was born about 9 o'clock on October the 21st in the year BC 4000 and 4 an English scholars said rather dryly being a careful scholar he would not commit himself more fully than this when our archbishop Asher was a grand archbishop and the Puritans the clergymen tended to move over to Ireland west but the lay members of the church who were worried about James and who could not worship as they felt they should fled east and they went to Holland they went to the Netherlands and many of the independence or congregational fled to the low countries now the other morning on school's broadcasts I listened to a broadcast on radio it's first school's broadcasts I've listened to in a long time but it was fascinating it was a dramatised version of something that happened in the part of the country I've seen frequently if you go up the A1 you'll see on the right hand side in the northern part of Nottinghamshire a village called Scrubey and there under a faithful pastor by name of John Robinson a group of independence met and formed their own congregation alas the squire brought the magistrates and they were threatened with all sorts of things if they persisted in meeting and they finally decided the only thing to do was to get a boat and go to the low countries to Holland Amsterdam anywhere around there where they could be free to worship it's most dramatic story of how they got the boat they got a Dutch boat to come and meet them offshore off Lincolnshire near Boston they set off from Boston Stump and they had two boats one with the men in and one with the women and children in they didn't come together so that the local police or magistrates rather wouldn't spot them and the two boats set off the tragedy is that the boat with the women and the children in got stuck on the mud the men reached the Dutch ship but then they saw on the shore British troops coming who began to fire on the Dutch ship and the ship had to pull off and the men so their wives and children left on the mountain wondered what would happen fortunately a year or two later the wives and children were able to go out and meet them in Holland but they're in Holland they meant free to worship God as they wished now under James some went to our some went to Holland, but in England you had to conform. Now something happened out there in Amsterdam, a group of Christians began to study the question of baptism. Now so far all the reformers as we've seen, practiced infant baptism as it had been practiced for centuries. But in Amsterdam a group under a man called Helwiss began to look at this and they came to the far-reaching conclusion that baptism should be for believers only. And that that would say more clearly than anything could say that the church is made up of believers only. Now of course they had no one to baptize them, so two of them got together and one said, "Our baptize you if you baptize me and this they did." And then because they could not find work they decided to risk coming back to London and in 1611 they came back and in Spittalfields in London the first Baptist church in England was formed. Very soon they drew the attention of the authorities and suffered for it. A few years later a group of independents meeting in the low countries who stayed there decided that it was just impracticable to stay in Europe. They were not understood, they couldn't get jobs, they were starving. And they decided to do something tremendous. They decided to come back to England to get hold of a ship and go to the new world and try to build in America. A free world where people could worship without the states saying how they should. They came back to England and they persuaded the owner of the Mayflower to take them out. And they were called the Pilgrim Fathers and timbers from that ship you can see in Georgians in the Mayflower barn. And it's almost certain that those timbers with the lettering of the Mayflower on them come from the ship that took the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620 from Plymouth. I went out to New England to the new world where they landed in Plymouth in the December of 1620. But what a hard experience waited them there. In the first winter 50% of them died. Like a food, cold, lack of medical help. But they stayed. And even though they had battles with established Anglican areas in the States, the Pilgrim Fathers began something that means that today America is entirely free of any state church relationship and where anybody may worship as they feel they ought. That's one of the reasons why most of the unusual sects seemed to start in America. They were free to start there and many of the sects and cults that come over to us started there. That was the risk they ran. That they rather would run the risk of that and have religious liberty than try and stamp out by force of Parliament what didn't fit in with the government's ideas of religion. So much then for the reign of James I. He was followed by Charles I, who alas was one worse than James I. And I'm afraid believing this divine right of kings and bishops, he went much, much further. Catch a Puritan into prison with him. Find him heavily. Put him in the pillory. Cut his ears off. Slit his nose. And all this was going on in the reign of Charles I. Archbishop Lord of Ken to Brie at this time helped Charles I to turn the clock back. The communion table in the parish church was now called again the altar. And now people were told to bow to it. Parliament objected and so Charles I simply did without a parliament for 11 years. Can you imagine a king or queen today doing that? I can imagine a parliament doing without the king or queen for 11 years. But I can't imagine a king or queen saying no more parliament. 15,000 Londoners marched on the palace and presented to King Charles I, the root and branch petition. If you've ever heard of the phrase root and branch, this is where it comes from. And they wanted all Roman superstition, rooted out, root and branch. Charles I refused to listen. And within a very short time England was at civil war. It broke out in 1642. Parliament was fighting the king. And it was a religious issue. And by and large the Anglicans fought with the king and the Puritans fought with parliament. And by and large the north and the west was in the king's hands and the south and the east was in the parliament's hands. And that is why if you study the distribution of free churches today you'll find that it follows that pattern. Now the border came between Ailsbury and Oxford. And one of the greatest fighters for the parliament was a man called John Hempton. And not far from this church is Hempton Road. And one of my children is in the Hempton House in the local school. And if you go to Ailsbury there standing in the square is a statue of John Hempton whose home was near Stoke Mendeville. Alas that leader was killed very early in the war. And parliament began to lose the battle. They were waiting for a leader. And that leader came in Oliver Krummel, Watson all. And Oliver Krummel blended them into a new model army. Under the famous cat phrase "Trust in God and keep your powder dry" he put new morale into the troops fighting for religious liberty in this land. They met in Westminster or they met in Westminster at this time during the Civil War a group of clergymen and scholars from Oxford and Cambridge to try and work out some kind of a pattern of church life that would be acceptable to all. It was called the Westminster Assembly of Divines and there were a few Scots invited who seemed to have influenced them terribly heavily. Scots often do. And they produced a creed of their beliefs called the Westminster Confession of Faith. And to this very day this is the confession of faith not only for the Scottish but for most Presbyterians in the world. And I'm sure you could quote one thing from it. What is the chief end of men? The chief end of men is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. If you heard those words that was decided in Westminster during the Civil War. But it was not acceptable generally. The Scots accepted it but the English never did. Charles I was still around but was finally brought to London to be beheaded. He was kept for a few weeks or was it days in the men's house at Stoke Poges. And if ever you get the chance go to Stoke Poges, go into the men's house and there above the fireplace painted on the plaster wall is the royal coat of arms of Charles I. To while away the hours and keep his mind off his execution he painted his royal coat of arms on the plaster. They've covered it over with a glass sheet now but you can go into the main room at Stoke Poges and you can look. At the royal coat of arms before Charles I was beheaded in Whitehall in the year 1649. Among the soldiers who fought with Oliver Cromwell was a young man, a heart drinking, hard fighting, hard swearing young man who had been born at a little village called Elstone just this side of bed for just off the M1 and his name John Bagnon. More about him in a moment. After the Civil War the Presbyterians got the control of the Church of England and tried to make everybody a Presbyterian. Isn't it funny? When the Anglicans are in control everybody must be Anglican when the Presbyterians get it everybody must be Presbyterian which calls someone to say that new Presbyter was but old priest writ large. In other words we've just changed one tyranny for another. Finally we come now to Charles II. A man who well one could hardly say things bad enough about this unprincipled profligate who was accepted by the Scots Fest and they crowned him at Skone on the Stone of Skone or Skone whichever you like. Skone right and they crowned him there thinking that he would fight with the Scots and the Parliament of England for Presbyterianism for a pure Puritan Church. Alas the Scots regretted their folly very quickly. I can't go into the story of the Covenanters suffice to say that 17,000 Scottish Covenanters meeting in secret in the Highlands to worship God as they felt they ought, suffered under Charles II. But come back to England, Charles II was a secret sympathiser with the Roman Catholic Church and his ambition was by intrigue to bring them back. He made a secret treaty with Louis XIV the France to turn the clock back 200 years to the pre-reformation days. How did he do it? 1661 began a series of acts of Parliament to turn the clock back. 1662 was the worst. It was called the Act of Uniformity. It was not Roman yet, but it was Anglican, and Charles II was saying, and the Parliament was saying, "Everybody must be this." It was in that year 1662 that nearly 2,000 clergymen left their living and went out into the unknown without home or job or anything else, because they refused to conform to the Act of Uniformity and into the English language came a new word, "non-conformist." And that word was a criminal word at the beginning, and non-conformist ran tremendous risks, and one of those turned out at that time was dear old Richard Baxter. 2,000 clergymen were on the streets after that Act of Uniformity. 1665 he passed another Act because these clergymen were creeping back secretly to hold meetings with their old people, and the Parliament passed an Act that no clergymen was allowed within five miles of his former church. It's called the Five Mile Act. Now here's something interesting. If you go to Wendover on the A413, this side of Wendover you'll see the Baptist church on the right-hand side of the road on the road. And it's a good five minutes walk, this side of the village, and you may have wondered why build a church outside of village, the answer is very simple. In 1662 the Vicka Reveilsbury was turned out because he refused to conform. He kept creeping back into Ailsbury and holding meetings in kitchens and gardens in any way he could. But then the Five Mile Act came out, so do you know what he did? Still in the middle of Ailsbury and he started walking out five miles. And he paced it out and five miles brought him to a field. And they started meeting in the field and people walked five miles from Ailsbury. They put up a place of worship which is now the Baptist Church of Wendover and it's exactly five miles. So when you get to the Baptist Church of Wendover you know you've got five more miles to go if you're visiting Ailsbury jail. In 1673 came the notorious test act and the result was that Parliament was saying there must be neither Roman Catholics nor non-conformists in England. Everybody must worship this way. Now that caused a great deal of suffering for conscience sake and it was during this period that John Bunyan, now an older man, now a converted man converted through listening to some gossip of some housewives in a backyard. All your housewives if you're gossiping a backyard just bear in mind you might get a John Bunyan if you're gossiping about the right things because this hard drinking, swearing, fighting young men overheard some housewives talking about Jesus in a backyard and he'd never heard anything so sweet. And it convicted him of his sin. He was converted as you know he became a preacher in Bedford. He was baptized as a believer and he preached the gospel wherever he could. Now John Bunyan was thrown into prison in the reign of Charles II. Twelve years he was in prison with only one break in between, separated from his blind wife and his children. He was suffering privation but one day in the jail he had a dream. The dreamty saw a man with a burden on his back and a man who wanted to get rid of this burden and he began to write down the dream and that dream is Pilgrim's Progress. I hope you've read that book right through in the adult version and not in the children's version. The adult version gives you not just what happened to Pilgrim but what he thought and what he said. And I hope to that someday you'll read another important book by John Bunyan, Grace Abounding. The full title is Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. It describes his conversion and how he became the preacher that he was and I suppose that John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is the best known Christian book next to the Bible. He never mentioned the church in it. He never mentioned the sacrament in it. And therefore it was accepted by Christians of all churchmanship and to this very day it's had one of the widest appeals in the Christian world of any book ever written. He died in 1688 and was buried in Bun Hill Fields which I visited the other day. Bishop Bunyan they called him by the end of his life but the one thing he didn't want to be was a bishop but as he traveled around and as people came to him for help they said you've got as much right to be called a bishop as those have as they have so we're going to call you there so Bishop Bunyan he wants. Now another man who suffered during this time a very different kind of character was a man called George Fox and George Fox had a very deep religious experience in the year 1646. Now there was something very good about that experience and there was something not so good. George Fox discovered or rather rediscovered the power of the Holy Spirit to guide into all truth. He called this experience the inner light, the inner light and he said it's no use just having the Holy Scripture outside you or even in your head you need the Holy Spirit inside you as well. Now that was something that needed to be rediscovered and needed to be said. You can have the Holy Scripture of Pat but without the Holy Spirit it's dead it's not alive and George Fox rediscovered the Holy Spirit. Alas having rediscovered something good he then went and said something not so good. He went one step further and said that the sure word of prophecy which we need today is not the scriptures but the Holy Spirit alone. Alas from that statement has come the greatest weakness of the movement that followed this man. For this man gathered around him a group of people of similar outlook who they call the Society of Friends. Other people nicknamed them Quakers because they Quaked and trembled before God in their meetings but he called them the Society of Friends and this has been both their strength and their weakness ever since. Their strength that they believe that God can speak inwardly through the Holy Spirit. Their weakness that they reject the sacraments which the Lord Jesus meant them to have because they are outward and also tend to disregard the Holy Scriptures and rely entirely on inner thoughts. And this is a weakness but nevertheless George Fox imprisoned for saying that incidentally because of its unorthodoxy suffered greatly and at one time there were 4000 Quakers in prison during the reign of Charles II. If you can imagine what proportion that was you can understand their sufferings especially when you consider that in prison you got no food unless friends brought them to you brought it to you and if you put all the Quakers in prison there'd be nobody to bring them food. A young aristocrat said we will never get freedom in England to worship as we ought. We must go to the new world and his name William Penn and William Penn lies buried not a mile from the spot with his family in the little quiet burial ground of Jordan's meeting house but William Penn went out to the new world and he pressed beyond the frontiers of the colonies on the eastern seaboard and he said we'll have a state of religious liberty and it became known as Pennsylvania the colony of William Penn where they might be free to worship and follow the inner light of the Holy Spirit. He crossed the Atlantic three or four times but finally died back here and was buried there in Jordan's. Come now to the next reign James II and a vowed Roman Catholic who not in any subtle way like Charles II but in a completely open way said I'll get you back to Rome if it kills me and to do this he used the notorious Judge Jeffries of Belsdrow Park Jarrett's cross and Judge Jeffries with his infamous acts and if ever a name has gone down into history as a brutal man it is surely that of Judge Jeffries he was the right hand man of James II in his. It was too much for England and as the result of a popular rising against the King James II had to flee. Finally we have that strange king by name of William and Mary and we have seen to call him King William and Mary but William and Mary came to the throne of England together and a new era of stability and tolerance began an era which set the pattern for the rest of English history as far as church life goes with one exception. The Roman Catholics were not allowed back in this reign and they weren't allowed back for another hundred years but tolerance was extended to others in 1689. One conformists were at least partially recognised and the piercing executions began to cease. I have here a book written by Fox. It's called Fox's Book of Martyrs. It was required reading for children on Sunday in the time of my great grandfather. I don't know that I dare to give it to my children now, or I'd have my children's teacher after me for filling their minds with such things. It's the most horrible account of the Martyrs, Christian Martyrs, from the time of the New Testament through to 1682. And I fear that the author, Hope, that no more stories of martyrdom would need to be written after Fox's Book of Martyrs. And that the tolerance gained by that towards the end of that century would be lasting and that been no more. Well, in a sense, there haven't been any more martyrs in England, but over the world, there has not been a period of 10 years since Jesus died on the cross. When Christians have not died for the faith. And still it goes on somewhere in the world. However, in England, toleration came. And for the first time, non-conformist could put up buildings of worship. And in the very next year, Jordan's meeting house was erected. So that dates the tolerance. And if you go and look at the date on Jordan's meeting house, it's a matter of months after William and Mary's Tulleration Act of 1689. Just a few years later, Amishem Oldtown Baptist Church began. A non-conformist had 1,000 places of worship up by the end of the century. So now we have the position. Anglicanism is still the established religion. The Puritans have largely left the Anglican Church. They've either gone to Ireland or America, or they've gone into the independence or the Baptist. And become non-conformists. 1662, 2,000 more Anglicans come out and join the non-conformists. By the end of the century, non-conformist chapels and meeting houses everywhere in the southeast of England and spreading into the north and west. That's the position. But within the Anglican Church, three parties. And so as I gave you the state of play at 1,600, let me give you the state of parties at 1,700. There are now three parties in the Church of England which have remained to this day, high, broad, and low. And they are right there at the end of the 17th century. The high party are those who still hanker after the Romish practices in worship. The low party belongs really to the few Puritans who manage to stay in somehow, and who have very simple, unadorned worship without the vestments, without the altar, with just a table. And who worshiped very much like the Church of Scotland and who were very doubtful about having bishops. The broad party is the one that I want to leave you thinking about because it's the beginning of the 18th century story. Can I ask this question, what did God think about all this? What did the devil think about all this? I have the feeling the devil was laughing up his sleeve at Christians killing each other. I have the feeling he was thrilled that physically they were destroying each other. But when the toleration act came and they allowed each other to worship freely, the devil had to think up a new tactic and he thought up a most devilish one. That instead of destroying Christians physically, he would think up something that would destroy them mentally, and during the 17th century, some very queer ideas had been produced on the continent in the name of Christianity. In the country of Sweden, there was a scientist called Swedenborg. And Swedenborg was producing some incredible ideas in calling them Christianity, founding the New Jerusalem Church. You may not have come across those. I found more of them in Lancashire. On the continent was a man called Socinius, and Socinius in Italy was saying this kind of thing. The Bible is not the Word of God. It's helpful, but it's not just the Word of God like that. And Jesus was not the Son of God. He was simply a great man of God. And we must imitate his example. And Jesus didn't die for our sins. He died to give us an example of love. This was being said. And these ideas were coming across the English Channel. There were other ideas from a man called Arminius in Holland who opposed the teaching of Calvin. And ever since we've had Calvinism and Arminianism, Calvinism emphasized the sovereignty and the will of God. Arminianism emphasized the free will of men. And they came almost to mental blows over this difference. Well, into the Church of England from the continent there was coming a party of people who really felt that as long as you came to church and worshiped it didn't really matter whether you held the old beliefs. Until the end of the 17th century, all the people that disagreed about church order, about bishops, about baptism, they were all agreed about Christian beliefs and what the gospel was. But now there came into the Church of England from the continent. A party that believed you could be much more latitude and Aryan in your doctrine, in other words you could be wider, broader in your thinking than the old fashioned gospel. And this was to kill the Church of England almost dead by the 1730s. Spiritually it was to rub that Church of its power and heritage. And that is the story I want to take up next time. I've told you this story, not because I want to give you a history lesson I've told it to you because I want you to realize that if we were living in 1700, you and I could not have met here tonight. We were not free to do so. You would have to conform. You would have to conform to a set order of service settled by act of parliament. You would have to conform to a rigid church government settled by act of parliament. And there would be no freedom for you to meet us. We do once a month in a church meeting to decide what the Lord would have us do. Now this liberty is now ours. Praise the Lord for that. Thank the Lord there were those who saw that the New Testament demanded a free church in a free state. And that religion was a matter of conscience. To those who carried this to the New World, to those who went to the continent with this idea, but above all to those who stayed here and went to prison, and thought it out that you and I might come to go and heal back to this church in Sunday evening and worship God as we feel our conscience dictates. Thank God for this liberty. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We could lose that liberty again very easily. So have others lost it. And we need not only to look back into the past, but to praise God that in the future he can keep us where we ought to be. I've also told you this story. To tell you this, that in spite of all these battles, in spite of all these difficulties, the church of God goes on. And in every generation, the Holy Spirit converts men and women and makes them blazing preachers of the gospel and sends them out. And even in spite of all this, the church was still there. Christians were still there. The gospel was still there. The Bible was still there. For Jesus said, "I will build my church." And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Let us pray. This is the God we adore, our faithful and changeable friend, whose love is as great as his power, and neither knows measure nor end. Tis Jesus the first and the last, whose spiritual guide us safe home, will praise him for all that is past and trusting for all that's to come. Amen. You have been listening to David Porson. Other talks by David Porson can be found and downloaded free of charge by visiting www.DavidPorson.co.uk.