ask for blessings they have already received, but rather for an increase of the gifts of which they have already partaken. In this sense the charge is equally true of all earnest Christians, and, we may add, of all Christian Churches. The Plymouth Brethren in general accept that interpretation of prophecy which teaches us to look for the personal coming of our Lord, and his reign upon earth during the millennium. But these opinions are not peculiar to them, nor are they a test of fellowship.

BRET

Roman

RETHREN OF THE FREE SPIRIT; also called Beghards and Beguins. All that we know of this sect has come down to us through the representations of their enemies, the ecclesiastical writers of the Romish Church, and ought, therefore, to be received with caution. They appeared at the first dawn of the Reformation, early in the thirteenth century, in France and Germany, and were probably connected with the Albigenses. Catholic historians describe them as the worst of heretics; and Protestants, without sufficient consideration, have confirmed the charge. Mosheim in particular (from whom, until very lately, almost all our acquaintance with the ecclesiastical history of the middle ages has been sought, for almost a century) speaks of them with abhorrence; and yet he is obliged to confess that there were among them men of exemplary piety, distinguished by the gravity and austerity of their lives and manners, who suffered death, in the most dreadful forms, with the utmost resolution and constancy. It is certain that they resisted the pope's authority, and denied the peculiar doctrines of the Church of Rome. They were severely handled by the Inquisition; and their examinations, as taken down and published by the inquisitors, are not to be regarded as a fair exposition of their tenets. Three heavy charges are brought against them: mysticism, antinomianism, and sensuality. We are disposed to think that of these indictments the first was true, the second questionable, and the third undoubtedly false. Their mystical doctrines were, in fact, little more than a revival of those ancient heresies, or rather follies, of the early Church, when men attempted to engraft Platonism upon Christianity. They are said to have held that all things flowed by emanation from God, and were finally to return to their Divine source; that rational souls were so many

portions of the Supreme Deity, and that the universe, considered as one great whole, was God; that every man, by the power of contemplation, and by calling off his mind from sensible and terrestrial objects, might be united to the Deity in an inexplicable manner, and become one with the Source and Parent of all things; and that they who, by long and assiduous meditation, had plunged themselves, as it were, into the abyss of the Divinity, acquired a glorious and sublime liberty, and were delivered, not only from the violence of sinful lusts, but even from the common instincts of nature. Similar notions have been entertained in almost every age by men who have suddenly woke up to a consciousness of the reality and importance of spiritual things, and aimed at high attainments in religion, while they disclaimed or overlooked the practical instructions of the New Testament. It was, in fact, a revival of the ancient Gnosticism: "Man," said they, "is only a passive instrument in the hands of the Divinity. Science comes solely from this source; and reason should detach itself, not only from the influence of the senses, but even from itself. The ascetic, or he who elevates himself to God, alone possesses true knowledge. All is then pure ecstacy." Some of the fathers wrote in the same strain; and it is curious to observe the reappearance of this mysticism amongst illiterate Germans in the dark ages. Like all mystical writers, they were often, and sometimes no doubt wilfully, misunderstood; and the worst construction was put upon each ambiguous proposition. Amalric, professor of logic and theology at Paris (whose bones were dug up and burnt in 1209), is considered as one of the founders of the sect. He is charged with having taught that the universe was God; and that not only the forms or essences of all things, but their material substances, proceed from the Deity, and are again absorbed into the Source from whence they came. He was charged with reviving the heresy of Alexander the Epicurean; but it has been suggested by the Abbé Henry and others, that the errors of Amalric were of a very different kind, such, indeed, as are altogether inconsistent with these opinions. He taught, says the abbé, "that every Christian was obliged to believe himself a member of Jesus Christ; and that without this belief none could be saved." The learned Spanheim imagines that various absurd opinions were falsely imputed to him in order to render his memory odious, because he had opposed the worship

VOL. I.

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of saints and images. David of Dinant, another Parisian professor, expressed, it is said, the fundamental proposition of his master, Amalric, in these terms: "God is the primary matter or substance of all things;" for which he was charged with heresy, and fled from France in order to escape the death of a heretic. The bishops assembled in council at Paris, and condemned the works of Aristotle, which they regarded as the source of these impious tenets-tenets which would probably have been considered harmless had they not been associated, in those who held them, with views of Christian doctrine, on certain other points, at variance with those of Rome.

The charge of antinomianism must be proved, if at all, by attending to the sense of their, often extravagant, assertions, rather than the sound. Their doctrines were set forth in a treatise De novem Rupibus; the nine Rocks, signifying the different steps or gradations by which man ascends to God. A great part of it seems to have been purely unintelligible. Its statements with respect to morals were such as these:—“If it be the will of God that I should commit sin, my will must be the same, and I must not even desire to abstain from sin. This is true contrition. And although a man, who is united to God, may have committed a thousand mortal sins, he ought not to wish that he had not committed them: he should even be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than omit any one of these mortal sins." Perhaps the meaning of this bombast was nothing more than that man's will ought, in everything, to resolve itself into the will of God. The notion that, God being the author of sin, it became no longer sin, has, however, found its advocates, in later times, even within the Church of England, and is antinomianism of the worst kind. The inquisition proceeded against the Brethren of the Free Spirit upon these grounds, and charged them with teaching "that the sin of man is not sin if he be a child of God, because God works in him, and with him, whatever he does." (Mosheim, note, p. 255, vol. iii.) It seems probable, on the whole, that they misunderstood the meaning of St. Paul-Romans viii. 2-14-and inferred that a Christian was "free from the law," in a sense never contemplated by the apostle.

The morals of the Brethren of the Free Spirit have been bitterly assailed. They are said to have treated with contempt

the ordinances of religion, looking upon fasting, prayer, baptism, and the Lord's Supper, as of use only to those whose piety was in its elementary state, and of no value to the perfect man, whom long meditation had raised above all external things, and carried into the essence of the Deity. Beyond this they are charged with the wildest fanaticism-going from place to place with an air of lunacy and distraction; refusing to labour, as an obstacle to divine contemplation; begging their bread with wild shouts and clamours. They were accompanied by women, called sisters, [hence they were styled in Germany Schwestriones,] with whom they are said to have lived in intimate familiarity. They maintained, that by continual contemplation, it was possible to eradicate all the instincts of nature, and regarded modesty as the token of inward corruption. It is said that they held their meetings in a state of nudity, considering as at a fatal distance from the Deity all who felt the carnal suggestions of nature. How far these accusations were true, in any sense, it is perhaps impossible to determine. We receive them at the hands of their enemies, who, having exhausted all the horrors of the inquisition upon them, and extirpated them from the face of the earth, may not uncharitably be supposed to have had some interest in depicting their excesses and errors in dark colours. The early history of the Quakers is disfigured by extravagances very similar to those which are ascribed to the Brethren of the Free Spirit; yet we know that in their case licentiousness was abhorred. The inquisitors acknowledge that the Beghards, though destitute, as they affirm, of shame, were not in general chargeable with a breach of chastity; and they confess with wonder their patience in suffering, and their constancy beneath the most frightful torture, and in the presence of death itself. It is not to be questioned that great numbers of them were men of sincere piety. These held the liberty of the Spirit, upon the whole, in the scriptural sense, as a release from the law as a means of justification before God, not as an exemption from it as a rule of life; but they held themselves exempt from the duties of external worship, and from the laws of the Church; placing the whole of religion in internal devotion. Monastic institutions, then had in profound respect, they treated with contempt. About the middle of the thirteenth century, they persuaded a considerable number of monks in Suabia "to live

without any rule, and to serve God in the liberty of the Spirit, as the most accceptable service that could be offered to God." It seems highly probable to us that the injunction to live without any rule, had reference chiefly, if not entirely, to the monastic vow. The inquisitors placed another interpretation upon it, and condemned the Beghards and their converts to the flames for heresy. They died, by the testimony of their judges, with triumphant feelings of joy and exultation. The sect disappears towards the close of the thirteenth century under dreadful persecution; probably the enthusiasts of the party died off, and the devout members, who escaped the inquisition, joined the Albigenses, and disappeared at length with them.

BRETHREN, UNITAS FRATRUM, or MORAVIANS.—An ancient

episcopal Church, which was formed in Bohemia and Moravia about the middle of the fifteenth century, and traces up its origin through the Waldenses to the time of the apostles, without connexion with the Church of Rome. The romantic history of this Church, the touching simplicity of its character, and the extraordinary zeal and wonderful success of its missions amongst the heathen; and, we may add, its cordial recognition in times past by the Church of England as a sister Church, entitle it to something more than a brief mention in these pages.

The Waldenses dated their origin from the age of the apostles (see ALBIGENSES and WALDENSES), asserting that they derived episcopacy from them, in an uninterrupted succession, through the Paulicians in the East. One of their own body, Reinerius Sacho, apostatized, and rose to the dignity of an inquisitor in the Church of Rome. He became a relentless enemy, but his charges against the Waldenses rest entirely on their schism. He admits the orthodoxy of their creed and the purity of their lives. "Among all sects or religious parties, separated from the Romish Church," says this inquisitor, "there is not one more dangerous than the Leonists or Waldenses, for the following reasons: first, because this sect is older than any other. It existed, according to some, in the days of Pope Sylvester, in the fourth century, and, according to others, even in the days of the apostles. Secondly, because it is widely spread; for there is scarcely a country into which it has not found its way. Thirdly, because