ion, I much question if they have any. One brother
assured me there were rules, but as the price was fourpence, and as trade
was slack, he had been unable to procure a copy of them. In answer to
our appeal, an elder said there were such, but they were under lock and
key, and he could not find them for us; whereupon another brother reached
out a New Testament, with the assurance that there, and there alone, were
their rules. What information we could get we had to fish out by
questions. As to Church membership, they have no preliminaries. All who
come are of the Church; those whom the Lord calls will join them, and if
the Lord has not called them they will soon drop away. They consider
that every service is the sacrament, and they have no special form. In
the same way they have no baptism--infant or adult, creeds, confessions
of faith, forms of prayer, ministers set apart and trained to
preach;--all these things they have done away with. By communion as
brother with brother, and sister with sister, they can cherish the true
Christian life. If one of them lack anything, let him or her ask of God.
How familiarly and at times irreverently they pray, the reader can well
imagine. It is difficult to say common things with propriety, says the
old Latin proverb. It is more difficult to introduce them into prayer,
to inform the Lord that Brother Jones would have been present had he not
been unable to come, and to explain the peculiarly distressing
circumstances of Sister Smith. For acting on the world outside, they
have great faith in out-of-door preaching, an exercise in which they take
great delight, and for which they consider themselves peculiarly
qualified. They forget, as one has wittily remarked, that if the Lord
does not need man's learning, still less does He need man's ignorance.
As to the financial question, they get over that without much difficulty.
Their expenses are next to nothing, and each brother or sister is ever
ready to contribute his mite. They have nothing to pay for pew-rents;
they have no minister's salary to collect; they have no educational
institutions to support; the rent of a room in a back street is no
serious item; and as to church furniture, that is easily supplied--a
door-mat, a dirty desk, half a dozen old forms, a second-hand Bible or
so, a greasy hymn-book that has done duty many times, and they have all
that they require. It is not for me to judge my brother. To show him
how fat