Brown’s move led to the ruin of the Middleburg church, but the seeds of his system were not so easy to destroy in England. Sir Walter Raleigh, in an essay composed in 1592, already counts upward of twenty thousand persons imbued with Brown’s opinions.
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It was not over articles of faith that they broke off from other communions, but because of ecclesiastical discipline, and especially the form of government in the Anglican church—of which the Brownists strongly disapproved, though without adopting that of the Presbyterians, since they assigned equal blame to the consistories and the synods, the bishops and the ministers. They did not want to join any reformed church, since they said they were not assured of the sanctity and regeneration of the members of those churches, because the latter put up with sinners and communicated with them—which, according to the Brownists, was the height of impiety. They condemned the solemn celebration of marriage—which they said was merely a civil engagement, and thus needed the intervention of only the secular magistrate, not at all the ecclesiastical. Nor did they want children to be baptized by Anglican priests or Presbyterian ministers, whom they did not regard as members of the church, and who, they added, took no care of those they had baptized. They rejected every kind of prayer, saying that the Lord’s Prayer ought not to be regarded as a prayer but merely as a model for a prayer that J. C. has given us. See SEPARATISTES and NON-CONFORMISTES.
They established an ecclesiastical government of democratic form. When one of their churches was assembled, whoever wanted to be incorporated into their society made a profession of faith and signed a form by which he committed himself to follow the Gospel in the same sense as they did. The power to admit or exclude members, and to decide all conflicts, belonged to the entire society. They selected their officers and ministers from among themselves to preach and care for the poor. These ministers were established and their different functions were distributed to them by the fasting, prayer, and laying on of hands of some members of the society—without, however, their believing that they possessed the title or dignity of ordination. For they sometimes reduced their ministries to the status of the laity—persuaded that in this regard, they could destroy their own work. And since they taught that a church was only an assembly of a certain number of persons in the same place, they therefore believed that the power of the minister appointed in that place was so limited to it that he could neither administer communion nor baptize nor exercise any other function in a church other than his own. All members of the sect, even the laity,
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were permitted to make exhortations2 to the assembly, to propose questions after the sermon, and to debate what had been preached. In a word, each Brownist church was an assembly in which each member had the freedom to strive for the general good of the society without being accountable for his actions before any superior, synod or tribunal. The independents who formed themselves afterward from among the Brownists adopted a portion of these opinions. See INDEPENDENTS.
Queen Elizabeth actively went after this sect. Under her reign, the prisons were full of Brownists; there were even some hanged. The ecclesiastical commission and the Star Chamber raged against them with such vigor that they were obliged to leave England. Many families retreated to Amsterdam, where they formed a church and chose Johnson for pastor, and after him, Aynsworth, known for a commentary on the Pentateuch.3 Also counted among their leaders: Barrow and Wilkinson.4 Their church was maintained for about a hundred years. (G)
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Celibacy †
*CELIBACY (Ancient and modern history, and Morality) is the state of a person who lives without becoming committed to marriage. This state can be considered in itself under three different aspects: (1) with regard to the human race; (2) to society; (3) to Christian society. But before considering celibacy in itself, we are going to present in a few words its situation and its changing circumstances among men. M. Morin, of the Academy of Belles-lettres,1 reduces its history to the following propositions: Celibacy is as old as the world; it is as widespread as the world; it will last as long as, and infinitely longer than, the world.
Abridged history of celibacy. Celibacy is as old as the world, if it is true—as is claimed by some authors of the old and new law—that our first parents lost their innocence only by ceasing to preserve their celibacy and that they would never have been expelled from paradise if they had not eaten the forbidden fruit, an act that in the modest and metaphorical style of scripture indicates nothing else (they say) but a violation of celibacy. They derive the evidence for this grammatical interpretation from the feeling of nudity that immediately followed the sin of Eve and Adam; from the notion of irregularity attached to the carnal act virtually everywhere in the
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world; from the shame that accompanies it; from the remorse that it causes; from the original sin that is communicated in this way; finally, from the state to which we will return upon departing this life, in which it will not be a question of husbands and wives, and which will be an eternal celibacy.
It is not up to me, says M. Morin, to assign the appropriate qualifications to this opinion. The opinion is odd; it seems contrary to the letter of scripture; that’s enough to reject it. Scripture teaches us that Adam and Eve lived in paradise as brother and sister, as the angels live in heaven and as we will live there one day. That’s good enough; there you have the first and perfect celibacy. To know how long it lasted is a question of pure curiosity. Some say several hours; others several days. There are those who—on the basis of mystical reasons, on who knows what traditions from the Greek church, on the era of Cain’s birth—push this interval to thirty years.
The Jewish doctors would have another, even longer celibacy follow upon this original one. For they claim that Adam and Eve, ashamed of their crime, did penance for a hundred years without having any dealings together—a conjecture they base on the birth of Seth, their third son, whom Moses attributes to them only at the age of a hundred and thirty. But to be precise, it is only to Abel that one can assign the honor of having preserved his celibacy throughout his whole life.
To know whether his example was imitated in the following generations, whether the sons of God who allowed themselves to be corrupted by the daughters of men weren’t a religious sort who lapsed into disorder—that’s what we can’t know, although it’s not impossible. If it’s true, as appears to be the case from the supposed book of Enoch, that there were at that time women who made a practice of sterility, there may well have also been men who did so. But the likelihood here is not high. At that time it was a question of populating the world; God’s law and that of nature imposed on all kinds of persons a sort of necessity to work at the increase of the human race. It’s to be supposed that those who lived in that time made it an essential matter for themselves to obey that precept. M. Morin says that everything history teaches us about the Patriarchs of those times is that they took and gave away women; that they brought into the world sons and daughters, and then died as if they had had nothing more important to do.
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It was much the same thing in the first centuries that followed the flood. There was much clearing to do and few workers; it was up to whoever begot the most. At that time, men’s honor, nobility, and power consisted in the number of children.