To the mayor, aldermen, majestrates and officers of the military force in the city of London and county of Middlesex for you to receive and in patience to consider.

To the mayor, aldermen, majestrates and officers of the military force in the city of London and county of Middlesex for you to receive and in patience to consider.

Table of contents

TO THE MAYOR Aldermen, Majestrates and Officers of the Military Force in this City of LONDON, and County of MIDDLESEX, for you to receive, and in patience to consider.

[Page]

[Page]

TO THE MAYOR Aldermen, Majestrates and Officers of the Military Force in this City of LONDON, and County of MIDDLESEX, for you to receive, and in patience to consider.

MEN and Brethren, in the fear of the Lord I beseech you, every one of you to walk humbly in the places wherein you are set, and also warn you that you beware of pulling Innocent blood on your own heads, though some of you with the Jews may not matter it, if our blood should be on you and your children, Yet know this, if ye shed it or cause it to be shed, it will prove a burthen heavie for you to bear, even as the innocent blood of Jesus proved a burthen heavy for the Jews, though they in haste cried out, his blood be on us and our children. I write unto you Magistrates that you may consider, though Naboth was put to death by the commandment of Jesabel, yet Ahab leaving his seal so carelesly, that his Wife could come at it, though Ahab himself lay upon his bed, yet the blood of Naboth was laid to Ahab's charge; and withal know this, that we dare not part with the Inheritance which the Lord giveth us, though with Naboth we should be stoned to death for it.

[Page] Therefore oh ye Magistrates, was not the late made Law against us, who in scorn are called Quakers, enough, but do you now leave your seals so carelesly that others may take them, and send Souldiers into our peaceable meetings to abuse us by bruising some of our bodies, to the je [...]pardy of some of our lives.

Therefore oh ye Rulers know this, that ye ought to bear the Sword of Justice, and not to bear it in vain, but to see that it be born for the punishment of evil doers, and for the praise of them that do well. And I write unto you Officers of the Military Force, that you may consider, though Ʋriah was put in the Front of the battel by Ioab, and slain by the [...]word of the Children of Ammon, yet his blood was laid to Davids charge; Therefore know this, that if the Souldiers whom you send, shed our blood, though the guilt will lie upon them, yet it will also be laid to your charge: Therefore I warn you in the fear of the Lord to take heed that ye bring not swift destruction upon your selves, for we are a people that expect deliverance only from the Lord, for I denie all that confidence that trusteth in a carnal weapon, for our trust is only in the Lord God, and how can we but Worship him who hath delivered us out of so many dangers, which hath attended us; Yea though we should with Daniel be thrown into the Lions Den, yet we must serve the Lord because we know that it is better to serve him, then to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; and some of those great abuses I would lay before you which of late have been done unto us, de [...]iring you to beware of abusing the Innocent, for surely my soul believeth hat the Lord will plead our cause and deliver us rom the hand of the oppressor.

[Page] Upon the first day of this week we being peacably met together in the fear of the Lord, waiting upon him to do his will in that measure of his Grace which he hath bestowed upon us, out of the great love that he hath to the Sons of men, There came in one like unto a man, but in the actions of Fury more like a bear robbed of her whelps, passing through the body of the people, laying about him with such a weapon, that merciful men would be loath to strike Doggs with, and some Souldiers following him shuffing us to and fro as if we had been the most contemptible of all creatures, throwing some out into the mire and dirt, one being wounded, many receiving heavy blows, which may be to the hazard of their lives, my self being a spectator of some of those things, not being ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, because it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, And also consider how many of us have been put into nasty prisons amongst noysom stinks, many of the harmlesse Servants of the Lord have gone out of Newgate sick in the time of this late imprisonment, eight of which have died, being taken away from the evil to come, neverthelesse that will not clear those that caused them to be put in prison; and now instead of carrying us to prison to die there, Souldiers comes to our meetings to beat us and bruise us, near murthering of some of us, none of you having any just thing against us, but as concerning the Worship of our God; even as the Rulers of old had against Daniel, and the Jews against Paul, But as it was ever so it is now, The seed of the bond woman persecutes the seed of the free woman; But I commit our cause to him that judgeth righteously, desiring with my soul, if it be the Lords will, that the worst of our persecutors, [Page] even those that are posting head long towards Damascus may meet with that voice in the way, which might make them to know, it is hard for them to kick against the pricks. And having written something of what hath been done unto us, now I would desire to know, how vice is beaten down; Have the Stage players liberty to Act their Playes, or are they hindred? Have the Bear-baiters liberty to make a shew of the Creatures that were created for the use of man to be received with thanksgiving or are they banisht from the City? Are the Ballad-singers singing Ballads up and down the Streets, or are they restrained? Are the Mountebancks, the Juglers, the Morris-dancers suffered to Act their Tragedies, or are they not? Are the Drunkards, Swearers and Lyers lying in the Taverns and Ale-houses in their drunkennesse, while sober people are kept in Goals? Is not this the time that is spoken of, because of Iniquity the Land mourns?

And now oh ye Rulers come let us reason together, what have we done, or what would you have us to do? Who have we wronged, or whom have we defrauded, whose Ox or whose Ass have we taken? Have we raised any Rebellion against the King, that we should be thus persecuted? Nay, nay, we abhor defraud and all such things, we own true obedience, either Active or Passive, what we cannot for Conscience sake towards God perform in Active Obedience, we are made willing to suffer as the Lord shall enable us in Passive Obedience, till the Lord deliver us, for our trust is not in the Arm of flesh, but in the Living God; But here is the reason that we are persecuted because the Lord hath called us to follow him, because we dare not joyn with Wickedness, because we dare not run into the same excess of riot as others [Page] do, and as we have done our selves in times past; Therefore as it is written, we are killed all the day long, we are counted as sheep for the slaughter: And now consider seriously with that of God in your selves, and see what ye think it is that we thus suffer for, for if our hope were only in this life we were of all men most miserable, for how has many of us left our native Countries, some leaving their Wives and Children, and travailed into strange lands, receiving when they have come there Imprisonment, or Whipping, or Banishment, yea some has been put to death, and what has it been for, but for the sake of that Life Immortal, which no man could take from them; And what is it that we keep up our Meetings for, when some of us are haled to Prison, some cruelly beaten, some in jeopardy of our lives? what is it we war for, is it [...]an earthly Kingdome, is it earthly riches, honour or preferment? Nay, nay, it is for that life Immortal, it is for that treasure which will never corrupt, and the weapons of our warfare are not carnal; Therefore take counsel of Gamaliel, that juditious Lawyer, and let us alone least ye be found fighters against God, and also consider what Spirit that is that persecutes, and how it differs from that spirit that gave forth the Scriptures of Truth. Cain murthered his Brother Abell, and if I should declare, through the Scriptures, and through the persecutions of the Christians unto this day, I might make a large description of that spirit of Cain which hath been persecuting the true Abells in many Generations, and suppose that we were Hereticks, as it may be some of you may deem us to be; Yet consider that to murder an Heretick, were the way to cast him into Hell; and see how this is contrary [Page] to the Apostles Doctrine, where he saies in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves, if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledgeing of the Truth, 2. Tim. 2. chap. and in the 4th. chapter of the same Epistle, it is said, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine, (mark) with all long suffering. And many examples I might bring out of the Scriptures to prove, that that spirit that seeks to destroy mens lives is the spirit of Antichrist, not of Christ, who came to destroy sin and to save the life; But if nothing will satisfie you but our blood, fill ye up the measure of your Fathers, that ye may have blood to drink, and that we may fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of our forefathers, and of the sufferings of Christ in our flesh, for his bodies sake, which is the Church; And now see what is it that ye thus pursue, what am I or what are we, are not we the weakest of all men, that is to say of our selves, for we are made low in our own thoughts, and contemptible in our own eyes, that the power of the Lord alone may be exalted in us, for by the grace of God we are what we are, it is not of our selves, it is the gift of God, and to him only I do commit our cause, for we have none other to fight for us, but only the Lord, who alone by the right arm of his power hath made thousands willing this day, I do believe, in England, rather to have their outward Tabernacles of flesh torn in pieces then to yeld to that wil of man that is contrary to the righteous Law of God, for we know that the utmost of your power is but to kill the body, and then you can do no more; Therefore hath the Lord brought us into the pure fear of him that can both kill and cast into hell; and these things do I lay before you, that ye may take heed of pulling innocent blood upon [Page] your own heads, for the Lord hath made me a plain man, and in plainness I write unto you, and I leave what I have here written to that of God in you, and in all people to see whether the Magistrates sword be not, be born in vain this day in England.

By one that is a true lover of all your souls, being known amongst men by the name of Humphrey Brewester.

The 2d. of the 7th. month called September, 1662.

THE END.

Information about this book

Title statement

To the mayor, aldermen, majestrates and officers of the military force in the city of London and county of Middlesex for you to receive and in patience to consider.

Brewster, Humphrey.

Edition statement

1662

Publication

Publisher

Text Creation Partnership,

Place of publication

Ann Arbor, MI ; Oxford (UK) :

Date

2008-09 (EEBO-TCP Phase 1).

ID [DLPS]

A29355

ID [STC]

Wing B4435

ID [STC]

ESTC R31628

ID [EEBO-CITATION]

12196928

ID [OCLC]

ocm 12196928

ID [VID]

56011

Availability

This keyboarded and encoded edition of the work described above is co-owned by the institutions providing financial support to the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership. This Phase I text is available for reuse, according to the terms of Creative Commons 0 1.0 Universal. The text can be copied, modified, distributed and performed, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Series

Early English books online.

Notes

(EEBO-TCP ; phase 1, no. A29355)

Transcribed from: (Early English Books Online ; image set 56011)

Images scanned from microfilm: (Early English books, 1641-1700 ; 1500:7)

Source

— To the mayor, aldermen, majestrates and officers of the military force in the city of London and county of Middlesex for you to receive and in patience to consider., Brewster, Humphrey..

Extent

7 p.

s.n.,. [London? :: 1662?]. (Caption title.) (Place and date of publication suggested by Wing.) (Signed: The 2d. of the 7th month called September, 1662. Humphrey Brewster.) (Reproduction of original in the Bevan-Naish Collection.)

Creation

Created by converting TCP files to TEI P5 using tcp2tei.xsl, TEI @ Oxford.

Editorial practices

EEBO-TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Michigan and Oxford and the publisher ProQuest to create accurately transcribed and encoded texts based on the image sets published by ProQuest via their Early English Books Online (EEBO) database (http://eebo.chadwyck.com). The general aim of EEBO-TCP is to encode one copy (usually the first edition) of every monographic English-language title published between 1473 and 1700 available in EEBO.

EEBO-TCP aimed to produce large quantities of textual data within the usual project restraints of time and funding, and therefore chose to create diplomatic transcriptions (as opposed to critical editions) with light-touch, mainly structural encoding based on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org).

The EEBO-TCP project was divided into two phases. The 25,363 texts created during Phase 1 of the project have been released into the public domain as of 1 January 2015. Anyone can now take and use these texts for their own purposes, but we respectfully request that due credit and attribution is given to their original source.

Users should be aware of the process of creating the TCP texts, and therefore of any assumptions that can be made about the data.

Text selection was based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL). If an author (or for an anonymous work, the title) appears in NCBEL, then their works are eligible for inclusion. Selection was intended to range over a wide variety of subject areas, to reflect the true nature of the print record of the period. In general, first editions of a works in English were prioritized, although there are a number of works in other languages, notably Latin and Welsh, included and sometimes a second or later edition of a work was chosen if there was a compelling reason to do so.

Image sets were sent to external keying companies for transcription and basic encoding. Quality assurance was then carried out by editorial teams in Oxford and Michigan. 5% (or 5 pages, whichever is the greater) of each text was proofread for accuracy and those which did not meet QA standards were returned to the keyers to be redone. After proofreading, the encoding was enhanced and/or corrected and characters marked as illegible were corrected where possible up to a limit of 100 instances per text. Any remaining illegibles were encoded as <gap>s. Understanding these processes should make clear that, while the overall quality of TCP data is very good, some errors will remain and some readable characters will be marked as illegible. Users should bear in mind that in all likelihood such instances will never have been looked at by a TCP editor.

The texts were encoded and linked to page images in accordance with level 4 of the TEI in Libraries guidelines.

Copies of the texts have been issued variously as SGML (TCP schema; ASCII text with mnemonic sdata character entities); displayable XML (TCP schema; characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or text strings within braces); or lossless XML (TEI P5, characters represented either as UTF-8 Unicode or TEI g elements).

Keying and markup guidelines are available at the Text Creation Partnership web site.