Mormon Classics | Spalding Library | Bookshelf | Newspapers | History Vault
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Lawrence Greatrake (1793-c.1840) Lights and Shades... (Pittsburgh, 1836) |
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Rigdon mentions in text below: p. 15 p. 24 p. 29 p. 34 p. 40
"Rigdon Revealed, 1821-23" | Greatrake's 1824 pamphlets | Campbell's first reply (1824)
Elder Walter Scott's 1824 pamphlet | Rev. Alexander Campbell's 1825 pamphlet
Greatrake's 1826 pamphlet | Greatrake's 1827 pamphlet | Greatrake's 1830 pamphlet
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LIGHTS AND SHADES OF THE WATERITE REFORMER, AND ONE FACT APOSTLE; ALIAS, ALEXANDER CAMPBELL, V.D.M.B.B BY A REGULAR BAPTIST, ALIAS, LAWRENCE GREATRAKE, PHYSICIAN IN ORDINARY TO THEOLOGICAL ADVENTURERS AND REFORMATION LUNATICS! "MENEN AEIDE THEA." "The Reformer's wrath to me -- the direful spring Of woes unnumbered -- Ossian like, I sing." 'Ad populam phalcris, ego te intus et in cute novi.' "Away with those trappings to the vulgar; I know thee both inwardly and outwardly" -- au fond -- "to the bottom." Pittsburgh: PRINTED FOR THE PUBLISHER. 1836 |
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==> An Irishman, just from the Emerald Isle, and who, like the Reformer, could do any and every thing, and a little more, was sent by his employer into the woods to fell trees, and make rails. He cut down and butted a gigantic gum, and commenced in sturdy maulings to open it; but after driving a dozen or two iron wedges into it, and exhausting himself by a half day's pounding, he found that he had lost his wedges, his time and his labor, thus far. A thunder storm, accompanied by rain, coming up, the Irishman took shelter under some umbrageous saplings, close by; and while there, the lightning, attracted by the wedges, split the log to pieces; when the son of Erin clapped his hands and exclaimed, in the humor peculiar to the 'Queen of the ocean' -- "Arrah, by my showl, but you have met with YOUR MATCH NOW!" ==> From those editors to whom we shall send a copy of this pamphlet, we look for some respect to be paid to the character of the press, and that they will contribute an item in the premises towards neutralizing the infernal infamy that such wholesale editorial caluminiators and forgers of lies as Campbell are clothing it with; that they will exemplify, somewhat, fiat justitia ruat coelum. This request will appear reasonable when it is rememberes, that such fellows as Campbell take care to attack, as far as possible, the defenceless; and that their master pieces of slander are against those who have no press by which they may defend themselves; and that what they may do through such a medium as this, is likely to be, in a great measure, at their own expense. So that while Campbell gets a 10 or 20 dollar note for every lie he publishes, they have to lose that much in exposing the lie. So hell triumphs through such religious periodicals, Millennial Harbingers, as the primitive faith Apostle's! ==> A single copy of this pamphlet is 25 cents; six or more copies, 16 cts. each; to be had at the Monongahela Bridge, and at the 'Emporium of Fashion.' Market, between Third and Fourth streets, and at the bookstores generally, in Pittsburgh. [ 3 ]
TO
Sir: -- The attempt that you have lately made to consign my name to infamy, through the medium of your Harbinger, is, no doubt, estimated by the multitude of your mole and bat proselytes, as an auto ad fe -- an act if faith; worthy the great apostle of the "ONE FACT and ONE DIPPING" gospel; while thousands of others may conceive, that you were sublimely bold in adventuring on such a publication concerning me, unless sustained, at least by sub rosa responsible authority, and indubitable facts. Leaving the former to luxuriate in the regions of fancy, while admiring your piety and extolling your CAPACITY, I would suggest to the latter, that you had understood, that I had gone, or was going, to a region of the country, (Texas,) where I should no more hear your Arabic name, or see aught from your oracular and veracious pen: at least, you knew, that I was a thousand miles from you, and, as you concluded, no doubt, and not likely to be back in this region of country again: hence you felt soldier-like and brave as Col. Pluck astride a mammoth hog. So much for your heroism -- your more than Numidian lion nerve! No! you are one of the hecatombs of theological adventurers, and religious speculators, and stock-jobbers, with which this mighty mole-hill, earth, is cursed at the present day; one whose craven, poltroon spirit, and whose soul of mud, seek refuge and security under the profession of christian, and a christian minister, from all responsibilities for the nameless and unnumbered villainies that men of your genus, CAPACITY, and means, can enact with impunity, within the limits of the "glorious law!" Your Elymas attributes of subtlety, prompts you to devise and inflict ceaseless wrong and outrage upon the feelings and characters of those who are really christians among your opponents, under the conviction, that their principles will prevent them from taking that vengeance which belongeth unto God, but which your unprincipled insolence provokes, and your nefarious calumnies richly entitle you to, at their hands. You have only to attempt a few more moral assassinations -- perhaps you may find one such, as we are about to notice, sufficient -- and you may be made to bite the dust -- you may be shot down as a nuisance to the earth; not out of revenge, but to the end, that the CAUSE of your death may gain the notoriety and circulation that the devil gives to your Tophetian Harbinger; and that without expense or loss of time to the objects of your unmeasured traducements. At all events, imitate some other modern christian leaders, and go armed with pistols and dirks, so that while you enact the moral and editorial bravo, you may have at least the appearance of physical unison; and -- in Arminian parlance -- a 4 chance for your life. The time is rapidly coming, hastening as an eagle to the prey, when thousands of such religious editors and ministers as you are, will answer and atone with their lives -- and without the intervention of law -- for their jugglery and profligate calumnies. Read, mark! or you must digest! This may be a digression. We proceed to add -- if the objects of your traducements calim but the prerogative of worms, to resent your licentious abuse of them, so far as to vindicate their characters, and turn the poisoned chalice to your own lips, then your, and your serpentine proselytes' subtelty, oozes forth, in vociferations and philippic against them, as being destitute of all christian forbearance, charity, and forgiveness; * and thus you would have christian charity, that "rejoiceth in the truth," award a premium for lies; and thus, jointly, would make the word of God pander to your slanders. If no vindication is offered by your intended victims, then do you and your Satan satellites construe and proclaim their silence to be evidence, strong as proof of holy writ, that they are guilty in the premises; while, to cap the climax, you, and your rag tag and bobtail proselytes, would make it the duty of those whom you attempt morally to assassinatem to prove a negative -- devolve the onus probandi on those whom you accuse! Truly, your's is a Procrustean bed -- if a man is too long therefor, you will mangle and butcher him shorter; and if too short, you will stretch him to dislocation. You conceive, that because old women and children, and booby men, are terrified at the idea of being published in such a squib and cracker, pop-gun cannonading paper as your's, that there must be something appalling as the ghost of Banquo, or of Saul, therein, to every one; that the stoutest must necessarily quail and be brought couchant and crouchant to your feet, to deprecate your wrath, and woo your clemency, by qualifying, if not recanting, your own base lies and slanders! A man, however, of any moral dignity and spirit, would as soon think of stooping to the worship of the devil, as to approach you thus, or ask any such corrections at your hands. __________ * Among the religious editors who have had us in their papers, was one Uriel B. Chambers, of Ky. who forged a vile story about our lectures on the "Signs of the Times," being horribly blasphemous, and disgustengly vulgar and obscene. His tale was re-published by the coxcomb editor of the "Christian Index;" † and from that print other pious editors transferred the article to their columns; among whom was Bicknell, of the "Counterfeit Detector." We subsequently sent Bicknell a pamphlet, vindicating our lectures from every such charge, by the testimony of numerous professing and non-professing gentlemen among our hearers; and exhibiting as indubitable evidence, that the pettifogging religious editorial U. B. Chambers was about as unprincipled a LIAR as there was in all, even procreative, Kentucky, and as a base a FORGER, as this pamphlet proves Campbell to be; at the same time, we sent Bicknell a note, expressing our contempt for the man who could thus intermeddle with other men's matters, and thus use his press against an isolated individual, and a stranger. Well -- instead of noticing our vindication, this wool-dyed hypocrite our private note to him, with prefixes and affixes thereto, in the form of canting homilies about christian temper, charity, forbearance, and forgiveness. Thus these gentlemen of the press, who laud themselves to the third heavens as being every thing of noble mindedness, amor patriae, and Constitutional principle, will enact the parts of scuttle-fish, and moral bravos, for any popular, purse-proud, bloated religious demagogues; and then in the PIETY of their father, ‡ and to avoid the consequences of their licentious traducements, they will affect great defference for the word of God, and quote scripture to prove their voctims villains, in their self-vindications; and themselves saints in the service of Satan. O tempora! "When the devil was sick, the devil a saint would be; When the devil was well, the devil a saint was he." † Wm. T. Brantley, of Philadelphia. ‡ Matth. iv. 1 to 10. 5 Time is a necessary element in all things; and time, (12 years,) has fully convinced my own mind, that my first impressions, and all that I then, (and as the FIRST MAN WHO EVER TOOK A PUBLIC STAND AGAINST YOU!) said and wrote concerning you, were essentially correct and true. If ever a human being's official life was characterized by one unbroken scene of mental prostitution, and all moral obliquities, trick, finesse, cajolings, scenic thunder and lightenings, thine is that life! "Thou art the man!" Having, for the government of my own life, laid down the principle of "lashing naked round the world" every liar and calumniator that attempts to degrade the cause of God and truth in my person, and having this far unfalteringly adhered to, and triumphantly acted on that principle, I feel no disposition to relax, or constitute exceptions! and if I did, you would be the last to whom that forbearance would or should be extended; as towards you, it would smell rank and foul of treason against all that is true and lovely from heaven, and all that is pure and upright on earth. I had hpped that I was done with you; but you have compelled me to notice you once more through this medium, and on you must rest the consequences. In by-gone days, I exposed you as a gilded ritten post -- a whited sepulchre, which without appears beautiful, but within is full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. Even so you also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within you are full of all hypocrisy and iniquity; as we shall demonstrate, to more than your heart's content, in the sequel. In doing this we shall perform a task, loathsome as that which a physician encounters when he has putrescence to dissect. But the result of our labors may be to demonstrate in your person, Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat; "Whom God designs to curse, he first gives up to madness:" and that if Satan wounds our heel through the medium of the Bethany Reformer, our's is the perogative to bruise his head in the person of the same august Representative of his ebon throne.
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
N.B. Infuriated are you -- you breathe out threatening and slaughter against every one of any prominence in the religious worls, who sternly refuses to call you a christian! I have ever been one of them. Serpents may couple with birds, and lambs with tigers, ere I would call you a christian. Again -- you affect at all times to consider yourself as being entitled to the courtesy, swaviter in modo, due a gentleman! Ah, no doubt you are. And so as truly were the Pharisees, and Elymas, entitled to the same courtesy. And so would an incendiary, midnight assassin, be entitled to the same swaviter in modo, when being taken to the penitentiary or the gallows! But we are not of that number of fools, knaves, or would-be-mock gentlemen who give a premium to villainies, by being traitors to the essential interests of society in confounding, in their deportment towards others, virtue and vice -- the Jesuit with the Israelite, in whom is no allowed guile.
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Sir: -- Some one says, a liar is worse than a thief; for against the inroads of the altter, you may oppose bolts and locks. But what bar shall obstruct, or how will you close the mouth of the former? This sentence prompts me cordially to avow, that I am fully convinced of your flea-like smartness and homer 6 like (extra hogshead) CAPACITY; and that it is extremely difficult to catch you in a lie; while the simple reason is, you are no sooner in one, than you are out of it into another. Ex pede Herculem. Hercules is known by the size of his foot, you know; and the dimensions of your CAPACITY may be, in some tolerable degree, conceived of, from the following paragraph, found in your Harbinger, Vol. 7, No. 2, page 84, or Feb. 1836, No. "It has pleased the Lord, in his all-wise providences, sometimes to unveil the opposers of his cause, and to let both friends and foes, even in the present life, see what manner of spirits oppose Reformation, under the mask of zeal for sound principles and practices. In our public attempts to revive and restore the primitive faith and manners, it has been our lot to be opposed and fiercely assaulted by many persons of much influence with the people; and I doubt not but amongst our opponents have been persons of sterling principle and integrity. But with all our charities alive and active, we must confess, that, in our judgment, such opposers have been a very small minority in the host of assailants whom we have had to encounter. Two of the most zealous of these champions for metaphysical regeneration, who have greatly injured us by false representations, have recently been completely unmasked. LAWRENCE GREATRAKE, a name familiar to the readers of the Christian Baptist -- a Regular baptist of high Calvinian stamp -- for whom not only many preachers of different shades, amongst the regular baptists, but also among the Presbyterians, had much affection, as a defender of their faith, and for whom they opened their meeting-houses, pulpits, and purses, because of his sayings and doings against us. After offering much incense at the shrine ot Bacchus, this militant preacher of the popular doctrine has openly renounced Jesus Christ as an impostor; and, as recently and credibly reported here, has put on the profession of atheism." There's a flight -- there's a Sam Patch leap -- there is a stroke of genius, the hand of a master! There, there, we have the primordia rerum, the first principles, in the Reformation of all Reformations! There we have the moral diastole and sistole of the Buffalo Bishop -- the Harbinger of the Latter-Day Glory -- the Millennial morn! Thou art the man who swelleth, like the frog in the fable, in ineffable self-complacency, that thou art destined to be, a John the DIPPER, to Christ's second coming without sin unto salvation, and and to reign a thousand years on earth! Our's is the enviable preogative to give thee exaltation, high as Haman's, if not as novel as Absalom's -- to aid to embalm thee in the admiration and grateful reminiscences of remotest posterity -- and touch once more the fame of the greatest man the nineteenth century has produced. It is observed, 1st. -- You publish me as having been, or become, an open renouncer of Jesus Christ as an impostor, after I had offered much incense to Bacchus! So much you affirm and publish, on your own open and unqualified responsibility, as being truth and fact; while that which you affirm on report -- credible report, is, that I had "put on a profession of atheism!" a distinction without a difference! I perceive that you design to shelter yourself under the plea, that all you have published is a report. So your Sejannus soul is ever thus artful in preparing some hole to retreat to, when you have crept up and stabbed your victims. But here you will fail to find shelter; for by every law of exegis, and rule of grammar, all that preceeds the copulative, "and," of charge against me, is your own, and not another's! and so I shall treat it, and consider you as having pronounced me a toper and an infidel. 2nd. What a lofty minded man you must be, to make such charges against any one, with alluding to the time when, or the community where, these things took place; or naming any individual as the credible authority you affect 7 to have! What a Draco you would be in your laws, what a Norbury in your decisions, had you the power to make the one, and dispense the other! As liberality does not consist so much in giving largely as in giving seasonably, we would, matchless man, with becoming deference, lay the following documents and suggestions at your feet, to establish your claim to the character of a christian reformer, equal to his who forged a dying recantation of the Rev. August Toplady -- that ascendant of champions for predestinarian doctrine, (Including metaphysical regeneration,) of the 18th century, ==> So, then, at the very time you were hatching this Bacchanalian and Atheistical tale concerning me, the representatives of one of the largest states in the Union -- who had known me for a year -- were estimating and treating me as a christian and a christian minister; fearlessly, faithfully, and -- as they are pleased to say -- ably discharging my official duties. But you -- near a thousand miles off -- could see that I was a Baccanalian and an Atheist! or, at least, you could see that I offered much incense at the shrine of Baccus, and had openly renounced Jesus Christ as an impostor; while some ondits assured you, that I had put on the profession of Atheism. But, again to documents --
8 We would refer, for similar confirmation of what the Apostle of the ONE FACT Gospel has published concerning us, to the following gentlemen, residing in ILLINOIS. -- ElderR. M. Newport, Doctor Norton, Palestine, Crawfold co., George Redman, Wm. Green, Paris, Edgar co.; Benjamin Parker, Cha's Morton, Charleston, Coles co.; Elder Wm. Crow, Jacksonville; Col. Charles Prentice, Vandalia; Berry-Man Creele, Carlisle, Clinton co.; L. Adams, Esq., Dr. Roman, Lebanon; Gov. William Kinney, Gideon Simpson, Belleville. Now, if there is one of those gentlemen that does not confirm the TRUTH of what the great apostle of the One Fact Gospel has published concerning us, just as much as Messrs. Stephens, Oxley and Kennard have, then Campbell is no scoundrel Liar, no fool calumniator, no vile Forger. It is to be hoped, that if the Reformer, or any others interested in the matter, should write to those gentlemen, or any of them, that they will pay the postage of their letters. Ni, we will except the Reformer, and promise him, that such will be their individual and united disposition to bear testimony to his CAPACITY for falsehood, calumny and forgery, that they will cheerfully incur the expense of postage. ==> Only let him state the charges, he has made against us, in his communications to them! Should the Apostle want more similar confirmation, we refer him to our paper, titled, "Signs of the Times," published in Mo. up to May 20th, 1836. But as the foregoing documents and references embrace only two years of time, or my character and labors in Illinois and Missouri; and as by the term, 'recently,' the Buffalo Bishop may in his famous latitudinarianism, mean four or five years, instead of two years, we shall take the liberty of referring, in a passing way, to our three years labors in Kentucky. For instance -- Elder Lawrence Greatrake: 9 your course with joy. So pray your affectionate brethren in the "faith once delivered to the saints.Well, thou prince of visionaries, one might suppose the foregoing to be quantum sufficit of testimony to satisfy the most voracious appetite, short of that of hell and the grave. You see what a large letter I have written to vindicate your veracity, and place you, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion! Had you committed yourself to any measure of nefarious and malic prepense slander, everybody knows you to be capable of magnanimously retracting what was set down in malice, and of amply apologizing for yourself by ascribing it to lapsus pennae -- a slip of the pen! __________ * One object that we have in view, in referring to Kentucky testimonials, is, to shew that not only were there no limits set to the subtle and brazen-faced misrepresentations of us, and ruffian-like assaults made by thousands on our character there; but to add, that Campbell's proselytes were among the most vulgar and licentious of those liars. Who can reasonably doubt it, with what we are now making manifest of their Pope, before their eyes? "Like priest, like people," all the world over. Or what will their masters not do, when low villains can thus presume? What are we not to expect from the principals, when we are thus insulted by their subalterns? 10 Verily, you are a Bertrand, Skalspeare, Sir Archy, and Eclipse, in vault, and wind, and bottom, in SOME THINGS. You have, no doubt, read the old legend, that represents the devil to have been once walking on the sea-shore, to cool his thunder-blasted brow, when he perceived a lobster rapidly advancing towards him; but no sooner did the gifted creature see his Satanic majesty, than he began to move backwards as fast as he has been speeding forwards. Whereupon Satan, in admiration, exclaimed -- "By my imperial horns, but you are a racer!" With what full-orbed complacency, unebbing as the tide of eternity, he must hover over and around you, as a racer! The insignia with which he has invested you, are more numerous than those of prince Esterhazzy, at a continental congress of royality; and compared with which, topaz is ebony, and the diamond an ink-drop. If we have exhibited a chief d'oeuvre of the brillants that corruscate on your majestic brow, it is only an earnest of our unveiling scores of others of little inferiority of water; and the concentrated radiance of which must not only establish your claim to the character of a reformer, but constitute you a religious and editorial phenomenon in its perehelion, glowing o'er, radiating, and vivifying these western moral wilds, as the monarch of the day, rolling in vernal spelendors, gives life and animation to the countless offspring of old mother earth! Ad interim -- come thou, expressive silence, muse his peaise!
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
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It may not be irrelevant for me to mention, that a Mrs. Mary Zachary, an old-fashioned predestinarian baptist, a mother in Israel, first apprised me of the distinguished notice you had given me in your Harbinger. She was on a visit from Owen's Station, St. Louis co. Mo. (mark her address!) to her children, settled at Dixon's Spring, Tennessee; and from which place she wrote to me as follows.
11 You will be duly sensible of, as well as thankful, no doubt, for my kindness in thus catering for the gratification of your self-complacency, by giving this additional evidence of your morally sublime CAPACITY. And to prevent the cup of your exultation from being incomplete, we may inform you, that we have had two sons with us in our Illinois and Missouri tour -- or for 2 years past -- who will rise up to confirm your claim to prodigious CAPACITY, if not exactly your claim to VERACITY. They will be able to tell your children what a unique you were, and how entitely by truth and righteousness you got the wealth they will inherit from you! I shall now proceed to a brief analysis of the extract, and draw forth therefrom such an assemblage of virtues, that their united sweets shall torture your sense. You say -- "It has pleased the Lord, in his all-wise providences, sometimes to unveil the opposers of his cause, and to let both friends and foes, even in the present life, see what manner of spirits oppose reformation under the mask of zeal for sound principles and practices." The presumptuous and impious familiarity with which the names of God and of his Christ, are pressed into the service of all that is corrupt and corrupting in the religious Bedlam of the age, is enough to hermetically seal the lips, and paralyze the pen, of every Israelite indeed, in reference to the use of those sacred names. As an instance -- here is the ascendant of reformers, coupling the name of the God of the universe with the foulest lies, and most nefarious slanders! His own malicious fabrications, his own fiend-like traducements of a man, he represents as being the Almighty's providential unmasking him! Well, no wonder the Buffalo bishop, and his proselytes, generally, catch at any thing that they may conceive of as being a veil! they have certainly use for every thing of that sort they can buy, beg, make, or steal, to cover up, but partially, even, their own leprous diffusing corruptions. These infamies they call reformation -- the cause of God -- the primitive faith and manners. Yes, primitive enough, beyond all contradiction, as we find the devil to have been the father of such reformations, belying and slendering even the Almighty himself, for the purpose of reforming in the garden of Eden! (gen. 3, 4, 5.) Again: This sui generis reformer says -- "In our public attempts to revive and restore the primitive faith and manners, it has been our lot to be opposed and fiercely assaulted by many persons of much influence with the people; and [I] doubt not but among our opponents have been persons of sterling principle and integrity: but with all our charities alive and active, we must confess, that such opposers have been a very small minority." The reformer gives us to understand, that he has labored, like old ocean into tempest tossed, to revive and restore primitive faith and manners. Yes, we have ever conceded, that the "prince of the power of the air" has worked in him mightily; and we are now exhibiting specimens of his primitive faith and manners. By their fruits we shall know them. And we would humbly opine, that any principles and practices, masked or unmasked, opposed to his primitive faith and manners, can scarcely be less than correct and good, and that zeal therefore would not discredit any man. We are told that he doubts not but among his opponents have been perosns of sterling principle and integrity. His qualifications to judge concerning sterling principle and integrity, after what we have detailed, are not to be called in question! Sancho Panza could say, "Blessed be the man that first invented sleep;" but by what invention the reformer has been invested with any faculty to apprehend anything of sterling principle and integrity, is as mysterious as polar attraction; but that he is lynx-eyed, and an Argus, in such appregensions, is not to be called in question by 12 any one who expects to be interested in his great salvation. We may suggest, that all of those opponents whom the reformer has succeeded in cajoling or flattering into his Falstaff, regiment-like ranks, are perosns of sterling principle and integrity! their having him as their Custos morum guarantees that -- while all those who remain his fierce opponents, are thereby demonstrated to be the very Simon Maguses and Julians of the age! His charities are obtruded upon our notice, and are not to be passed by without receiving that attention they deserve: he tells us that they were all alive and active. This must have constituted an epoch in his wonderful life: his feelings, under their influence, must have been as strange as those of incipient maternity, or as light and air to newborn infancy. His charities! in magnitude, no doubt, equal to a globule of the blood of those animalculae, of which, according to a celebrated Naturalist, are more in the milt of a single cod-fish, than there are men, women and children, on the face of the earth; while if the globules of their blood bear less the same proportion to their bodies, as those of man do to his, then it may be proved, that the smallest grain of sand, visible on the sea-shore, would contain more of those globules, or drops of blood, than ten thousand two hundred and fifty-six of the largest mountains in the world would contain grains of sand! Whew! St. Anthony's devils -- twenty thousand of whom could dance a saraband on the point of the finest cambric needle -- were very Goliaths, compared with them: and then the quality of his charities quadrates with their regular magnitude: they are like the thorns and thistles of the forest wild: they do but afford a shade for the hissing serpent of SLANDER to repose beneath, or shower their mock beauties on the deadly asp of heresy. Matchless man! we hope his Atlean shoulders will not groan, crack, and break beneath the avalanche of his lively and active charities; and that their splendors may not abash and oppress his modest and retiring soul. A specimen of those peerless charities is found, in characters of more than living sapphire, in our second letter. We shall terminate our third letter, by returning unto our second person PLURAL, and just to say -- en passant -- one of your ruse de guerre -- your vilis artificium -- is, if possible, to villify into non-resistance every antagonist that you dread; to parade yourself as a very Hector of Troy with the quill, and any you deem comparatively imbecile; and flatter into partizans all that are vain, and the mere scum and offals, moral vermin, * of other religious sects: in all of which you demonstrate that subtlety of the serpent, and the conscia mens recti, worthy of the POLYPHEMUS REFORMER of this age of ages.
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
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In the next two sentences of the extract, you are pleased to say -- "In the list of assailants whom we have had to encounter, two of the most zealous of those champions for METAPHYSICAL regeneration, who have greatly injured us by false representations, have revently been completely unmasked. __________ * Many have been the cursing, swearing, and drunken, habitually drunken members of the Campbellite churches; and among them, deacons, too! He gets into his synagogues little more than natural, corrupt, and cirrupting materials, who are ripe for any enormities, and who exhibit Italian attribute in bold relief. But bid him go to hell -- to hell he goes." 13 LAWRENCE GREATRAKE, a name familiar to the readers of the Christian Baptist -- a Regular baptist of high Calvinian stamp -- for whom not only many preachers of different shades, amongst the regular baptists, but also among the presbyterians, had much affection, as a defender of their faith, and for whom they opened their meeting-houses, pulpits, and purses, because of his sayings and doings against us. After offering much incense at the shrine ot Bacchus, this militant preacher of the POPULAR doctrine has OPENLY renounced Jesus Christ as an impostor; and, as recently and credibly reported here, has put on the profession of atheism." Here, thou pink of magnanimous candor, and dignified ingenuousness, you inform us, that among the list of your fierce assailants, there were two of a superlative degree of fierceness, and who are now completely unmaksed. Unmasked! UMASKED!! Was conscience telling you a tale? or what mirror were you contemplating yourself in, when the idea of a mask so irresistibly fastened on your imagination? 'Twas a palpable optical illusion, only accounted for upon a principle of solar reflection and refraction, in the contemplation of yourself! Unmasked! Unmasked!! How truly this illustrates and confirms a recondite criticism on all great dramatic authors, namely, the principals of their dramatis personae they always draw upon themselves for -- as in Milton's Satan, Shakspeare's Richard the Third, and Campbell's Lawrence Greatrake! So your par nobile fratum J. M. PECKS, URIEL CHAMBERSES, and scores of kindred religious editors and authors, have made L. Greatrake appear on their canvass, what L. Greatrake has subsequently demonstrated them to be, in living flesh and blood -- in principle and in overt-act!! But L. G. has offered much incense at the shrine of Bacchus. How classical, how significant, how ingenuous, is this suggestion! When, where, at whose house, in company with whom, it was not necessary for the REFORMER even to suggest! His 'say-so' is enough. Much incense! What was the 14 Richelieu, the cunning of a Mazarin, the insensibility and cruelty of Louvois, the profligacy of Dubois, the suppleness of a Maurepas, and the activity of a Vergeanes. But what, pray, was your object in thus FORGING, (for you have given no authority, as you have none to give,) such lies concerning L. Greatrake? It was to slander and calumniate, in my person, all who have ever been, or hereafter shall be, your opponents, at least prominent opponents, by representing what your lies make me appear to be, as a personation of them! This liberty you took while L. G. was a thousand miles from you, fondly dreaming that you would escape the lash your profligate enormities provoke. Another specimen of your reformation -- your primitive faith and manners! It appears that I have injured you greatly by, what you call false representations. Why did you not specify some, at least, of those false representations? In the absence of such specifications, did nit not strike you, that you appear the liar? particularly in connection with what we have exhibited, and shall exhibit, in these pages. In making this charge, you allude to my LETTERS to, and MINIATURE PORTRAIT of you -- two pamphlets published in 1824. Ah, they were like Hercules' shirt to you; they made you writhe from head to heel; and to this day, no doubt, you feel them to be like a sheet of lead to a gouty foot, or a plaster of cantharides to a fresh wound. You will recollect, that those pamphlets were written over the signature of 'A Regular Baptist;' and that you got my real name by sacrificing your veracity and word of honor as a man, a professed christian, and christian minister! The principal object I had in view, in not giving my real name, only on a principle of mere justice to you, was, that I knew how capable you were of taking all dastardly advantages that your press could give out against an opponent situated as I was. I will give you once more the written condition I left with the printers of those pamphlets, and on your compliance with which condition, they were to give you my real name. Messrs. Eichbaum & Johnston:Well, what did you do? Did you go to Caesar's tribunal? Did you take the legal measure to prove that there were false representations of you? No! but you sneaked off to your editorial kennel, to bark forth your gratuitous charges and malevolent lies against me; and by putting together odds and ends of what I had written to you, to make me appear a monstrum horrendum, a horrid monster, for your proselytes to chatter at and about, like an army of 15 monkeys in a cane-brake. 'Tis true, you came to see me with the now Mormonite Sidney Rigdon, (then your right-hand man as a reformer,) and Walter Scott, and complained to me that there were false representations of you in my letters. I told you to go to Caesar's tribunal and prove the falsehoods, as you were solemnly pledged to do. You replied, that we were both christians; and you wished the affair to be adjusted on gospel principles. I asked you, if you thought I was a christian? you answered certainly. I then replied, that I should lie like Lucifer, if I were to say, that I thought you were a christian! and so I say still. Thus low, and thus dastardly, were the means by which you got my name, to render it familiar to the readers of your lying sheets, and to hang it up in the shambles of your Christian Baptist, where you have cut up and quartered hecatombs of the best of characters, for your proselytes to feed upon, with the appetite of jackals. You perceive I am making steady, if not rapid, advances, towards demonstrating you to be the ascendant of all theological illuminati -- a pillar of cloud by day, and if fire by night, to all that have eyes, but see not; and of consequence, the knight La Mancha of all reformers. But as expectation makes the blessings dear, and as it is a gratification to me to imbue my services, on your behalf, with every ingredient of happiness, I shall suspend my remarks for the present with the suggestion, that you must, at least, already appear an admirable exemplification in your own life and character, of the "Allon iatros, autos elkesi bruon" of Plutarch -- the physician of others, while he himself teems with ulcers.
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
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Sir -- In the extract under notice, you are pleased to tell the public, that I am, or was, a regular baptist, of high Calvinian stamp, a zealous champion for metaphysical regeneration -- for whom many preachers of different shades among the regular baptists, as also among the presbyterians, had much affection as a defender of their faith, * and for whom they opened their meeting-houses, their pulpits, and their purses; because of my sayings and doings against you. At the same time, you, in that extract, state those sayings and doings to have been "false representations, and by which you were greatly injured!" So, then, those regular baptists and presbyterians, of different shades, did not open their meeting-houses, their pulpits, and their purses, because of their much affection for me as a defender of their faith, but because of my greatly injuring you by false representations! This was the case, or you add another lie to the long list. In fact, you would make it appear, that they never opened their meeting-houses, their pulpits, or their purses, for me until I began to greatly injure you by false representations -- which is, notoriously, another lie; for their meeting-houses were as much opened to me before I knew you, as they have ever been since. As the purses of presbyterians and baptists having been __________ * Here, then, is the very Goliah of slander against me, testifying, that I have been a devoted defender of the faith of regular baptists, and of presbyterians! that is of the faith avowed in their formulas! Such I have been to this day! Therefore, purses having been opened for me, the most soul-harrowing opposition and abuse have I sustained from them -- (here and there an individual exception;) because I would not succumb to their traditions and inventions. 16 opened * to us, you are not to be believed by any honest-minded man, until you state the when and where, with good endorsement. The object of your expressing yourself on this point so ambiguously was, to escape, if possible, detection in a literal lie, though conscious of being guilty of a lie virtually, or morally. YOur design is to give your readers an idea, that streams of money have flowed in upon me, from baptists and presbyterians, in all directions; and then, if you are pushed to the wall, and made to answer distinctly as to what you mean -- O, then, you only meant that some of their purses had been opened to me; but as to what amount they gave me, you don't pretend to say; you don't know that they gave me any thing, or that there was any thing in their purses to give! So you exemplify the "ad captandum vulgus" -- so you ensnare the vulgar -- so conscientious are you at times, lest you should literally lie: like some chaste and faithful wives, who, to avoid dishonoring their husbands' beds, take special care to occupy some others with their paramours! I know and understand you, au fond, to the bottom! A likely story, indeed, that the baptist and presbyterian churches would not open their meeting-houses and pulpits of me, as an object of their affection, on account of defending their faith -- "esteeming me very highly in love for what they conceived to be the truth's sake" -- and yet open them, and their purses too, for abusing and falsifying you! Truly, you move a 'pas de geant' -- with a giant's stride. You will soon be elevated as high as the apex of Pompey's pillar or Cleopatra's needle, as a truth-telling editor, and enabled to exclaim -- "Cedite Romani scriptores, cedite Graii!" Yield, ye Roman, and also ye Greek writers. Surely my gratitude is due to you for having published me in your pearly pages as being, or having been, a regular baptist, of high Calvinian stamp, and a zealous champion for, (what you most philosophically denominate,) metaphysical regeneration. Ah yes, I have been a very decided and unfaultering contender for the doctrine of slavation from power, pollution, and love of sin, by and "through the sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth," in contra-distinction to the doctrine of believing the truth for the sanctification of the Spirit. The Spirit agent -- instrument the word! I have testified, that __________ * So a balderdash proselyte of your's (A. H. F. Payne, of Ky.) said on board of a steamboat, some few weks since. Among other things he affirmed, that we had been cordially received and hospitably entertained by a Mrs. Marshall, of Washington, Mason co. Ky. and that she had liberally donated money to us, when we never had been in her house, had never sen a picc-une of her money, and nevr had spoken to her only once, (from her carriage,) when she requested to be introduced to me! Mrs. M. was a presbyterian. 17 God, the Spirit's, is the perogative, and his only, to "bring a clean thing out of an unclean" -- (2 Thess. 2, 13, and Job. 14, 4:) that it is the Spirit that quickeneth: the flesh, (moral, intellectual, and physical powers of man,) profiteth, or availeth, nothing therein -- (John 6, 63:) that God gives a new heart, takes away the heart of stone, and gives a heart of flesh: puts his Spirit within men, and causes them to walk in his statutes, to remember their own evil ways and their own doings, and to LOATHE themsleves in their own sight, for their iniquities: and thus the Lord cleanseth them from all their iniquities -- (Ezek. 36, 26 to 33.) This constitutes the washing of regeneration; that washing that the Psalmist implores at the hands of God; and which Jesus refers to when he says -- "If I was thee not, thou hast no part with me;" and that the apostle speaks of when he says -- "But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and BY the SPIRIT of God" -- (luke 13, 8 -- Psalm 51, 2 -- Titus 3, 5 -- 1 Cor. 6, 11.) We have testified, that no man can come unto Jesus, except the Father, by that Spirit, draws him: 1 that no man can call Jesus Christ, Lord, but by the Holy Ghost: 2 that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty: 3 that it is the Spirit of adoption, by which the sons of God, the elect, call him Father: 4 that it is the Spirit of sanctification, 5 of union to Christ; 6 the Spirit of strength; 7 the Spirit of prayer and supplication; 8 the Spirit of witness, 9 of love, and a sound mind; 10 the Spirit of repentance and faith; the Spirit of glory; 11 resting on and preparing the vessels of mercy for an exceeding great and eternal weight of glory; and that, if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his -- though he may have the Bethany, and a thousand copies of a hundred other editions of the New Testament -- and make a hundred thousand dollars in bald, disjointed, syllabub commentaries on them! So we have believed, and so we have preached; and if this be metaphysical regeneration, we glory in it as a constituent of the doctrine of the Bible. And why not? Because you have enacted the part of an Iscariot to, (kissed and betrayed,) that constituent of gospel doctrine, as well as other constituents -- such as the triplicity of moral distinction, or personal subsistence, in the divine nature; the sovereignty of Jehovah Aleim; the purposes of God; the personal, particular, and eternal election of the subjects of salvation; the speciality of the atonement as to nature and application; the perserverance of the saints to glory, through the alone righteousness of Christ; is it, I say, because you, finding that such doctrine would neither multiply your converts, or fill your purse, or the "measure of your earthly glory," that you have apostatized therefrom, that others are to abandon and deride it as being metaphysical? Cannot your vain, money-loving, muck-rake soul, conceive it possible, that there are those who can estimate the truth of the gospel, just in proportion as they make sacrifices for it, as much or more than you do in making a hundred thousand dollars by it, and getting the fame of a reformer? No -- ame de boue -- thou soul of mud -- no such conceptions can enter the heart of such a theological petit maitre! With you, 'gain is godliness;' and the clink of Mammon's box sweeter music than the symphony of the spheres, or the diapason of heaven. More of this anon. Do you ever read your printed theology of former years, and ere you set up trade, or opened a sort of Cario slop-shop of theology for yourself? Perhaps not. I will therefore stir up your PURE mind to a few reminiscences on the subject. But I would not have you suppose, that I attach any more value __________ (1) John 6, 65 -- (2) 1 Cor. 12, 3 -- (3) 2 Cor. 3, 17 -- (4) Gal. 4, 6, and Rom. 8, 16 -- (5) 2 Thess. 2, 13, and 1 Pet. 1, 1,2 -- (6) 2 Cor. 3, 13 -- (7) Ephes. 3, 11 -- (8) Rom. 8, 26 -- (9) 1 John 5, 10 -- (10) Rom. 5, 5 -- (11) 1 Pet. 4, 14. 18 to your profession of the truth, than I do to your hocus pocus one fact and one dipping gospel. In the former case, your profession, at best, amounted to nothing more than Horne Tooke's Jowler's probo Aliter, or Poll Parrot's "Polly, put the kettle on!" and in the latter case, your profession is but argumentum ad crumenam -- an argument to the purse. In your Circular letter of 1817, for instance, you recognize the Trinity in unityas being the "most fundamental doctrine of the christian religion." You add -- "next in order to, and inseparably connected with, the former doctrine, is, the will or purpose of the Most High in creating men and angels, as revealed in the scriptures as the end of all his works" -- (page 1.) You then pronounce the divine purpose to be "ancient as God himself; 2nd -- that they are independent; 3d -- that they are immutable:" (page 2.) You then tell us of the elect angels, of the number of man's months, of his appointed time, of his fixed habitation. And with respect to the souls and eternal state of all men, you say, "the same language runs through the divine oracles: hence we read of some appointed unto wrath, and some appointed unto salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ: hence we read of some ordained to eternal life, and of some ordained to condemnation; of some vessels of mercy afore prepared unto glory, and some vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:" (page 3.) On page 7, you say -- "So, then, if there be no election, there is no salvation." On the same page you affirm -- "The testimony of God reveals the achievements of Jesus Christ as the means, and the alone means, of salvation." ==> Not the belief of the one fact, and being immersed, do you there recognize as the means of salvation! You add -- "So, then, if there be no revelation, there are no means of salvation. From this it appears obvious, that none but those born from above," (not of water! that's from beneath!) "can use the means of salvation; and such only are exhorted to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling." "All the promises," you say, "are addressed to men as believers, and not as unbelievers." You add -- "When the Holy Spirit accompanies this word, then, and then only, is it effectual: no man can profit from the scriptures, but as he is taught by the Spirit that indited them; which gift of the Spirit is as sovereogn as the sending of Christ into the world." (Pages 7 and 8.) In a word, in that letter are the doctrines of Trinity in unity, of Jehovah's sovereignty, predestination, personal election, unfrustratable vocation, regeneration by the Spirit's direct influence, alias metaphysical regeneration, special atonement, justification by Christ's righteousness, and the final perseverance of the saints, the elect, from grace to glory. In reference to these truths, and kindred ones, you remark -- "When our minds are ecercised in the consideration of this great subject, in the light of revelation, we would scarcely suppose that an objection could exist against it: but, alas! the scripture plainness of any doctrine is no defence against the cavils of poor, blind, deluded man. There is not a truth in the revelation of God, against which the pride and ignorance of man does not object. Some object against one part, some against another. But this doctrine has had a host to oppose it in all ages. From the days of Cain, down to the present age, objections have been urged against it." "But what are the objections? And from what quarter do they come? 'Tis all one whether we take them from the mouth of Cain, the obstinate Jew, the sceptical Greek, the infidel Roman,, or the MODERN ARMINIAN. Their objections are one and the same." (Too metaphysical! aye.) "Moses, in his day, withstood them; Christ silenced them; Paul refuted them; and the saints, in all ages, have testified against them." "The natural man," you say, "cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them. So that this doctrine, instead of being 19 adverse to the salvation of any, it is only in consequence of its being true, that any can be saved. So that except the Lord of hosts had a remnant according to the election of grace, we had all been as Sodom, and perished as the men of Gomorrah. So, then, if there be no election, there is no salvation." (Pages 6 and 7.) This doctrine, then, that you blow like a grampus whale against at this time, deride and sneer at, and publish as metaphysical -- and which your magpie bishops and proselytes are, as your echos, decrying -- you once solemnly professed to believe, as you published them, to be fundamental truths of the word of God. And you pronounced their opponents to be natural men, reprobate to the truth -- Cains, sceptics, infidels, and Arminians! * Then, who, what, and where are you at this time? Are you not evidently one of those poor, blind, deluded men, who, in cavillings against the truth, manifest that the scripture plainness of any doctrine is no defence against pratings and malicious philippics in opposition thereto? In the spirit of all apostates, your happiness and glory lie in seducing or persecuting into defection from the truth as many others as you possibly can; while you are exaperated at disappointment in proportion to the ability and prominence, as advocates for truth, of those you essay to reform. There are some, no doubt, whom you might reform, if you could guarantee to them a moiety, or a fourth, of the mammon of unrighteousness that you have secured to yourself from your reformation. But few there are whose CAPACITY can be compared to your's, in the illustration of the art, science, or craft, incident to the 'Aurum e stercore,' or bringing gold From Dung! Common justice, however, requires us to concede, that if your life exemplifies the vivere rapto, or that you live by diverse plunderings, including that of robbing heccatombs of their good name, your marvellous writings, and tweedledum, tweedledee proselytes, have no less evinced that 'vocem comoedia tollit' -- comedy carries the day.
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
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Sir -- As we progress in our Lights and Shades of your eventful life, you may begin to feel, that though tiger-hunting is a delightful recreation, while you hunt the tiger, that it is not quite so agreeable when the tiger takes it into his head to hunt you. I have already suggested, that any champion for that doctrine which you, in your circular of 1817, represent as embracing the fundamental truths of the gospel -- the Trinity in unity -- sovereignty, election, &c. † -- such a champion you dread, and shrink aghast from, as Milton's Satan shrunk from the __________ * Publish that circular of yours! ah, publish it! publish it as a monument of your ministerial knavery, or of your religious ignorance or apostacy, or of ALL! † We perceive that the "Old School General Assembly Presbyterians," are beginning once more to "awake, and arise from the Pelagian Arminian" (Arminians are but the varnished offspring of Pelagians!) "dead." It is time that they were aroused; for that seductive, treacherous Delilah, had well nigh shorn them of their strength -- bound them hand and foot, and delivered them to 'the dogs without' -- the uncircumcised and unclean. Their's was nearly an Ichabod state. No one will realize more heart-felt satisfaction than we shall, on witnessing them redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, 20 wand of Ithuriel. There is no such man, of whom you stand in dread as a past or prospective antagonist but what you studiously, artfully, or insolently attempt to degrade, to the end, that you may have an appearance of plausible pretence for not accepting his challenge; and from the same politic considerations, you sneer at those truths, including regeneration by the afflative influences of the Spirit, as metaphysical, mystical, and a mere bag of moon-shine. This is an easy way of achieving a conquest -- as much so as that of Caligula's of Briton, or Domitian's of the Catti! No, you will never, never meet a champion for those fundamental truths of the word of God, the gospel of Israel's salvation: or if you should have the temerity to resolve to do so, you shall never want an antagonist, while life and ordinary health are continued to your atheist, LAWRENCE GREATRAKE! as, for the sake of demonstrating how great is truth, and how insignificant you are, as an opponent thereof, I will engage to become your opponent myself -- and so far do violence to my feelings, as to controvert with one whom I conceive to be a living sepulchre of moral duplicity and mental prostitution -- with one whom I have found to be the most malicious liar, and audacious slanderer, of all the hundreds of thousands of human beings with whom I have been acquainted. I shall, in that event, pluck The feathers from the daw, or tear the lion's skin from an assine biped. Not only so, but at the same time I would engage to demonstrate, that all the more prominent passages of scripture that you refer to for the support of your "chaos and old night" theology, are no authority at all therefor, the subject of baptism excepted! ==> Could you anticipate the quid pro quo -- as many thousand dollars from the publication of a debate on those truths, as you have realized from your debates, or either of your debates, with McCalla and Owen, on the, mere externals of religion, you might be goaded to embrace it. At all events, avarice and apprehension would produce an effervescence in your breast, like the union of alkali and acid; and develope emotions that the pencil of Hogarth would be baffled in depicting. But to return to the extract. You there represent me as being, or having been, a militant preacher of the popular doctrine. High Calvinian doctrine popular! Well, we thought that that was the doctrine against which the vox populi mutters forth the diabolo, Tiberio, tetrior of an opponent of old; and which the multitude of professed Christians in this day, in volcanic-like rage, proclaim to be 'a cursed doctrine!' We thought that FREE WILL was still, amor et delicae humani generis, corrupted nature's deformed darling, and that it found open hearts and arms, for its adulterous embraces, in every direction. And if we thought correctly, you must have falsified in the premises; and we will prove that you knew better, and that you lied in the case wittingly! You shall be witness against yourself! In your circular letter of 1817, you say, in reference to this high Calviniait doctrine -- (including what you now call __________ as a church: to see them unfurl once more the banner of that glorious gospel, from whence they derive the blessed fundamentals of their "sound speech," their "good confession" -- and rallying beneath its resplendent living STARS and STRIPES * -- and wielding the "sword of the Spirit" against the countless hosts of Pelagian, Arminian, Socinian, Sabellian, &c. errorists, that now swarm our country, would indeed be to make one's soul as the chariots of Aminidab -- to exclaim with one of old, "How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob! and thy tabernacles, O Israel! Strong is thy dwelling place; and thou puttest thy nest in a rock." For our own part, we feel no interest in, or value a snuff, all that transpires on earth in the name of the gospel, and of the church, or of religion, but the promulgation of the doctrine of sovereign, discriminating, unfrustrable, reigning and triumphant grace! All else is lie and delusion, and will and must work desolation on earth. * Rev. 12, 1 -- Isaiah 53, 5 -- 1 Pet. 2, 24. 21 metaphysical regeneration!) "But alas! the scripture plainness of any doctrine is no defence against the cavils of poor, blind, deluded man. There is not a truth in the revelation of God, against which the pride and ignorance of man does (do) not object. Some object to one part, some against another, But "this doctrine," (high Calvinian doctrine,) "has had a host to oppose it in all ages." ==> How you must have lied then for how impudently you lie now! Happy, enviable man, to have such a choice! But happier stuff to have such spiritual gifts! You know, that almost all professors of religion, of all denominations5 including your own amphibious sect, vaunt of, and affect, at least, to triumph in the assurance, of that doctrine soon becoming extinct from the face of the earth; as you may know, that not one out of twenty of those who profess to be Calvinian preachers, are more or better than mongrel at best -- half Ashdod, half Hebrew -- wool and hominy; having their sermons larded or honeyed with terms and conditions, offers and proffers of salvation -- sermons, the Calvinism of which is as the size of an ostrich's head, and the Arminianism thereof as the size of its body; and by all of which they catch or make proselytes without number, and who, as 'dead flies,' cause the apothecary's ointment tg send forth a stinking savour. Your ipse dixit makes me a militant or fighting preacher! Well, from such authority there is no appeal! Whatever of retrospective falsehood there may be in representing me as a fighting preacher, I should opine that there was something prophetically true in the representation, did I not know you to be the basest of poltroons -- a miscreant who would butcher a thousand of your species to secure your ill-begotten wealth, or to revenge your wounded vanity, if you could do it with impunity: at the same time you would forswear all, rather than jeopardize your craven existence. As to polemic fighting in defence of high Calviniun doctrine, I have had none of that, and for this simple reason, I have never met with any reformer, or other Arminian or Fullerite champion, that would dare to meet me as an antagonist. They know that they would have to fall before truth, as Dagon before the ark; that they would be demonstrated to be nothing, essentially, better or more thau baptized infidels! In such a case you know that you would prove yourself to be a mere theological puff-ball, a flask of cucumber sun-beams, or a bag of moonshine! Hence you will never dare to meet such an opponent; but will rather resort to any vile lies, or base subterfuge, to avoid it! to excuse yourself! But if you had meant by my fighting, that I have had to collar half dozens of reformers at one meeting, to overcome their attempts to prevent me from getting into a meeting-house, and to battle with them as Paul did with similar beasts at Ephesus, (I Cor. 15, 32,) and to drive them from me as so many filthy, jabbering ourang-outangs -- and to expose their lies and calumnies, as I am now exposing their POPE'S -- if by this, I say, as well as similar rencounters with many others of the pie-bald Arminian and pseudo Calvinistic sects of the present day, you mean to say I am a militant preacber -- then you for once tell the truth: so, it is said, pearls are sometimes found in toads' heads' But more particularly in reference to what you call my false representations of you, would I now remark. If those representations have existed, or do exist, they must be found in the letters I wrote to you and published in 1824, or they are nowhere to be found. I have already made it manifest, that you did not dare to go to Caesar's tribunal to prove, or attempt to prove, those falsehoods, though you solemnly pledged yourself to go to and to prove at that tribunal, that there were those falsehoods in those letters, if my real name was given to you. You got my name on that pledge; but you took care not to go to Caesar's tribunal! What's the inference? Why, that no such false representations were made of you!! while the violation of your solemn'pledge, in connection 22 with the base object you had in getting my real name, is a lasting monument of infamy to you. I shall recapitulate every prominent representation of mine concerning you and your proselytes in those letters; and that recapitulation I find in the last of those letters, and which in substance is as follows. "Sir -- In recurrence to what I have written, you will perceive, that I mean to be understood as saying, that you never gave the baptist denomination any evidence whatever, that your becoming professedly a baptist was the 'answer of a good conscience:' on the contrary, there is much reason to say of you, in reference to conscience, as the poet said of women -- 23 baptist would ever cast in his lot among a people, of whose religious character he was to judge by your's: no, though he was never to have any connexion with the church militant. So, then, all that we can intelligently calculate upon of proselytism by you is, of those from whom we had much better be separated. 24 derive great satisfaction in reading the bible; to have much, peace and joy in their attainments of knowledge. Now, the truth is that in every stage of their profession of religion, the pride of their minds, the vanity of their hearts being gratified, is the sole cause of their satisfaction. Indeed, the whole of your fraternity, from first to last, including yourself, sir, are flaterers of each other. They say that there is no teacher like you: you respond, there are no people so intelligent and well instructed as them. * You recollect, I presume, who 'obtained a kingdom by flatteries.' Bear in mind also, that it is written on good authority, 'he that speaketh flattery to his friends, even. the eyes of his children shall fail;' and that the characteristic of a gospel minister is, I not to use flattering words;' for that is to set down, as 'a cloak of covetousness,' after fame or emolument, or both -- as in your case. Now, it is not my wish to be understood as disapproving of all possible devotedness to the perusal of the scriptures; but I wish to be understood as saying, that, generally, they read, for no other object, and to no other end, than to grow wise in their own conceit: and you know it is written, that 'there is more hope of fools,' than of such characters." Here, then, is the substance of what I wrote to and concerning you in my letters of 1824, addressed to you over the signature of "A Regular Baptist:" or if there was any thing more predicated of you, it is found in the declaration, that you designed to "dissolve, if possible, all existing connexions between pastors and churches; and thus to efect the first step towards making the latter your followers, or proselytes to your system of theology, under the direction of your agents; and in thus doing, consummate the measure of Your fame, by becoming the acknowledged head of some new, though yet nameless, sect." You professed to be bent on destroying a swarming generation of ravening clergy; but it was only that your own more ravening ministers might get the loaves and fishes of the former! If what we then predicated and predicted concerning you, and your bamboozled followers, are not now notoriously stubborn facts, and matter of history, then the Berkley philosophy is true, and there is nothing real; all is merely imaginary, that lives, and moves, and has its being, under the heavens! We have some variety and no little amount of addenda, to attach to our former reflections on your vanity and avarice, and the general characteristics of your proselytes. For the present we will comniend our clemency by giving you a momentary respite from the thumb-screws which we are about to add to the knout; and by which we shall illustrate in your person, if it was ever exemplified, the Hic niger est; hunc tu Romane caveto † -- of Horace. __________ * Most fully were all these characteristics developed in the BAMBOOZLER'S church in Pittsburgh, under the co-pastorship of Sidney Rigdon, (now a Mormonite bishop!) and Walter Scott. But it is Fuit Illium -- "Troy was"-- with this, as with a large proportion of the Campbellite churches - they rise and fall like toad-stools. † That man is of a black character: do you, Roman, beware of him. 25
Letter 7th,
Sir - I would add, in reference to the general characteristics of your amphibious disciples, and after seeing them in thousands as individuals, and scores as churches, that no sooner do men and women, boys and girls, become reformers, than their tongues begin to go like the pendulum of a clock, and with as much noise almost as the machinery of a steam engine: they appear bipeds filled with buck-eyes or young clover -- distending with wind that threatens to burst them, if it finds not vent -- or an inflammable gas, that forebodes spontaneous combustion, unless let off through the condenser or safety valve of reformation hocus pocus. At all times, almost, by day and by night, are they heard clamoring, about the belief of the one fact and being immersed, like flocks of sea-gulls in a storm. It is to be observed, that the most of your proselytes are those who have been members of some one of the several denominations of baptists. Hence, those who become reformers, are generally apostates from a prior profession, or faith: and if fiell furnishes a mischievous, subtle, malevolent, corrupt and corrupting church materiale on earth, it is found in such apostate professors. To account for our getting so much of such materiale, we are to refer to the spirit of proselytism that has been abroad in the baptist church for the last 30 or 35 years. This rampant, lawless spirit, began to operate among the baptists in the large cities, where it was expedient, or thought to be expedient, that the ministers should occupy what, in fashionable parlance, are denominated genteel, respectable circumstances; and to that end, those ministers must have liberal salaries; and to realize liberal salaries, it became absolutely necessary that they should have multitudes of proselytes, and large congregations. To realize these, every device was but into requisition, including fine, or even splendid meeting-houses, the witchery, and salvage soothing power of music, together with a corrupt, consequently popular, alias, Arminian gospel. These things enabled, as they still enable, those baptist ministers to make christians, or to find the saints of the Most High, the elect of God, in all business prospering, money making communities, from those of the magnitude of Boston, N. York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, down to those of Erie, Cleaveland, and Massillon!! Hence it is settled, to demonstration, with such ministers, that where they cannot go for money, or with money, there are no christians to be made, no souls to be saved, no people for the Lord! This spirit of proselytism soon began to spread throughout the country, like fire in the prairies -- rather, like the crackling, noisy fire in a cane-brake -- until thousands of baptist ministers, from the dignity of D. D.'s, down to old granny imbecility and ignorance, were putting forth every effort, art, and artifice, to rival each other in the work of proselyting, converting, or making baptists, of blue, black and grey devils, in the form of men, women and children. The D. D.'s, and other ministers of the higher order, had a subsistence -- respectable circumstances in life -- together with the gratification of their vanity, to realize from their proselyting; while the imbecile, ignorant, and OLD GRANNY part Of those ministers had, comparatively, only their vanity to stimulate and propel them: but that vanity was a very steam power. The natural consequence of these things was, that what were called baptist churches, were made up, or almost universally incrustated, with 'wood, hay and stubble,' and were obnoxious to be set on fire, when the devil might please to throw his BRANDS among them. A vast majority of those called regular baptists, never had believed in the doctrine of the faith of that church, and secretly hated it as bitterly as Jew 26 ever hated Samaritan; at the same time, they conceived of baptism (immersion) as a positive pre-requisite to becoming members of any ostensible and visible church; so that they were, in fact and essentially, reformers -- nothing more or less than Waterites, ere your APOSTLESHIP began. And experience abundantly demonstrates, treat this sort of baptists are wont to estimate variety in religious notions and professions, as being the spice of godliness! They are as fond of change, as women are of dress or gew-gaws, or as children are of toys and sports. Under these circumstances, then, you were THROWN into the religious arena, "set on fire of hell." The baptists, baptist churches, and baptist ministers, among whom you made your debut as a baptist minister, were not only of the character of materiale that we have,just described, but among them obtained an unusual extent and diversity of mere natural CLANSHIP and family influence, and by which a great deal of profession as baptists obtained, and consequent corruption in their churches, and those churches' Association! You wrote that Association a very Calvinian Circular letter, by way of allaying suspicion; and then you and your father commenced going from county to county, from neighborbood to neighborhood, from house to house, to "win golden opinions" in favor of your embryon reformation. In achieving this, never did two men exemplify, in bolder relief, the language of an apostle, in 2 Tim. 3, 6, 9 -- and of another apostle, in 2 Pet. 2, 1 to 3 -- than did Thomas and Alex'r Campbell. Truly, ye were industrious to make proselytes. You applied yourselves to particular persons; visited them in their houses, not daring at that time to appear openly. You crept into houses, to insinuate yourselves into the affections, (mere natural affections,) and good opinion of the people, and so to draw them over to your system of things. Those that you succeeded with best, were silly women and weak men, and such as were ladened with sins, (of lying, tattling, slandering) -- led away with divers lusts -- lusting after what was strange and new. A foolish head, and a filthy heart, make persons, especially women, an easy prey to seducers. Well, as soon as ever those pseudo regular baptists, among whom you began your operations, found an avenue to escape by, from their 'first faith,' they commenced aiding you to produce open schism and anarchy in every church within the bounds of the Redstone Association; and to betray, decry, insult, falsify and slander down, all who opposed your 'unfruitful works of darkness;' while that clanship, and that family influence, we have adverted to, were especially serviceable to you as a midwife, in bringing forth your incestuous progeny, your bell-hound spawn. In this manner has your REFORMATION, your primitive faith and manners, exemplified themselves; thus they have spread like lurid exhalations from bogs or quagmires -- or like crackling thorns and briers, a noisy blaze, and soon over: while you and your maniac-like proselytes become exasperated, like so many foaming demoniacs, as you witness the evanescent existence of your synagogues, called churches -- and as time proclaims you to he a knave, and them fools, in the predictions and promises that you have published, and they echoed, of the triumphs of your reformation, and of its being destined to embrace all Christendom in a few years! To these exacerbated feelings is to be referred your rccent nefarious and fiend-like publication concerning me. Fully understanding you, from the beginning of your ecclesiastical jugglery, theological humbug, and religious pantomimes, I drew you to life; I made the canvass breathe with all you were then, and have since been; and in the hour of your mortified pride, and wounded vanity, you would spit the whole of your toad-like venom on me, in revenge for what disservice I did you then -- 'greatly injured' you, as you say. Poor fool! Where was the occasion for your 27 publishing that! Don't you perceive, that it will not only be a satisfaction to your opponents to know that, but it will encourage others to aim similar blows at you; at the same time that it proclaims, that, out of malice, to glut your revenge, you published what you have published concerning me? Ah, your shilly shally, canting, hypocritical exordium, proves, that from such a principle you wrote. one might conclude that you were FUDDLED, in no small degree, when you made that statement. Well, I freely avow, that I do not consider you to have injured me by any thing you have published concerning me; to be dispraised by you is no small praise! Therefore, I write, to benefit others, by giving them due estimation of, and confidence in you, as, 'Facile princeps,' the admitted chief, of all reformers; and that from personal experience I may know, 'Felix qui nihil debet' -- happy is the man who OWES nothing! After all -- "Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid;" for you will make from sixty to a hundred thousand dollars by your reformation -- your primitive faith and manners -- even if that PANTOMIME should vanish, like the baseless fabric of a vision; and that sum will be, latter-day glory, and millennial reign, and primitive faith and manners, and glorious reformation enough, for one such modest and temperate Worshipper of the mammon of unrighteousness as you are. You will be able still to say and sing, with Horace's miser -- Ipse domi, simulac nummos contemplor in arca." "The populace hiss me; but I applaud myself at home, when I contemplate the money in my chest." There is another satisfaction which you must enjoy in a supreme degree, and that is, the assurance, that whatever lies and slanders you may or shall publish, or have published, concerning any prominent opponent, your proselytes will prove very hounds, (I speak of them, generally -- there are exceptions!) in yelping them out in, every part of the country where we have met them, and have been a stranger, we have had them thus bow wowing against us -- from your Bentlys down to your crazy Tate. Often have we had occasion to predicate of them, as synagogues or churches, as Milton speaks of the progeny of sin and death. Endandering often, of those lusts beget These yelling monsters, that, with ceaseless cry, Surround us, For when they list into the wombs That bred them, they return, and howl and gnaw. Then bursting forth Afresh, with conscious terrors vex us round, That rest or intermission find we none: Before our eyes in opposition sit Their demon priests, our foes, who set them on." In sooth, yourself, gifted and ocean like as you are in CAPACITY, are but a degree or two in advance of many of your Reubenite bishops and their precocious converts, in the science of falsehood and traducement. You may excel them in invention, but they equal you in invention, but they equal you in impudence! Like yourself, too, they have no wish for truth, or thought of decency; they are without care of any reputation, but that of stubborn adherence to their fee-faw-fum reformation, alias, your 'primitive faith and manners.' Like you, they carry on the same 28 tenor of representation, through all the changes of right and wrong: endorsing and publishing each other's lies and calumnies; neither depressed by detection, nor abashed by confutation, proud of their houry increase of infamy, and ready not only to boast of all the contumelies that their incessant falsehoods may bring upon them, as new proofs of their zeal and fidelity; but to predicate increased claim to the character of reformers, to primitive faith and manners, upon increased demonstration of their capacity to make, and their love for and devotion to lies. If your proselytes are not apostates from some other profession of religion, they are, generally speaking, the canaille, the mere dregs of society; and with many of them, nothing has prevented them from enacting, or attempting to enact, the part of assassins on our own person, but physical cowardice. No clerical demagogue and followers ever constituted a more entire unit in every execrable attribute, than what your kaliedescope reformation embraces: and no wonder, when we remember the sources from whence its materiale is derived, These Letters can scarce fail to be "velitu in speculum" to you -- a mirror in which you shall behold your enchanting loveliness; and, like Adonis, dissolve in tears of delicious rapture, in the contemplation thereof; though some may conceive, that those letters are like the arrow that pierced Philoctetes' foot; and that you SMELL not more sweet than did that Grecian warrior, when wounded and left on the island of Lemnos! Alas! you will never find a Machaon; you will continue wounded -- continue to stink -- the most while living. If not, 'twould be pestilence and plague to live near your sepulchre.
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
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Sir -- We have already briefly noticed what you have said concerning the pulpits and purses of baptists and Presbyterians, of different shades, having been largely and liberally opened to us; as we have, in connexion therewith, just glanced at your own intense devotion at the altar of the mammon of unrighteousness -- the god of this world. We shall now enlarge our remarks on those points; and in so doing, you, no doubt, will sensibly realize, that nothing is so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as rough truths. You then publish us as having had the purses of baptists and Presbyterians, of different shades, largely and liberally opened in contribution to us. This, sir, is a LIE, second only to your representation of us as having denounced Jesus Christ as an impostor, or your on dit of our having become a professed atheist! So, you may remember, that in 1824, you published us as having been hired by the 1st Baptist Church of Pittsburgh as their minister -- getting a salary from them for preaching to them, when that church publicly declared, that we Were many scores of dollars out of pocket in our service for them. Here is their testimony. "At the request of Elder L. Greatrake, the Church took into consideration the following assertions of Alexander Campbell in his 'Christian Baptist' No. 2, vol. 2, in reference to this church, and the said Elder L. Greatrake -- to wit: 'This gentleman, (meaning our pastor,) is at present hired by a party who were excluded from a regular baptist church, at least by a church that was recognized, at the time of their exclusion, as such.' Wherefore, resolved, that 29 this church utterly disavow having hired the said Elder L. Greatrake to be their pastor: on the contrary, this church do authorize their Elder, if he thinks proper, to say publicly, that we feel confident, that be, our pastor, is many scores of dollars out of pocket, in attempting to do us service in the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. And furthermore, we utterly deny the latter assertion of Alexander Campbell, in which he says, that we are an 'excluded party from a regular baptist church.' On the contrary, we have the best of testimonials to prove the reverse: and we do authorize our pastor, to make use of any part of the testimonials he may deem proper, for the purpose of publicly refuting the statements of Alexander Campbell. C E R T I F I C A T E. "Whereas, a request by certain individuals of the Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, according to a resolution of the Association, for a committee of five neighboring churches to meet at Pittsburgh, on the 11th October, 1823, to consult on certain points of doctrine, which have occasioned misunderstanding between the members -- We, the undersigned, do agree, that there is just ground of complaint against the doctrines protested against by certain members of this church; and that all the members who adhere to the doctrine on which this church was first constituted, be considered by us the existing Regular Baptist Church in Pittsburgh." So, then, four Baptist ministers, and nine laymen, or ministers and members from five Baptist churches, proclaim you by their decision, (a decision that had been known to you nearly a year,) a liar and calumniator, in representing this people as an excluded party; as they proclaim you to have been a slanderer of myself as the pastor of an excluded party, when I was pastor of an orderly baptist church: and that church proclaims you to have been a liar in representing me as an hireling. In 1824, you did quite respectably in your vocation; but in 1836, you can out Herod Herod, and flidg your former self into the back ground. Those you would have represented as the Regular Baptist church of Pittsburgh, and the excluders of that party, were Reformers, or Waterites -- made so by you and Sidney Rigdon. Hence, what a wool-dyed scoundrel would that man prove himself to be, who, as a fortune hunting traitor to his own country, should dare to report and publish those who abhorred his treason, and resisted his subtle and impudent emissaries, as 30 being themselves traitors -- outlaws! Truly parallel was your conduct in the foregoing instance, as it has been parallel in many other instances! Such bold and high-handed measures, you have found to be like flaming granites poured from a volcano among your opponents; and they constitute the fundamentals of your primitive faith and manners. Truly they are indicative of 'gabier de potence' -- garne for the gallows - or a Newgate bird! Purses opened to me! No, sir -- I have been 14 years in the ministry -- travelled 80,000 miles -- and never asked a cent from saint or sinner -- while all that I have ever realized of contribution was spontaneous, and in amount not more than would pay for my horse-flesh, or provide suitably for me in sicknesses incident to my exposures in all seasons and climates. But you, like myriads of others, will consider these declarations apocryphal! And why? Because, judging from your own sordid souls, and knowing that such disinterested ministerial labors are of themselves sure to solicit the most malign persecutions of such gospel speculators and stock-jobbers as yourselves, from the circumstance of their being a rebuke to your individual avarice -- hateful, if not as appalling, as the memorable TEKEL - 'thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.' But thus to labor, and thus to sacrifice, were nothing, and less than nothing, when compared with the incessant Norway billows of abuse, and Euroclydon of lies, beating upon us at every point of the compass, from the hundreds of thousands of devil-possessed men and women, girls and boys, which you, and others like you, in selfishness and knavery, cajoled or frightened into a profession of Christianity, to gratify your vanities, and make merchandise of, as hood-winked and zealous proselytes! But our storm is nearly over, and there is no Gabhaim -- HIGH ONES on the throne of the universe -- if your and those kindred speculators' storm is not brooding for another and eternal world. You may then find your money to be not only aurum potabile -- drinkable gold -- but molten also. You represent me as having been, up to the time of my openly renouncing Jesus Christ as an impostor,' a 'regular baptist minister, of high Calvinian stamp:' well, you will not dare to say now, that in all my ministry, I have ever "asked leave of any Board of Missions, nor their support; but confiding in the power and faithfulness of Him that called me, I have looked up to heaven for every provision, protection, and support, by land and sea, necessary for safe conduct thither: and also for success when I arrived." * For 14 years, and to the extent of 86,000 miles, I have thus made 'proof of my ministry.' Do you know another man in the United States that has gone and done likewise? No -- you do not! JAMES OSBORNE, (a high Calvinian baptist,) comes nearest to it. He, too, has in some good degree been independent, fearless and faithful, as an apostle; spurning and trampling upon, and abhorring, the use of, mere sectarian pride, pomp, vanity, jealousies, and rivalry. Well, let any such man, holy and intellectual, if possible, as an angel, fulfil THE COMMISSION, (Mark 16, 15,) in the same way; and he will find all the Camphellites, and all other open and disguised Arminians and traditionizers, nineteen-twentieths of these called christians, enacting the part of incarnate fiends towards him. He will then know how much hristians esteem a man very highly in love for the truth's sake; he will find himself as poverty-stricked and destitute, as the Captain of salvation himself, who had not where to lay his bead, and who had by a miracle to furnish himself with money to pay his _________ * So wrote Campbell in 1823 -- see 'Christian Baptist,' vol. 1, page 203. But he never did it! He has more confidence in a hundred dollar note, than in all the promises of the I have done it, and he publishes me a bacchanalin and atheist!!! 31 taxes to Caesar, instead of Caesar's pouring into his coffers millions per annum!! He will find that every sacrifice, every privation, every act of disinterestedness, that characterize his ministry, will be transmuted to crimes by such wretches as yourself; and that the bewildered brains of carnal professors, and the mud-puddle affections and sympathies of mere fleshly, natural men and women, will constitute the tribunal at which he will be arraigned, tried, judged, and executed. The mere screams of vultures like yourself, and echos (proselytes) of vultures driven from their prey, will Constitute the trumpet of his fame, 'Millennial Harbingers!' In view of these naked facts, who would have supposed that any man would publish high Calvinian doctrine as being popular! But your RESOURCES are equal to any demand or emergency. You well remember how you were once wont, in your "orations on the Christian religion," to blow like a grampus whale in a north-east storm, against all milkings of the goats, and fleecings of the sheep. Turn to your 'Christian Baptist,' vol. 1, pages 26, 31,32, 35, 177, 179, 203, 226, for specimens of your bulls, decretals, and fulminas, against all money making in the form of ministerial salaries, or otherwise, by, through, in, or from the use of the gospel of God! Fiercely, too, did you reprobate and denounce the use of any other writings than the scriptures, as necessary to, or authority, for faitb and practice. Vehemently did you declaim against the multiplication and existence of ministers: they were, in your estimation, superfluous, unwanted: every man, woman and child, having the scriptures in their hands, i. e. New Testament scriptures, was capable of being his, or her own teacher, preacher, minister and bishop. Your writings, from the year '23 to '25, teem with such philippics and declamations; though we know that such is your capacity, that you are as likely as not to deny any such things were ever published by you. Well, such is the text! What, in 1836, is the commentary? Why, your sect's ministers are more numerous, three to one, than those of any other christain society, relative numbers considered! They multiply, frequently, with the rapidity of lice; and become as bishops, grandfathers,in 24 hours! and rush forward officially, vociferting, hureka! hureka! hureka! I have found it! I have found it! I have found it! And then they comnience to paw, and to prance, and to snort, in imitation, as it were, of Job or Jeremiah's war horses, about the belief of the one fact and being immersed! Of the most of them it may be truly said, Slips through the cracks and zigzags of their head." And truly it is ludicrous to witness their frog-swelling efforts at times, to exemplify the 'sublimi feriam sidera vertice' -- and To prove that one and one make two." But I forbear -- as it is to be remembered, that you are the subject of a father's pride and vanity; and will esteem your own offspring as the loveliest of all the 'fowls of the air' (see Matth. 13, 4,) though they were to combine the characters of the jack-daw and owl in their own individual persons. In respect to the Bible, more particularly the New Testament, one and indivisible, being the Shadai, ALL SUFFICIENT, as a source of instruction in divine and spiritual things -- your fourteen years' writings and publications, amounting to about FORTY VOLUMES, each as large as the New Testament -- is an imposing conmmentary!! Forty pages to explain, one! Whew! We opine your reformation is in a circle, and not in progression - and that you and your bishops, &c. are like ships in a whirlpool, or tabbies running round to catch their own tails! Multum in parvo. 32 I scarce need to reiterate, that you have made more money by your services in the name of religion, than any other man in the United States, for and during the time you have been editorially engaged; but then it was not made by preaching! No -- that's true; for you know no more about preaching the gospel, than a mole does of the lunar circle, or a mule of algebra. You might as well attempt to extract oil from a flint, or blood from a turnip, as to attempt to preach the gospel: but so far as making merchandise of the gospel is concerned -- or the love of money, or covetousness, or speculations broad, deep, noon-day, unblushing speculation, in its name, or by your use of it, is concerned, you may triumphantly boast of being a very Saul -- head and shoulders above any individual among your pious contemporaries, not excepting FREY, the converted Jew, who made a hundred thousand dollars by it; but then Frey exposed himself to every vicissitude of climate, encountered years of laborious itinerancy, with all its attendant privations -- while you have been subjected to nothing of that sort. Your money making, merchandise use of the gospel -- your milkings of the goats, and fleecings of the sheep, are now too notorious for even you, in all your matchless effrontery, to deny! This accounts for our no longer dealing out anathemas against others, for their mercantile use of the gospel, in tolerating their crimes, you do but feel for your own! As an instance of your pious speculation, take your debate with Owen. What thousands of dollars you made by that! It is well understood by men of penetration, that Owen knew your ruling passion; that he agreed to let you make merchandise of the debate, for your own exclusive emolument. You agreed to play the Achilles, and he consented to be the Hector. You got an ephemeral triumph, a chaplet of jimson leaf, if not of laurel; while Owen, adroit and skilful as a Napoleon, made use of you as a kite to carry abroad to thousands his scepticism, (through your publication of that debate,) where one would not have known any thing concerning it, had it not been for your insatiable avarice, and rampant vanity. Yes -- your printing office has been, and is, your sanctuary; your writing desk, your pulpit; your ledger, your bible; your subscription book, your psalms and hymns; your churches, your exchanges; gold is your god; and you have no faith in any thing but the mammon of unrightousness!! Truly, you are destined to illustrate, beautifully and forcibly the "Mihi cura futuri -- my CARE is for the FUTURE, LIFE!"
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
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Sir - You, it appears, have been indefatigably engaged in resuscitating the primitive faith and manners, and have thereby gained great reputation, and a princely fortune. Jesus Christ and his apostles, it is understood, were the authors and original promulgators of 'primitive faith and manners;' (manners! what a syllabub, gew-gaw philologist, you manifest yourself to be! But your booby, baby, adult proselytes, are better pleased with square inches of tinsel, or pinch-back, than with pearls and diamonds; *) and in the promulgation thereof, __________ * This man's 'reign, reform, favor,' &c. for kingdom, repent, grace, &c. may well be called the spaw water of philology: 'tis enough to make a he-mise and chemise seamstress sicken, as sheer affectation. But it is an index to his jejune, Proteus, Will-o'-the-wisp mind, the fickle fancies of a distempered brain. At the same time, such variations are estimated by his erudite readers as 'ardentia verba,' glowing words; or they otherwise amuse them as so many rattles, tops, whips, and hoops, to spring, spin, crack, and bowl. The female reformers are the most engaged in those amusements, and very often 33 they had to sacrifice their reputations, so to be poverty stricken, even to hunger, nakedness, and homelessness. What is the cause of the difference between your circumstances and their's? The cause? Why, your peerless superiodty in piety and CAPACITY, to be sure! Who can doubt that? Buf IF that should not be the case, then, as sure as fire ascerds, as water seeks its level, as effect follows cause, as wide as hell from heaven is wide -- so opposite are your 'faith and manners,' to their faith and manners! At this moment I remember, that I published a second pamphlet concerning you in 1824, titled - 'A Miniature Portrait of Alexander Campbell; being a supplement to the Letters of a Regular Baptist.' That pamphlet was reply to what you published concerning me, and of my Letters to you. well -- perhaps it is in that pamphlet that those false representations of you, which 'greatly injured' you, are to be found. The contents of that pamphlet are recapitulated on pages 22, 23, 24, and will speak for themselves. Here they are. I have shown -- 1st. That you violated your solemn pledge to Messrs. Eichbaum and Johnston, or rather to me, through them, to prosecute me, if my name was given to you. That name was given to you solely upon the condition, that you would prosecute me; and you have not done it. Instead of that, you flew to your press, and published those things as 'false representations' of you, which you knew I would, be abundantly able to prove to be truths, at Caesar's tribunal! 2nd. I have clearly proved you guilty of unqualified falsehood against me; and of slander, in publishing me as being a hired minister. 3d. I have clearly proved you guilty of falsehood and slander against the Baptist church of Pittsburgh, in publishing them as being an 'excluded party from a Regular Baptist church;' when they only separated themselves from a nest of your serpentine proselytes. 4th. I have proved that you falsified, when you published, that the Academy at Pittsburgh was offered to you; and that the managers of that academy will deny, toto coelo, that such an offer was ever made to you! 5th. I have shown, that you were guilty of unqualified falsehood, when you pronounced my estimate of the profits of your publications, 'a forgery:' that instead of its being a forgery, it fell short one thousand dollars of the gain from your publications. 6th. I have shown the strongest circumstantial evidence, that you are a compound of meanness, selfishness and vanity, from your indelicate and cruel publication of the names of the persons that you have, professedly, obliged, by becoming responsible for them -- even to your own partner, (Mr. Sala,) in business. The man that could do this, never did perform a liberal action; and ought not to have the means of conferring, a favor. 7th. I have shown, the bare-faced, flagrant injustice, that you are capable of doing a man, from your having arraigned me at the tribunal of the public mind, as guilty of having told 'one round dozen of falsehoods' without ever naming, or daring to name, even one of them; knowing, as you did, that I __________ sweat at them, as if they had spent so much time in playing shuttlecock.'Tis ludicrous enough to hear the female reformers. jabbering like so many Jackoes about Bapto, Baptistes, Baptismos, Baptisma, &c. together with relatives, antecedents, nominatives, and active transitive verbs governing the objective case! While thus clattcring over, peradventure, their wash-tubs, about Baptismos, &c. they conceive, that by their having been dipped, they were cleansed from all filth, or sin, just as their clothes are purified by water and soap. 'Crede quod habes, ot habes' -- believe that you have it, and you have it. And as a man, especially a woman, thinketh, so is she, or he. 34 should, in that event, have proved the lies to be all your own; and in evidence thereof, you did not dare to go to Caesar's tribunal, fo investigate the case, tho' you were solemnly pledged to do so. Sir, you cannot point out, in the whole annals of monkish persecution and inquisitorial barbarity, an instance of more palpable injustice, than the above charge exhibits against me. * 8th, I have shown you guilty of direct falsehood, in your stating, that you had to threaten the printers of my Letters with a civil suit, before you could get my real name; whereas, they told you, that they would not give up my name, unless you promised and pledged your solemn word, that you would prosecute me: and this they told you by my positive orders. 9th. I have exhibited you telling another falsehood, by virtually stating, that I wanted my name, as the author of those Letters, known, to give me some notoriety, when I did every thing to prevent its being made public, that, in justice to you, I could do. Mark! you say, ' I (you) had to threaten the printers with a civil suit'-- that is, to get my name; and then you say, that I was very desirous, or I wanted my name known, to gratify my vanity! 10th. I have shown you guilty of another indirect, yet virtual lie, in your calling upon me, and attempting, by equivocal language, to impress my mind with the idea, that you had been to the printers, had seen, and engaged to comply with the condition, and had obtained my name; when you had only been to the printers, and having read the condition, you refused to comply with it, and consequently did not get my name at that time. (These things neither Scott, Rigdon, or Church, who came with you to see me, will deny; or that you did not call on me as the author of those Letters, merely from suspicion of my being such: and Messrs. Eichbaum & Johnston will prove that part to which they were privy.) 11th. I have proved you guilty of falsehood, in Your saying, that I made an offer to recant part of what I had written and published about you; and all I had written about Mr. Church: and your falsehood here is evident from these circumstances -- First: You came twice to see me, and spent three hours and a half, or more, in the two visits, in trying, with all a Jesuit's artifice, to get me to recant; but you got no recantation or you would have exhibited it. Again and conclusively, that I made no recantation; is evident from my having put you under your pledge to prosecute me, before you said any thing about recantation. You had solemnly pledged yourself to prosecute me; and then, according to your story, you came to me, when you were pledged to prosecute me, and I recanted! alias, I became witness against myself, and furnished you with the means of triumphing in the prosecution you were pledged to enter against me! Holy maid of Kent -- but this would prove as sticking point for the faith of even your devotees! Had I went to see you two or three times, after publishing those Letters, (instead of you having came to see me,) and spent three or four hours with you, you might have supposed that folks would believe you in saying, that I offered to recant: or had I not known that all I had published of you was true, surely I would have gladly embraced the full opportunity of recanting, which your wonderful solidness and condescension presented, rather than be prosecuted to infamy, and great loss of money, for inflicting "great injury on you by false representations!" __________ * ==> Your recent representation of me, as having become a bacchanalian, apostate, and atheist, is certainly a parallel to it. Indeed, the manifest improvement is worthy of aspiring genius, and exalted moral attribute. 35 In a word, and not to forelose other things by continuing my recapitulation, I have given the character, I have exhibited the moral complexion, of eight small pages of your writings, as a SAMPLE for the public to judge the rest by. Add had I time, or rather could lafford to do it, I would publish strictures on the whole of your writings, or 'Christian Baptist,' that would present them in the whole lamp, as agreeing with the sample. By hypocrisy, prevarication, direct falsehood and slander, railing, sophistication and ribaldy are you indebted for your momentary triumphs over an antagonist. You persuade yourself, that you are a mighty reformer, a demi-culverin of controversy; but when closely examined, you turn out to be a mere Tom Thumb, swaggering your way to distinction by means, which, when properly known, will sink you to the lowest contempt in the estimation of all unright minds. In your wordy debates on baptism, you have come off triumphant, with the arguments of other men, of other times, as your weapons; and hence you have become full of the idea, that you will prove a very tiger among all whom you may assail. But you may yet find yourself in the coils of the anaconda, and while writhing in agony, be literally crushed in its folds. Such, then, is the substance of what I detailed and proved to demonstration concerning you, in the 'Miniature Portrait' of you, published in 1824; and most of which is already well authenticated in these pages, while the rest shall be placed above all suspicion, ere we write our -- Finis. False representations of you! Father Abraham! Why, even you, yourself, could not more than do half justice to yourself, if you were to apply to your own life and character, as truths, all the lies that you ever spake and wrote concerning others. Your nature and vocation are treachery. You live only to abuse the confidence of all that are Israelites; to inflict all that oppression can devise against the stranger; all that persecution can inflict upon the feeble; all that vice can wield against the upright; all that the venom of turpitude can pour upon the faithful; while your two-fold hell proselytes join you in this Satanic service, and which constitutes them, as churches, charnel-houses of crime -- sepulchres, where corruption sits enthroned on the merit it has murdered -- while you would jointly stifle every voice at which the martyred victims might arise to vindicate their names. You and your proselytes constitute the most infuriated, as well as nefarious sectarians, now extant. You are their Delphian oracle -- universal bishop -- infallible arbiter of all doubtful questions -- their HOLINESS -- their POPE. They are nothing, and know nothing of religious matters, but what you make them, or cut and dry for them. They can readily compass and comprehend your pea-pod, nut-shell system of theology, and then begin to sputter, like tea-pots in a tempest, thereof -- and to crow and flap their wings, like so many chanticleers within the circumference of a barn-yard, and on their steaming, foetid mounds -- vainly imagining, with yourself, that their's are the eagle's soarings, and the eagle's mighty circuits, and the eagle to glorious liberty: And give abundant sport to after days." But disease like your's demands broken doses: I shall therefore terminate this letter by intimating to you, that having given you the calomel, I shall now, secundum artem, proceed to prepareand administer the jalap. Ad interim, be assured, 'Semper honor, nomenque tuum, laudesque manebunt' -- your honor, your name, and your praises, shall ever remain.
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
36
Letter 10th.
Sir - I am now about to carry the war into Africa. This you must unquestionably thank yourself for. I am only acting on the defensive; and should most likely never have noticed you again through the medium of the press, had you not constrained me. The principal part of the charges I am about to make, are already established as truth; while as respects the rest, and the reports, I will engage to establish them as truth, essentially, whea you shall have given any legal evidence, that I am, or have been, a toper, an apostate, or an atheist. In other words -- I will engage to meet the reasonable expences incident to your proving, or doing your utmost to prove, jot or tittle of the charges you have preferred against me, before any Court -- say Pittsburgh -- provided, you shall well and truly bind yourself to pay all the reasonable expences of my proving, at the same tribunal, all, or more or less, of the following charges and reports against you; and if I succeed not in establishing the whole as truth, I shall come as near to it as the angle of a gnat's heel. Under these circumstances, it will not be your own forgeries, or the on dits or fabrications of your dog and slut proselytes, that will be recognized as evidence. They may pass current in your Harbinger as such -- as they have passed current against us, as an entire stranger, with myriads of 'human beings' like themselves. Now, then, you blustering, Hectoring, lying, slandering braggadocia -- now put in your claim to a particle of manhood -- nor disgrace human nature further by again SNEAKING away from noon-day investigation of specific charges -- or responsibilities for your own malign calumnies. * No more throw your yourself on the sympathies and lies of your PACKARDS, PAYNES, and kindred puppies, to make new bow wows, by way of diverting attention from your and their old ones! This trick is now too stale; you have worn it thread-bare; every body can see through it. You are now brought, and bound, hand and foot, to the ring; and you shall be clothed with infamy, lasting as your paltry life - infamy, long labored for, and richly merited by you. C H A R G E S. 1st. That you never were, legitimately, a member of any Baptist church; that you are an outlaw in that respect.2nd. That you have turned a complete sonierset -- are very antipodes to -- an apostate from, the faith or doctrine you first professed to believe constitutes the fundamental truths of the gospel. 3d. That you for years imposed yourself on the Regular Baptist cburch, as being one with them in sentiment and tenet, when at the same time you were designing, and covertly engaged in subverting their faith and order. 4th. That your statement of my being a toper is a forgery -- your FORGERY! 5th. That I have ever openly, or in any other manner, renounced Jesus Christ as an impostor, is another forgery -- your FORGERY! 6th. That I have, or ever did, put on the profession of atheism, is also a FORGERY -- ah, and your own FORGERY too; and that you have, and have had, no credible authority for that lie. __________ * Is it not possible that your avaricious soul can give up a few hundred dollars, out of the scores of thousands that you have bamboozled or giffled others out of, to attempt a vindication of yourself, from the foulest charges! Do, thou 'fons principium' of mammmon worshippers, have some respect and sympathy for your own immaculate character -- do!! 37 7th, That the statement you make of my having had the purses of Baptists and Presbyterians opened for me, is a lie; and the object for which you say they were opened, is another lie, and a slander too. 8th. That the whining, canting, Jesuitical complaint which you make of my having "greatly injured" you by false representations, is a lie; and that as you never have been, so you never will be able to specify one of those false representations; and that you prefaced your foul slanders of me with That sort of Jeremiad, only to hide your heart, and to furnish a semblance of apology in publishing your forgeries concerning me. Fraud works in loose generalities: - and life prolaim, that you are deeply versed in the arts of hypocrisy. 9th. That your declaration of Baptist and Presbyterian meeting-houses having been opened for me, because of my sayings and doings against you, is another lie: as, for instance, I never occupied but one presbyterian meeting-house in Pittsburgh, where I lived, and still live, and that before I ever wrote or said aught pubricly in opposition to you, or even of you. 10th. That you lied in publishing me as being a hired minister by the 1st Baptist church of Pittsburgh. 11th. That you slandered me in publishing me as being a Pastor of an excluded party of Baptists, from a Regular Baptist church. 12th. That you both lied against and slandered that 1st Baptist church, in publishing them as being an excluded party from a Regular Baptist church. 13th. That when you published, that the Academy at Pittsburgh was offered to you, you lied. 14th. That when you published my estimate of the profits of your publications a forgery, you lied. 15th. That when you published, that my printers, (Eichbaum and Johnston of Pittsburgh,) did not want to give up my name, and that you had to threaten them with a civil suit, ere you could get it, you lied. 16th. That when you published, that I wanted my name to be known, that I might have my vanity gratified by appearing as an author, and your opponent, you lied, and added insult to the lie. 17th. That when you solemnly pledged your word, that you wanted my name for the purpose of proving at Ceasar's tribunal, that my Letters to you contained falsehoods -- or, as you say, 'greatly injured' you by false representations; and then, having got my name, hied off to your printing-office, and published every thing scurrilous that your malignant heart could devise -- you lied; and by your own conduct therein, confirmed the truth of all that I had written concerning you: at the same time you proclaimed your own baseness and treachery. 18th. That when you first called on me, in reference to my Letters to you, you gave me to understand that you had got my name from the printers, and therein you also lied. 19th. That in publishing, that I had offered to recant aught of what I had published of you in my Letters, you once more, lied. 20th. That you professed to be one of the most secluded, modest, and retiring of men -- wholly devoted to the reign of Cbrist -- whose kingdom is not of this world; and at the same time, dancing attendance at battalion musters, and tavern clubs, to make electioneering speeches, to obtain for yourself political preferment and office. 21st. That while you predicated your reformation on an hostility and opposition, fierce and unalterable as those of Amilcar's son to the Romans -- to all money making, in the names of the gospel and church of God -- you have 38 been as great, or a greater, money making speculator therewith, than any man in the country; and that you have made from fifly to a hundred thousand dollars thereby -- and that in ten or twelve years. 22nd. That while, at your editorial debut, you repudiated or denounced the existence of ministers, as being gratuitous in this age, and since the apostolic era, your own ministers or bishops, in your own religious clan, are, according to relative numbers, more numerous than those of any other religious sect in the U. States -- comparatively, like frogs and lice in Egypt; so that ten or fifteen of them, with their horses, are found Quartering at the same time on a poor deluded proselyte's house, eating his family out of provisions, and his cattle out of provender. 23d. That you calculate, and that it is a nart of vour modus operandi, for your fanatical proselytes to give trumpet tongued proclamation to your lies, inuendoes, on dits, and low lived suggestions against others; or, that when not thus having you as a prompter, that their own instinctive hydraulics will duly befoul all your opponents, especially those who can dissect you as I can -- ==> If there be such! 24th. That you excite deluded men, under the title of Reformer bishops, to proclaim the water of a river, creek, or mud-puddle, to be the bath of regeneration -- the blood of Jesus Christ, flowing for the remission and washing away of all sin; and that all who are or shall be immersed in that water, shall have their sins forgiven, washed away, and come out thereof, and up therefrom, holy as angels! and shall have the Holy Ghost given unto them in 24, 48, 72 hours, or four days at furthest! 25th. That some of your converts, (Tate, of Warren, for instance,) have rushed out of their houses at night, exclaiming in the streets and high-ways, 'I have got it, I have got it' -- in allusion to the Holy Ghost, which your bishops, their dippers, had promised to them, if they would be immersed: and which converts ran from house to house in the town, and in the country, like rabid dogs -- all night, calling on the people to got up, and go and be immersed, for the gift of the Holy Ghost! 26th. That you have forged stories of supernatural illuminations having attended your administration of the ordinance of baptism * -- immersion -- by way of superinducing whole families to submit to the ordinance -- alias, be dipped, through your instrumentality -- that you might vaunt, vive voce, and publish yourself, in your periodicals, as being a very apostle. 27th. That you have flourished and vaunted, in a State Convention, about the ineffable inhalation and exhalation of the mountain breeze of political independence, and at the same time gratuitously, and as a professed christian, and christian minister, were buying and selling negroes! 28th. That you are continually passing off your periodical, as being honored with the communications of the delicioe literati, or theological Rabbins of the country, when those communications are from proselytes ignorant as Marcus, and not, theologically, more than a few moons old; and which communications you vamp up to the appearance of intelligence, and in the publication thereof, not only make a parade of learned correspondents, but you thereby secure their most zealous efforts for the circulation of your periodical, to the end, that their vanity may be the more largely gratified, as public writers and theological illuminati. __________ We heard a whole family of ten or twelve persons assert this to be a fact; and so did three persons in company with us -- a Mis. C. of Washington city, was one! 39 29th. That you publicly said, in the year '30, and in one of your orations at New Lisbon, Ohio, that it appeared to you, that when a man is baptized, it "gives his soul an impetus, or projectile motion, by which it is pushed half way" -- (to the diameter of a gnat's heel, precisely half way) -- "to heaven." And this water-spout assertion was made for the purpose of pushing your hearers into the water. (Whew! If one dipping pushes a man's soul half way to heaven, how far will two dippings push it? The Menonites baptize by three dippings! Poor fellows -- they must get pushed far beyond heaven! Mirabile dictu -- wonderderful to tell! Mirabile visu -- wonderful to behold! Ab uno disce omnes' -- from this single instance, you learn the nature of the whole.) 30th. That at the same time and place you declared, that your congregation were in "preternatural circumstances; that God Almighty had done all that he could do, to get them out of those circumstances;" and that even you found yourself impotent, (what enchanting modesty! what matchless diffidence!) "entirely impotent, in the production of faith in their minds, while in those circumstances." * (Alas, for the New Lisbon sinners! God could not deliver them from those preternatural circumstances! The mighty REFORMER could not do it! To whom then could they look? To themselves? Then they must have been greater than God Almighty, or even greater than A. Campbell!!) 31st. That such were your bald, disjointed chat, your filmy, gauzy, gossamary notions -- and hobbling, stumbling, floundering, spavined effort, on that occasion, that one of your friends, Gen. G. remarked, after meeting -- "Damn the fellow -- I don't know what made him flounder so, unless he was DRUNK!" 32nd. That though you had one, and only one, disreputable truth to publish concerning John Winter -- at the same time, you published BARE-FACED LIES of him. Thus, if at any time you can establish any disreputable charge against an opponent, you and your caw, caw, caw, proselytes, will make that an endorser for a hundred of your mean, nefarious falsehoods. You and they are ever seeking for a reason to do those things against opponents, that you have determined to do without a reason. Enormities and profligacies of every description are tolerated among your own disciples, while you and they are ready to stone to death those that are unsullied as Alpine snow, only as your Upas breath pollutes them. "Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas" -- your censure pardons the crows, while it harasses the doves.' But God gives short horns to the mischievous ox; and you will find your's to be much shorter than you supposed them to be. R E P O R T S. 1st. That you sold a negro, whom you knew was going blind, as being 'sano in corpore' -- sound in body; and that you sold the said negro to a poor man, who would never have been able to vindicate his rights, bad not a generous lawyer stepped forward, and compelled you to adjust matters, and to pay hush money!2nd. That you assumed an attitude of opposition to Masonry, merely to cover an act of swindling upon a mason, to the amount of 700 dollars -- concluding, that his complaints and charges against you, you could adroitly ascribe to masonic subtlety and revenge! __________ * These New Lisbon apothegms we heard Campbell advance there1 Truly we may say ---- "Never man spake like this man!" Who teacheth like him? 40 3d. That you had a printer working for you, during the first three or four years of your religious piblications, and though he did all your printing -- at least worked like a dray-horse, and lived in the humblest and most economical manner -- and though he loaned you 700 dollars, when he first went to work for you -- yet did you bring him minus at settlement on your scientific books! 4th. That you engaged a bookseller in Pittsburgh to get on from the east, sundry rare and costly Books for you; and when he had got them on, you refused to take them at the advance of 16 or 18 per cent. for his time, and other incidental expences, such as freight, drayage, &c. He then told you to take them at cost; and you refused to take them at all, unless he would take pay for them in your hocus pocus edition of the New Testament! 5th. The you wheedled a youth, (ignorant and inexperienced,) the son of an old Israelite Baptist minister, into the purchase of about 1200 dollars worth of your Debate with M'Calla, assuring him, that it would sell like Junius or Waverly -- South Sea Scheme -- or Marion City Stock; and that by buying and selling your Debates, he would realize a greater fortune than Tom Withington from his cat, and become a greater man too! Thus assured, he bought, and gave you his note for 1200 dollars worth -- went abroad with the books -- and at the end of the year, found that he had not sold as many as would pay his travelling expenses. He found that the affair was like coals taken to New Castle, or warming pans to the West Indies. You gave him another year, with his father as security, and due interest. With a wagon and two horses, the old man and his son toiled, far and near, through the year, to sell the books; but their toil was in vain -- 'twas Sisyphus' stone to them. At the end of the year, you put the thumb-screws of the law on the old man -- stripped him of all he possessed in the world, and turned himself, his aged wife, and family, out of house and home! 'Credat Judaeus apella.' 6th. That some of your female converts, having been baptized, with the promise from their dippers, that they should have the Holy Ghost given to them at such a time after being dipped -- but not receiving the Holy Ghost by the time specified, they became clamorous therefor at the hands of their dippers -- and on those jugglers affecting to be in a hurry just then, and on their way to such and such places, those female converts gravely inquired, if they could not send the Holy Ghost down to them by the stage! 7th. That your female converts have been a little in advance of time, 'as ladies like to be who love their lords;' and that therefrom, the wags and wits were wont to say, that they were enciente by Scott, Rigdon, Bentley, or Campbell's holy ghost. 8th. That some of your female converts are in the habit, (during the scripture reading, "spounding and splaining" meetings of your churches,) of asking their bishops, or dippers, a variety of such questions as the following. First - If Matth. 5, 29, means, that the right eye is to be literally plucked out, for the offence in verse 28? Second -- That as nothing is said about the left eye in the case, if that may do the act with impunity? Third -- That as nothing is said about the woman in the case, if it is therefore to be understood, that she may use both right and left eyes in that way, without sin? We are perfectly aware, how such men as you affect to consider women as being exempted from any such public strictures as those we indulge in: they are your mere kites and cast' paws -- so you use them! But none, except selfish demagogues, uxorious bipeds, or petit maitres, would suggest, that sex is any 41 shield against crime, or, its attendant infamy. What some women were, in a christian or church point of view, in the Apostles day, and how he spake of them, may be understood from 1 Tim. 2, 12 -- 1 Cor. 14, 34 -- 2 Tim. 3, 6 -- and 1 Tim. 5, 11. And all of which will especially apply to your female converts generally. They not only do not keep silence in the church, or during any antagonist gospel being preached; but they are scandalously outrageous at times in their senseless denunciations, and obstreperous ejaculations. * Women are to be found at the bottom of almost all the desolating corruptions of church and state, in all ages; and they are likely to be so to the end of the ebapter. It is the pride, vanity, and indulgence of women, that are mainly the cause of the terrific universality of insatiate covetousness characterizing our country; and which covetousness is multiplying endless monopolies, to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer; as it is women that are making our country a hot-bed of aristocracy, polotico, ecelesiastico aristocracy, in ramifications without number, and refinement of despotism, and cantings of hypocrisy, almost without a parallel in the history of nations. And we know terrible re-actions MUST sooner or later, take place; and wo, wo, to the sex, when they come! Unnecessarily we would say nothing severe, or suggest aught unkind of them. We shall at all times tell them the truth; and, if necessary, rebuke them sharply for the truth's sake -- but for that only. As to your female converts, truth compels us to declare, that there is nothing low, vulgar, riotous, tattling, slandering, and lying that they do not enact -- I speak of them generally. They have the merit, however, of exemplifying the Latin proverb -- "Aperte mata cum est mulier, tum demum est bona" -- when a woman is openly bad, she then is at the best. Her avowal is preferable to her hypocrisy. There, you pen-doughty, coxcomb, 'Custos morum' -- there is something for you to do at home; and to save you for a season, at least, from the impertinence and folly of being a 'busy body in other men's matters.' You may yet learn, to your cost, that it is you that lives in a glass house. At all events, I am now in Pittsburgh, and within a few miles of you: and, if you dare, proceed, as I have challenged you to proceed! At any time, or any tribunal, ecclesiastical, civil, municipal, or arbitrative, I will meet you on THE TERMS proposed at the beginning of this letter, and prove you to be a liar, foul calumniator, and all that is charged against you in the foregoing charges, if not all in the reports. Surely you may afford to give me your attention a few times at Pittsburgh, which is only about half a day's journey from your home -- a day's at most -- when I have come a thousand miles to thus honor and exalt you, and at an expence of some scores of dollars! And then, too, I promise you, that I will cheerfully give one year of my time and labor to demonstrate you to others to be all that I know you to be. Only be prompt in your closing in with my kind overtures, lest you should lose such a fair opportunity of 'filing the measure of your glory.' But at your peril, no more of your FORGERIES, or the forgeries of your perjury ripened proselytes, in your licentious periodical, concerning me. For one, I do not profess to believe, that the scriptures make it incumbent on any one to give a premium of impunity to such calumniators, and liars, and forgers, as you are already virtually proven to be. In the meantime you may learn, that because yourself, and hecatombs like you, (J. M. PECKS, U. B. CHANMBERS, DUNCANS, RODGERSES, &c.) presume to project reformations, and compass sea and land to make and multiply proselytes, to form some new sect, or give Babel character to an old __________ * "Habet sua fulmina Juno." Juno had her thunder! 42 one, and thereby gratify the vanity, or furnish the ways and means of subsistence to, or make a fortune for, such ministers and editors as you and they are; and that because in making these new sects, and enlarging others, you and they gather together, in the form of christian professors, the scum and dregs of society; that you, and they, and those dregs, are not to run riot and rough shod over the necks of those who penetrate your and their impostures, and expose your joint religious legerdemain. Intoxicated with the wine of the whore of Babylon -- stimulated incessantly by the accumulation of money, and the gratification of your vanity, by and through your Sodom apple theology -- you have confounded those excitements with religion, personal religion, when they have no more to do therewith than the reveries of an opium eater. Reverse the scene; let your theology, or reformation -- primitive faith and manners -- cost you two or three thousand dollars a year, and your zeal therefor would sink below zero -- you would become torpid as a toad in an iceberg. There is no man who practically knows better than yourself, that one imposture, falsehood, or slander, produces another; and that one-half the world takes pleasure in detraction, and most of the other half in believing all that detraction utters. You may also boast of exemplifying, in your own life and writings, that truth does not do so much good in the world, as its appearances do mischief; and that an evil sayer differs only from an evil doer in want of opportunity; that the difference is but slight between a calumniator and an assassin. We have now given, directly and indirectly, in the foregoinq pages, the testimony of about a score of old-fashioned, predestinarian baptist ministers, two to three scores of old-fashioned baptists, and well on to a hundred respectable citizens, of the states of Kentucky, Illinois and Missouri, where we have been for the last five years, that our character is unblemished -- and that up to June last, we were an unyielding, faithful, and laborious predestinarian bapist minister; all of which we may humbly hope will be equivalent to your representation of us as having "offered much incense at the shrine of Bacchus -- OPENLY renounced Jesus Christ as an impostor -- and put on the profession of atheism." Should you be able to get the testimony of one or two of your musk-rat, tad-pole proselytes, that they have heard that we had become a toper and an infidel, that may redeem your veracity! Though it is a lost hope that you will ever live to learn, that an honest man does not dare to tell a falsehood, or leave a truth untold, you may be made to feel, that no law is more just, than that the contriver of destruction should perish by his own acts.
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
N. B. -- If lies, slanders, and forgeries, constitute sin; and if, according to your baptismal regeneration, being immersed washes away sin; then I would, in a spirit of forgiveness and mercy, exhort you to rush to the Ohio, and plunge and re-plunge there, in, from the rising to the setting sun; for you have more devil in you than any one of the Gergesenes' swine that were drowned in their dippings -- and who, by the by, appear to have been the first of New Testament Reformers, or Waterites. -- They believed the ONE FACT, and they were IMMERSED. -- You want at least 7777 times as much dipping, to cleanse you, as did Naaman the leper. |
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43 CONCLUSION * Since writing the body of this pamphlet, we have seen that Number of Campbell's paper, (Feb. 1836, No.) in which he publishes us as being an atheist, &c. And we find, that the individual whom he associates with us, is a Dr. Sleigh, and not John Winter - (the latter he belied most bare-facedly in his paper some time since.) What we have suggested, however of Mr. Winter, we let go to the press, as we should do that much in justice to a dog hunted as Winter has been hunted by Campbell. As to Dr. Sleigh, we had never seen or heard of his name before. He may be guilty of embezzlements and frauds; but if his being stoned to death, depends on Campbell's innocency, he may consider himself quite safe! to embezzle a little money, makes a man a very Newgate bird; but to forge and publish the most enormous calumnies, make a man a Religious Reformer, Custos morum, and primitive faith and manners' apostle! or to demonstrate the Ethiopian to be black, proves the Egyptian or negro to be white! Campbell knows the importance of scattering doubtful rumors among the vulgar. He loves and courts the smiles of the veering rabble; and is, of all his contemporary editors and jugglers, most qualified justly to appreciate how useful a secret it is, to be able to lie to the purpose. Full well he understands, that Falsehood makes the tour of the world, while Truth is drawing on her boots; and that the former avails itself of haste and uncertainty, while the latter, on the contrary, is confirmed only by investigation and delay. We suggest these remarks, not as the apologist of Dr. Sleigh, but because 'Difficilem aportet aurem habere ad crimina' -- one should not lend an easy ear to criminal charges. To attack, is so much more easy, than to repel, that an accuser should ever be listened to with distrust. ==> The papper (Lancet) that Campbell makes use of as authority against Dr. Sleigh, may be a fac simlie of his own; and if such be the case, the charges against Sleigh may safely be considered as 'goats' wool.' At all events, we can bear testimony, broad and deep, that both Campbell and his proselytes, generally, are capable of laying deep plots, to ruin others; and that perjury itself would not be even a Rubicon to many of them; they would not pause a moment at it. So. Dr. Sleigh, it appears, from his version of the case, has found them gifted. But suggestions of this sort are gratuitous, in view of the contents of this pamphlet: they import the whole! ==> Since the foregoing was put to press, we are informed, by letter from Philadelphia, that Dr. Sleigh had Campbell arrested, by the Sheriff in that city, about the end of August last, and held to bail in the sum of 4000 dollars, to answer for "BASE, MALICIOUS, and FALSE SLANDERS," against the doctor. The latter has laid his damages at 20,000 dollars. We hope, if the doctor should make him disgorge a few thousand dollars of his infamously gotten wealth, that he will expend it in enabling others to prosecute the editorial Ivan for similar slanders. By that means, the fellow may be so far depleted, as to relieve him from the delirium tremens, mania in potu, from the 'wine of the whore of Babylon,' under which he has long labored, and waxed infamously wanton; he may be restored to his right mind, if ever he had such a thing, which is, at best, quite apocryphal. 44 JAMES H. OTEY -- EPISCOPAL BISHOP OF TENNESSEE. We perceive that the Waterite Reformer has taken in hand to convert the above named Bishop. should he succeed -- O! what quack, quack, quacking, there will be among his duck, gosling, and other reformation water fowls. It would give their souls another impetus, or projectile motion, by which they would be pushed the other half way to heaven! This would be an Ostrich feather in his bantum plume, and would constitute the reformation 'annus mirabilis' -- wonderful year!It is truly farcical to see the gawky eltorts that the Reformer makes to give himself the appearance of a gentleman: he is like a fly in amber, pug in generalissimos epaulets, a beetle surveying the pass of Thermopylae. He concludes his 8th Letter to the Bishop thus -- "All of which, together with the foregoing epistles, are most respectfully, faithfully, and benevolently, submitted to the candid and careful consideration of my much esteemed and accomplished friend; with every kind wish for his present and future usefulness, honor, and happiness -- by his obedient servant." Well -- if the Bishop be a man of discernment, he must mentally say with Claudian, 'Asperius nihil est humili cum surgit in altum' -- nothing is more disagreeable than a man of mean origin, when raised into power. And the Bishop will find, in the end, that the Reformer is 'anguis in herba," a snake in the grass; and that he has got an eel by the tail; one who refuses justice to the defenceless, and at the same time is full of fawning, concession, and adulation, to those in power. Alas! it must be low times with the Episcopalian interest in Tennessee, when its Diocesan is thus held up to the eye of the world as being on 'par nobile fratrum' terms of intimacy with a theological BOVERICK, * and editorial MUREL. † In this letter, the Reformer holds out himself as being something very great in the Diocesan, or pastoral way! all of whitch is consummate fudge, a villainous hoax. The last time we were at Wellsburgh, he had a church, or, flock, of some 8 or 10 scabby sheep to watch over -- and whom he got huddled together like a covey of sleet-shivering partridges, or prairie hens, under shelter of a rotten fox-fire log. He, Pastor, Bishop, Diocesan! The people, for miles around where he lives, would as soon think of having a mule for their congress senator, as to have Campbell for their Bishop: they no more believe in his christianity, or that he is a christian, than they believe in transubstantiation, or transmigmtion of souls. He! "daily penetrated with the sense of the utility and responsibility of the Bishop's office!" Bah! Some mole may now talk about being penetrated with the sense of the utility of the longitude, quadrature of the circle, polar attraction, and perpetual motion. N. B. -- We may have been premature, and done injustice to BISHOP OTEY, in suggesting, even, that he is in any way an intimate of Campbell's -- though the latter calls him his accomplished friend. We are fully apprized of Campbell's art and dexterity in giving himself the appearance of being intimate with prominent men in church and state -- when those very men would as soon be sentineled by croaking toads, or pillowed on and welted with slimy reptiles, as to have him, or an intimate. Some, however, get into juxtaposition with the Reformer, by circumstances over which they have no control; and have him hanging on them for a season, as Paul had a kindred reptile hanging on him in the island of Melita. -- Acts 28, 3, 4. Campbell affects those intimacies in his paper, when they in reality do not exist; and for the purpose of impressing the minds of his proselytes and readers with an idea, that he is a greater man than Plato's (a plucked he-biddy!) and equal to Mahommed's prodigious cock, whose crow could be heard all over the world -- that not only the ears of all mankind are open to his clarion notes, but their eyes are turned to and fixed upon him, as the eyes of dying Lombardians on St. Anthony, of Padua, (who hears and saves, even those whom God wont hear and save!) or ancient Jews to the temple. _________ * Boverick spent his life in making chains to yoke FLEAS! † Murel -- The Land Pirate. 45 "The Cross and Baptist Journal." This paper transferred to its columns, under date, Match 4th, 1836, Campbell's FORGERY concerning us; and comments thereon as follows, namely: -- "On the foregoing we remark, that Lawrence Greatrake, while he was once, we believe, accounted as a Regular Baptist minister, has, for the last six or eight years, been a violent opposer of the great body of the Baptist denomination, and of all who are laboring at home and abroad of the light and knowledge of the Gospel; and during this time, he has been regarded by the Baptists as worse, if possible, than even a Campbellite. "Now, how stands the case? Lawrence Greatrake, once received and treated as a worthy minister of the Gospel, has long been a scourge to the cause." REMARKS. 1st. It is TRUE, that for 6 or 8 years -- ah, for 12 years -- we have been a violent opposer of the great body of the Baptist denomination, and of all who are laboring for the spread at home and abroad of the light and knowledge of THEIR gospel! ==> for the great body of the Baptist denomination is, or are, made up of Arminians, Fullerites, and Campbellites; and the light of their gospel is "strong delusions, amd refuges of LIES!"2nd. The 'great body' of the denomination being deducted from the whole, there is a minority, smaller or greater, left -- against which, it appears, (by implication,) I have not been opposed; but whose gospel I have preached: and in proportion as I have been a scourge to the former gospel, I must have been a vindicator and supporter of the latter gospel. As I live, here are two truths in the 'Cross and Journal' concerning me. Thank you Mr. Stevens. 3d. But, positively, I have been a scourge to the cause, i. e. to the 'great body of the Baptist denoraination,' and their gospel -- a whip, a lash, a punishment, I have been to them. Thank you again, Mr. Stevens, for that truth -- for that testimony. I am not the first scourge that has been used against a similar denomination and similar gospel, or cause, as you may see by reference to John 2, 15. 4th. You say, that for 6 or 8 years past, I have been regarded by the 'great body of the Baptist denomination, as worse, if possible, than a Campberlite.' True, O king Stephen! You appear bent on illustrating, 'Magna est veritas et praevalebit' -- But First -- You forgot to tell who or what the 'great body of the Baptist denomination' are in principle and conduct! We will take you and your pamby namby co-publisher, N. S. Johnson, as specimens; and your joint publication of me, as a small sample of their practical godliness! Second -- If for 6 or 8 years past I have been regarded by that 'great body' as you represent -- and it was your official or editorial duty to notify the public thereof, through your Macbeth-witch-cauldron paper -- why did you not do it years since? Why [this] long neglect to inform the public of so important a matter? Why wait for Campbell's way-bill of infernal calumny, to endorse your philippic against me upon? Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike! For what if the 'great body of the Baptist denomination' have regarded me for 6 or 8 years past as worse, if possible, than a Campbellite! -- has that any thing to do with proving me to be a toper, to have renounced Jesus Christ as an impostor, and to have put on an open profession of atheism? Nothing -- unless, indeed, you mean to be understood as saying, that all the Campbellites are topers, have renounced Jesus Christ as an impostor, and have put on an open profession of atheism! 46 3d. You forgot to mention, how I have been estimated by the minority of the baptist denomination. That minority, you know, embraces at least FIFTY THOUSAND in the United States! Will you turn, in the immensity of your condescensions, to pages 4-14 of this Pamphlet, and will you glance at the following testimonials, as items of evidence as to how the minority have estimated me? You may recollect, that THE THING, (U. B. Chambers,) who edited the 'CROSS,' before it got into your hands, published me, as did John M. Peck, as being an impostor, and all that is bad. Hence the following CERTIFICATE. -- "We, the undersigned, have had more than ordinary, and every way satisfactory, evidence given to us, that Elder Lawrence Greatrake is a worthy member of, and faithful minister in, the Regular or Particular Baptist church." Now, sir, in this Pamphlet, we have given the names of about 20 baptist ministers, from 30 to 40 members of the old fashioned predestinarian baptist church, and well on to a hundred respectable citizens names, in three States, and in which we have labored ministerially for the last five years. We have given, we say, those ministers', those members', and those respectable citizens' names in evidence, that our personal character is unblemished, and our ministry sound, faithful, consistent and able, as an old fashioned, predestinarian baptist minister; while you, who know nothing of us, personally, pronounce us to be worse than a Campbellite -- and transfer to the columns of your paper, the most notorious lies, calumnies, and forgeries of that man's, who, according to your own version, "has for many years manifested a lamentable departure from the purity of the gospel." Impurity, in a theologicatical or speculative heresies, or both! So, then, one whom publish as being, and having been for many years, 'LAMENTABLY IMPURE,' or heretical -- you make use of that man, as authority for publishing me as being a toper, and an apostate, and an atheist; and all, too, on his own ipse dixit, or say so, he not even mentioning a name as his authority! Ah -- this manifests that you, at least, regard me as being, 'worse than a Campbellite!' Pilate and Herod were once made friends, to crush ONE who was published, far and near, as being a blasphemer, or infidel, a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, (John 10, 33 -- Luke 7, 34.) Whatever my private knowledge or opinion of you may be, I am free to avow, that I do not think you would enact such a part against a Campbellite; and that proves you consider me worse than one of them! "Delenda est Carthago," with some family relationship and sympathy, will account for your partialities! 4th. You say, in your first paragraph concerning me, "Lawrence Greatrake, while he was once, WE BELIEVE, accounted a Regular Baptist minister," &c. ==> In the next paragraph you say, ==> "Lawrence Greatrake, once 47 received and treated as a worthy minister of the gospel!!" In one sentence your faith is severely taxed to admit, or account him to have been a minister at all: in the very next sentence you affirm, that he was "once received and treated as a worthy minister of the gospel!!" Truly hath Solornon said, 'The legs of the lame are not equal.' 5th. In your first paragraph you say, that Lawrence Greatrake, during six or eight years past, has been regarded by the Baptists, (toto coelo, without qualification, restriction, or reservation,) as "worse, if possible, than a Campbellite." Indeed! Then how comes it, that in despite of ten thousand lies and slanders, published from the press and sacred desk, against L. G. that he has the testimonials, or testiinony, of more Baptist ministers and members, than any other man you can name has, that he, L. G. is a sound, faithful minister? But further -- In the same sentence that you represent L. G. to be regarded by all the Baptists as 'worse than a Campbellitel,' you, in that very same sentence, represent the same L. G. as being an opporer of only the 'great body of the Baptist denomination:' not all of them. Now, I don't say, that the testimony of scores of baptist ministers, and a hundred respectable citizens, who have had an intimate knowledge of me during your six or eight years, is equivalent to your and your 'Lamentably inpure' Campbell's ipse dixa, say so's, (and who have not been within hundreds of miles of me,) I only, with all due humility, suggest the inquiry, as involving rather a singular discrepancy, and a postponed question of veracity between you gentlemen editorial yoke-fellows, and those ministers and that hecatomb of respectable citizens. I am aware,, that you may plead, 'vox populi, vox dei,' and so confim all you have published of me! Yes, 'vox populi, vox dei,' roared the licentious multitude, when they crucified the Son of Man! But the French, and the christian world, generally, in our day, believe 'the will of women is the will of God,' and act accordingly. There again you will be found faultless. And soon, very soon, will those two holy and spiritual tribunals make it 'death in the pot' to any one to vindicate himself from the slanders of such religious editors as yourself, or to resent and resist your wrongs and outrages. "As for my people," said the Almighty of old, "CHILDREN are their oppressors, and WOMEN RULE OVER THEM! O my people, they which lead thee, cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths." If children, (religious editors such as you, and diverse religious agents, and ministerial imbeciles,) do not oppress God's Israel at this time -- and if WOMEN do not reign over them -- there never were such things: as a matter of course, God's people are made to err, and the way of their paths is being daily more and more destroyed by human traditions and inventions -- old wives' fables, filthy dreams, and lying wonders. 6th. As to what you suggest concerning the areat body of the baptist denomination, or of them and the minority, the sum total of them, being cursed by placing confidence in me, 'tis all gratuitous, as I never asked them for their confidence. I owe the former for nothing but the same unmeasured abuse, that you and Campbell have so recently and heroically poured out upon me; and the most of the latter for nothing but awful selfishness and treachery. So, then, if by some 'lamentably impure,' corrupt and corrupting villain, the Father of his country, or a Marion, had been published as a traitor, in the absence of a solitary name, even a tory's name, as authority, it would have justified the presses and the pulpits -- 7th. But supposing that all you say and insinuate against me, on your own responsibility, to be true, and that I have been violently opposed to the great body of the baptist denomination, and all who are laboring for the 48 spread at home and abroad of the light and knowledge pf the gospel; and that I am worse than a Campbellite; and am a scourge to the cause of the gospel! Does all that, even, prove me to be a toper, or drunkard -- or that I have openly renounced Jesus Christ as an impostor, and put on the profession of atheism? Then by the same parity of reasoning the same profound and pious logic, I may be proved to have been a black-leg, high-way robber, or murderer! Yes -- with all such as L. G. it will soon come to that holy Lrynch law -- ex cathedra iudgment and justice. Such have been the principles and conduct of the "great body of the Baptist denomination" towards me, for eight or ten years; so that the type in your religious paper, would hardly exceed the number, or blackness, of their lies and slanders of me. They cared not where, or from whom, they got those calumnies -- whether of foreign or domestic manufacture -- all one -- down they went, and out they went, to the four quarters of the earth. All of which you exemplify to admiration; as have your contemporary 'great body' Chamberses, Pecks, Brantlys, and other religious editors. In fact, falsehood, and traducements of any dreaded opponents, are the only weapons that you pseudo Regular Baptists, and ALL open AMINIANS, have to Wield; 'tis your and their instinctive hydraulics, and proclaim them, en masse, to be the ,i>"seed of the serpent' ot he is written childless! Any vagabond's ipse dixit you will base your false accusations of such an opponent upon; publish, for the time being, that vagabond to be a respectable man, and even bribe him to report, that you may report! Strange, then, would it be, if after finding the the 'great body of the baptist denomination' such moral miscreants, we had not been opposed to them -- and violently opposed to them. We might say much more; we could not very well say less. You will get a copy of this Pamphlet; your principles will be tested! I shall then know how to act, in reference to you. Half a million of religious fanatics, and their ruffian adjuncts, have been engaged to crush me: scores of pulpits, and many presses, have 'cried, havoc, and let slip their dogs of war' against us; but SINGLE HANDED and ALONE, we have sustained their ruthless assaults -- have rolled back upon them the floods of lies by which they have attempted to bury us in infamy. And with all their imposing advantages of presses, and pulpits, and churches, and myriads of infuriated, lawless, and "two-fold children of hell" proselytes, to echo their black calumnies, we esteem the 'GRAND TRIO' -- N. S. JOHNSON, J. STEVENS, and A. CAMPBELL -- as but mere personations of the world, the FLESH, and the, DEVIL; whom, we believe, we have, in a good degree, under our feet. As I said to Campbell, I say to you, there is no relation between cause and effect, if the time is not nigh at hand, when such religious editors as you and he will answer for your foul slanders at the point of the pistol, or on the blade of the bowie. Other religious periodicals may be corrupt and corrupting; but the Reformer and Fullerite Baptist religious papers, are infamous beyond compare. The reason is, that the leaders in those societies are men of the lowest origin, and most vulgar habitudes, and as 'similis simili gaudet' -- likeness is pleased' with like -- those leaders become nuclei, around which the very drippings of all that is base-born and base-bred. in the religious world, gather and swarm -- as tumble-bugs around pyramids of ordure. To attempt to depress them in the detection, or to abash them by the confutation, of their calumnies, is as vain as to attempt to shake hands with a shadow -- or sing lullaby to a saw-mill. 'They glory in their shame.' As vou have virtually endorsed, in your paper, what Campbell has published concerning me, you had better join him in trying to prove the same to be true. You may accomplish prodigious feats behind such a wall of 49 'LAMENTABLE IMPURITY!' Come then, with him to Pitt; and let US COMPARE CHARACTERS. I will give you all the advantages of those, as witnesses, who have known me for 12 to upwards of 20 years. Character!! Men who stand forth already as very IVANS of moral assassination, to cant about character! But you may be capable of measurably atoning for your profligate and poltroon assault. If so, well -- if not, be assured, that if life is spared me, I will make you feel, that if thus far I have only used a whip, and that gently, that I have a thong of scorpions, scorpion truths, to lash you with. In the meantime, from the lessons you have received, you may collect profitable instruction for your fuum life. They will either teach you so to regulate your conduct, as to be able to set the terrorem inquiries at defiance -- or if that be a lost hope, they will teach you prudence enough not to attract public attention to a character which will only pass without censure, when it passes without observation.
LAWRENCE GREATRAKE.
==> Should I have to notice you again, I sball at the same time say something of your Sin-siu-nats, or doubly sinning daughter of the mother of harlots, the whore of Babylon -- 'Queen of the West!' Yes -- See Rev. 18, 7. And you and N. S. (numskull) Johnson, are sons worthy of her. Ye intellectual imbeciles! ye editorial popinjays! 'tis indeed humiliating to have to stoop to your level, or write fot your comprehension. But you suit the moral and mental faculties of the religious canaille for whom whom you cater. Let me ask, who or what are you, your Fullerite and Reformer baptists, that presume to concern yourselves about old fashioned, predestinarian baptist ministers? They are not of, mix not with you, or ask aught at your hands: they look on you all with As Gabriel on the devil in paradise." They are no swine, or goat-herds, but shepherds: they pretend not to preach to any of you: they know that the more of the truth of the gospel there is exhibited to you, the more you all will be maddened, like filthy, ravening hogs, when pearls are scattered berore them -- and turn upon and rend them, it possible, piece-meal -- if not in their flesh and bones, at least in their feelings and reputation. Hence a man may be known as a faithful and able predestinarian baptist minister, by the effort that you all, together with all Arminians, make to keep him out of your meeting-houses -- and the abuse, in lies and slanders, that you bestow upon him from your sacred desks, and through the medium of your religious papers. It matters not where you are, whether in Pitt[sic - Pittsburgh] or Cincinnati, Boston or Richmond, Philadelphia or St. Louis; you are all the same genus and species of creature, and exemplify the way of 'serpents on a rock,' i.e. the rock Christ Jesus. ==> John M. Peck's recommendation of your paper, I perceive, in one of your late numbers. John M. Peck! The NOTORIOUS FORGER of infamously calumniating Letters! The wanton slaughterer of a poor widow's hogs! The man who got contributions from the Board of Missions, to the amount of 12 to 20 hundred dollars, for the education of poor pious young men, in his 'Rock Spring Academy, Illinois,' when he had not one such poor pious young man in it! The man who hired men as missionaries, and bade them charge tavern prices for every meal they ate, every night they lodged out, and every feed they gave their horses, while travelling -- and all of which he got from the Board and pocketed -- when those missionaries put up at Baptists' 50 houses, and were not at the expence of a cent! The man who had the meanness to put a sign over his door, labelled, "Private Entertainment by Mrs. Peck" -- appealing to the sympathies of the better sort of travellers, and to the wantonness of others, in behalf of the supposed widow! The man whom Elder Bolware, (as Elder James Suggett's family, than whom there is not a more respectable family in Missouri, informed us,) reports to have passed off, wittingly, counterfeit money! The man who has spent his life in sheer begging! This man's recommendation of your paper you publish! This man, too, is a specimen of the "great body of the Baptist denamination," against whom we have been violently opposed! * Thus,like a troop of black-legs at a horse-race, or a session of congress, do Baptist religious editors play into each other's bands. ==> You sent me promptly the Number of your paper I wrote to you for; this was well done! Now, if you should be found capable of recanting, in your paper, what you have published on Campbell's authority, after you shall have seen this Pamphlet, I shall duly give you credit for it. If not, be assured, that I shall as duly notice you again, and to searching effect. Should you be capable of recanting the scoundrel lies you have published concerning me, you will rate a degree above the moral attribute of any of the "great body of the Baptist denomination," that I have ever known; and will give me to 'drink of the wine of astonishment.' Ad interim, permit me to thank you for the item of illustration you have given to me, for my readers, of the character, principles and conduct, of the "great body of the Baptist denomination." For while there are few who are aware, that the genius and letter of the Regular Baptist church's faith and order, are audaciously violated by the assumption of editorial censorship, there are fewer still who are fully apprised of the licentiousness of the religious presses generally. There are a hundred religious editors and ministers, where the church of Christ wants one; and to find church members and subscribers, to the end that those ministers and editors may get a living, † hell and earth are put into requisition, to compass sea and land, to make proselytes, or christian professors, upon whom those craftsmen may have a claim for contributions and patronage, in the names of the gospel and church of God. Yourself and Campbell are specimens. So that truly evangelical ministers among you and your proselytes, will find themselves a sheep in the midst of wolves. But do not apprehend any injury to your interests, from such lawless enactments as what I am animadverting upon: on the contrary, the will give you unrivalled importance and value in the estimation of the "great body of the Baptist denomination," and greatly promote the circulation of your paper -- buzzards must have carrion! It generally understood among you, __________ * What we here publish concerning Peck, we proclaimed vive voce, and published from the press, throughout Illinois and Missouri, and around the Elymas' own neighborhood -- ah, when be was one of our congregation, in the State House of Vandalia, last January -- but he dared not to lisp a word of denial -- for he knew we had proof, strong as text of holy writ, at hand. † Generally, very generally speaking, these ministers' and editors' dear wives and children must be made of the genteel, respectable, in society -- their daughters raised to be ladies, and their sons gentlemen -- alias, drones -- alias, upstart aristocrats. To make their daughters useful, or their sons mechanics, or manufacturers, or farmers, is considered disgraceful. No -- the former must be wedded to the privileged, patrician order; and the latter converted, in ruthless violence to nature, into doctors, lawyers, parsons, bankers, 'cum multis aliis.' Thus our country is teeming with the elements of ecclesiastico politico despotism. Blood! Blood!! Blood!!! in torrents must flow, to quench this "fire of hell." 51 that it is no less your prerogative to enact all profligacies -- even to swindling scores out Of their property -- (ask Rev. S. of Zanesville, if he knows of any Baptist minister who did so in Va.) -- and that with impunity, and still be continued church members, in good and regular standing -- than it is your prerogative to make and publish all sorts of lies against those who are opposed to the great body of the Baptist denomination," to the "spread at home and abroad of the light and knowledge of their gospel." In a word, every old fashioned, predestinarian Baptist minister, who even stands neutral concerning such religious zoophytes as you Fullerite Baptist editors, saying, within his breast -- "Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?" even that minister you will all band together to hunt down, with the guile of Jesuits: but if such a minister takes an open and decided stand against you, and your scuttle fish, in the form of agents of diverse religious societies, and represents you all as being VILE EXCRESCENCES to the institute of the gospel -- and ravening locusts, that will ere long consume every vestige of truth -- and as so many adders, bite and destroy the very hands of that ministry that has fostered and warmed you into existence -- such a man you will all unite to hunt like spanish blood-hounds were wont to hunt the Japanese -- in the rage of so many Julians! More anon -- Messrs. Johnson and Stevens -- we will see you face to face ere long, and refresh your bowels more fully, and reward vou for your labor of love, by our personal acknowledgments. Ye are worthy! In the meantime, should you say, in your religious paper, that your tale about my being a toper and an athieist is a lie, you may rest assured, that 19 out of 20 of your sort of baptists will, as subscribers, take care that no one but themselves sees that Number, though they pressed the notice of the lie upon thousands. Thus you may deny it, without any great diminution from the amount of godliness that you originally designed to accomplish by its publication! And may you amply succeed in persuading thousands more, that you are religious editors and publishers, out of love to souls and the truth, and not out of love to the loaves and fishes!! ==> It may not be amiss to tell you, that if you were put upon your oath, you would acknowledge, that you no more believed that tale of Campbell's about me, when you published it, than you believed, that you had put on a profession of atheism! One of your sort of baptists in Pitt[sburgh] promptly proclaimed it a lie, as soon as he heard of its being published. Of course, he proclaimed you to be a liar, on the principle, that the receiver is as bad as the thief! But still, I suppose, they will fellowship you, and take your paper! A D D E N D A. As the following named gentlemen will get this Pamphlet, and as we know that their feelings will be gratified in our use of their names on this, or any similar occasion -- and as their testimonials are two years within the 'Cross and Journal's' eight years -- we shall take the liberty to republish their certificate -- premising, that a certain 'lewd fellow,' yelept ALLEN G. MILLER, M. D. of Mansfield, reported, that we got our living, partly by horse-racing, partly by gambling, and partly by preaching; and that we had gambled, and won a horse and sulky thereby, some 25 or 30 miles from Mansfield. All of which pretty story, in connexioin with sundry of their own manufacture, and kindred ones, numerous, of the exemplary baptists of the "great body of the baptist denomination," as well as numerous sinless methodists, in that region of country, were busy, as mice in tar barrels, in circulating far and near. Under these circumstances, the following testimonials were given. If the52 doctrine professed by the Union Presbyterian church be, in all its leading, fundamental constituents, a fac simile of the doctrine of the baptist 'Confession of Faith' -- and this is indisputably the case; and if the undersigned testify to truth; then how vile and villainous is the slander of the 'Cross and Journal,' when they publish us as having been worse than a Campbellite theologically, and a scourge to the Regular Baptist church! No, no -- it is only our opposition to their gospel Dianas, and the incidental shrine making (the craft by which they get their living,) that has made us worse than a Campbellite, and a terrible scourge. "To all whom it may concern -- This is to certify, that the bearer, Rev. Lawrence Greatrake, of the Old Regular Baptist church, having been introduced to our acquaintance about the first of March last, has, in the interim, between that time and these presents, given a good example of christian walk and deportment, as far as we have been acquainted with him in private: and in his public discourses, by his eloquence, (acknowledged of a high orjer,) his firmness and independence in defence of what he considers to be evangelical truths, he deservedly attracted large audiences, preached with a very considerable degree of effect, and approved himself, to our minds and apprehensions, as being truly orthodox; and as such we recommend him to the acquaintance, kindness, and christian offices, of all such as are established in the faith." If all the Union Presbyterian churches are what that church at Mansfield was in 1830, (and we have no reason to doubt their being so,) it is devoutly to be wished, by every evangelical minister, and every lover of the doctrine of grace, sovereign and unfrustratable grace, that they may multiply a thousand fold in our now religious Babeled and bamboozled country. Lest we should never have another, or as good an opportunity, to gratify our feelings in the case, we here take occasion to say, that of all the really evangelical lights in the U. States, we believe none excels, if any equals, the Rev. Robert Reid, A. M. of the Union Presbyterian church. With an eye of unequalled uninspired prescience, he has portrayed the "signs of the times" for generations to come -- judging of the intelligence and truth of what he has represented is to take place hereafter, from the illustration and confirmation given to his dissertations, by what has, transpired since he published them. Long may his useful life be continued, in its best energies and efforts, for the service of God's tempest-tossed lsrael. Next to that -- and we use a few signiflcant scraps of that language in which he is so theologically affluent -- our 'heart's desire and prayer to God is,' that his own soul may realize more and more fully the import of, 'oze vau zemareth YAH; Ki ani YAH HAVAH la shenith:' that be may make the richest melody in his heart unto the Lord; and with one of old, habitually 'sing praises unto ALEIM,' sing praises unto his name, find extol Him that rideth on the heavens, 'Beth YAH shemu,' and rejoice 'lamed PENIU.' And thus realize that 'Ihidethi's mutzatin' are no less 'mem Kadem, yomim oulem' in his 'unsearchable riches' of grace, than they have been and are in the emanations of HIS 'ETERNAL POWER AND GODHEAD.' 53 ==> In writing this Pamphlet, we design no vindication of our own character, but to furnish a specimen of the Reformer's, and others kindred to him; and to defeat the devil in his six-thousand-year effort to degrade the truth, the doctrine of Jehovah's sovereignty, sovereign grace, by calumniating, (through the medium of his Pharisaic, Pelagian, and Arminian offspring,) into moral monsters all and every able advocate for that doctrine. They proclam now,as they did in the Apostles' days, that the doctrine leads to licentiousness -- amounts to, 'Let us sin that grace may abound.' And then to give color to, or confirm this accusation to be true, they spend their infernal lives in fabricating and reporting endless vile falsehoods and foul slanders against the moral chameters of those its advocates. If to resent, resist and expose their machinations against the doctrine, constitute sin, we shall continue to sin, and would prefer to go to hell as its advocate, than to heaven with them. A specimen of this malevolence against the doctrine is found in the lives of the two Wesleys, who were wont to say of Toplady, Berridge, Hill, and kindred predestinarian gospel preachers, that they were the "devil's factors -- their churches, Satan's synagogues -- children of the old rearing hellish murderer, who believe his lie; ADVOCATES FOR SIN -- witnesses for the Father of lies -- blasphemers, Satan sent preachers, devils, liars, fiends." (See Sidney's Life of Rowland Hill, pages 109, '10.) There is, however, one class of professed predestinarian ministers, that the Arminions, of all names, are not so hostile to, as they are ironical towards; and that class is the multitude, who advocate and preach a yea and nay gospel -- terms and conditions -- and offers and proffers of Jesus Christ and his salvation. Weil do the Arminians hit off these wool and hominy preachers, by representing them as saying -- "Ye will and ye wont, ye can and ye cant, ye shall and ye shant." But as to anything like an 'able minister of the New Testament' being found either in the Arminian ranks, or among those pseudo, or cerebel soft predestinarians, it is out of the question: we might as well look for leviathan in a mud-puddle. But in multiplying inventions and traditions, in the name of the church and gospel of God, those christians are prodigies; and wo, wo, wo, to the man that opposes them! Hence, (and as a specimen of their bowels of mercies,) we solemnly ajfrm, that we believe, that the falsehoods and slanders that they have fabricated and put into circulation, from the pulpit and the press, against us, on account of our unyielding opposition to Temperance societiest as being any religious institute, constitute more crime, or moral profligacy, than the existence and operations of those societies ever effected of moral refomation! But God will take vengeance on their inventions: vengeance is his: he will repay. Hence the time is not far distant, when their anger, wrath and malice, lies, subtlety and mischief, will be turned upon each other, and consume and devour themselves. Like Actcon of yore, their ministers and leaders are being turned into wild beasts, (see 1 Cor. 15, 32,) to be hunted and devoured by their own hounds. But, as we were saying, we write not this pamphlet to vindicate our own character; for we are without hope and without fear, officially, from men. We never have had any character to derive, interest to secure, personal or family subsistence to obtain, or earthly object to promote, (and ere long all sound, consistent predestinarian ministers, will have to labor divested of all such influences, irrespective of all such considerations,) by our ministry, or other official labors. Hence, to us,it is of no more consequence whether men smile or frown on us, than it is to the man on whose forehead the dew-damps of death are glistening, whether the wind blows high or blows low. A vast majority of mankind have ravenous appetites for slander, and can mumble it like pugs at Cheshire or Goshen cheese, if they conceive that it is of that sort, or from sources, that they are not likely to be 54 exposed to! In that case, their resentments fairly burn against the traduced, for robbing them of their tit-bits, by exposing the liar and calumniator; while they lose sight of, or rather, smile on the traducer. Hence we write not to interest a SYMPATHIZING world on our behalf; for we should as soon think of finding the Kraken, and making him melt and lament, like Rachel in Rama. by Jeremiads, as to accomplish the former. We have seen enough of mankind in this generation, particularly in the religious world, to know, that with them, generally, nothing is greater incitement to guilt, than the hope of sinning with impunity; and that their beggarly virtues lose themselves in their interest, as the rivers lose likemselves in the ocean. To spare, then, such men as Campbell, is to hurt and enact the traitor to the good. As to what may be called our severity, * we have to answer for it hereafter, if it is udjust. In the __________ * There is nothing more palpable, on the face of the religious world, than that Arminians, of every shade, simultaneously and universally essay, and unweariedly persevere in attempts, to crush a bold, able, and unyielding predestinarian ministry; let it appear when or where it may, by ruthless traducements! They are their instinctive hydraulics -- their only weapon. And when they are ferreted out and exposed in their lies and machinations, their brutal, or their refined, despotism, and canting hypocrisy, they then commence lustily to vociferate against, what they call, eternal wranglings, unchristian disputations, and evil speakings. -- ("What lovely skins some snakes are allowed to wear!" -- To expose their lies and slanders, is to return evil for evil!!) -- Here they all meet, whether covert or open Arminians: here they all sympathise in the strongest ties of corrupt nature, and here they denounce, in the rage of Julians, and guile of Jesuits. And while hell is raging in their breasts, in anger, wrath, malice, and subtlety, they will read homilies, to their victims, on Christian meekness, forbearance, and charity!! Well -- it is long since we knew that Satan's seat is in their hearts; and since then, we have turned a deaf ear to his voice, (through them,) as an angel of light. We have exposed, in thousands of instances, and shall, 'Deo volente,' continue to expose, as Christ did their progenitors, their prototypes, the seed of the serpent, children of the devil, whited sepulchres, a generation of serpents -- the scribes and Pharisees, and their proselytes, of old -- so shall we continue to expose them, as long as they may dare to traduce us. In doing this, we have not only done the 'State some service,' by checking the growing corruption of, if not purifying, the moral atmosphere; but we have done it under the most vehement complaints and murmurings, invectives and denunciations, of myriads, whose mole and bat perceptions could not apprehend any effect beyond a point of time -- or the value of any effort that militated a farthing against their own present piccaune interest -- or that jarred for a moment their mere vegetative, automaton existence. We are now exposing the last of thousands that have shown themselves, or that have DARED to show themselves -- and he is their very LEVIATHAN -- and he and his sect are certainly Arminians of the very lowest grade -- As ignorance made drunk." So lost to all moral sensibility are many of the Fullerite and Reformer Baptists, Methodists, and other Arminian christians, that the apostasies and crimes of their own pie-bald ministers, they have, to glut their malice against the truth in our ministry, charged upon and reported of us, as a stranger! This is a fact, and has been done in scores of intstances. Can hell beat that? Yet many of those creatures appear almost angels, until they hear the truth of the gospel; but then hell itself heaves within them -- and the aorta of Leviathan is but a sleeping infant's pulse, compared with the throes of their "threatenings and slaughter." We have now headed, and put 'hors du combat,' as formidable a cordon of religious scoundrels, as ever were arrayed against one man in the U. States; a cordon einbracing an extreme distance of 1200 miles. But they, no doubt, like Milton's Satan, will consult, If not what resolution from despair." They appear bent upon and ambitious to be 'tormented before their time;' and to constitute us to themelves, a 'savour of death unto death' -- art earnest, token, or evidence, that they are now 'dead in trespasses and sins' -- and doomed to taste the 'second death,' the death that never dies. 55 meantime, it is to be remembered, that this Reformer's proselytes have been vociferating his and their own lies against us, to excite prejudice and passion, solicit wrong and outrage upon us, over half the states in the Union, as we,, a stranger, have visited those states. The hospitalities, or affectation of hospitalities, which they have in some instances, and at times, obtruded and even forced upon us, were only designed to parade their logomchy, and to furnish themselves with opportunities to hatch their cockatrice eggs of low on dit, or palpable lie. Like their High Priest, their nature and vocation are treachery; and proclaim, in language terrible as the groan of expiring nature, that they are the seed of the serpent. We may also remark, that we are not so silly, when we have a mule to beat, as to use a feather, when a gnarled club will hardly make the creature feel. Many, no doubt, will express great sympathy for the Reformer, upon the same principle that an undertaker grieves for the death of a quack; and while they would patronize his crimes, they do but feel for their own: they, also, being deep in calumny, or have learned the art and mystery of tickling the fancy, and fostering the'self righteousness of mankind, to pick the purse. One of the severest scourges that a country can be visited with is, the spirit of intolerance and persecution. This spirit is largely abroad in our country, more particularly in The religious community, and especially among the 'great body of the Baptist denomination.' They have commenced, and broadly developed, systematic efforts to fasten on the community their ever breeding religious inventions and traditions; while sentiments in opposition to those inventions, &c. are not only assailed as errors, but branded as crimes. They constitute the van in the grossest and most profligate immoralities of the age -- the practice of aspersing the characters of exemplary men, on the ground of difference of opinion as to the religious experiments of the age. They ruthlessly assail the freedom of thought and speech; and would leave us but the name of religious liberty. Hence, it has become perilous to search the scriptures for ourselves; and to speak freely, according to the convictions of our own minds. And if we thus speak, penalties, more serious than fine and imprisonment, are to be inflicted -- the penalties of general hatred and scorn; while the severest persecutions are being put forth by them, to effect a degrading uniformity of opinion in reference to their old wives' fables and lying wonders, called christian institute. The rights of the human mind we would maintain practically and resolutely; for without intellectual and religious liberty, civil rights, and every other sublunary possession, are worthless, only in the estimation of those of our species, who merely vegetate, or live to sense, or are muck-worms. The times require that a voice of strength and courage should be lifted up; and we would be among those by whom it is uttered, and sent far and wide. The timid, sensitive, diffident, and doubting, need this voice; and without it, they will be overborne by the clamor of intolerance. As suggested, 'this clamor is ascendant in vulgarity and noise on the part of the 'great body of the Baptist denomination;' and the religious tyranny that pervades them, would, if unresisted, soon fasten an iron yoke on all who bear the name of Baptist. We, and some few others, have met it with unyielding opposition; and though its spirit of intolerance has not been crushed, its tones have been subdued, and its menaces rendered impotent, compared with what they would have been, had it not been for that opposition. Much is said and sung, in our country, about the danger of Presbyterian influence in our civil affairs. Now, there is not half the danger to be apprehended from them, that there is from the 'great body of the Baptist denomination,' alias, the Fullerite, alias, the hypocritical Calvinian Baptists: they are the very Huns, and Goths, 56 and Vandals, of the religious communities in our country. And fifty thousand old fashioned Baptists, in the U. States, think of them as I do. Endless as the carnal, earthly, selfish, speculating, and peculating inducements now are, to pervert the gospel; and innumerous as are the instrumentalities now engaged in perverting it -- till it appears a maniac's dreams, varying all shapes and mixing all extremes; yet can that gospel never be destroyed by the licentiousness of those who abuse it. No -- it is not in the arrogance of power; no -- it is not in the fatuity of myriads of nominal churches; no -- it is not in the venality and selfishness of ministerial demagogues; no -- it is not in the artifices of men and devils, to crush this majestic, glorious transcript of Jehovah Aleim, the only true God's perfections. Reviled, it will remonstrate in its own effects; murdered, it will revive; buried, it will re-ascend. The very attempt at its oppression, will prove the truth of its immortality; and the atoms who presumed to spurn it, and the Muck-Worms that dared to slime and pollute it, shall fade away before the trumpet of its retribution.
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Lawrence Greatrake: Bio-data: The Laurence Greatrake, Sr. family came to Philadelphia from Herford, England, in about 1800 and lived on Brandywine Creek in the Christiana Hundred of Delaware. in the early 19th Century. The family evidently were of French ancestory, and perhaps descended from Huguenot refugees living in the United Kingdom. Laurence Greatrake, Sr. managed the Gilpin paper mill on Brandywine Creek. His wife was Eliza and their children were Eliza, George, Henry, Mary Ann, Lydia, Sarah and [Charles] Laurence, Jr. Laurence (or Lawrence) Jr. moved to Pittsburgh in about 1823 -- probably to find employment as a paper-maker. He may have already been a licensed minister for the Baptists: he was ordained a Regular Baptist preacher, in or near Pittsburgh, in 1823 or early 1824. Rev. Greatrake then took over leadership of the much diminished First Baptist Church in that city, replacing the Rev. John Winter in that capacity. Rev. Lawrence Greatrake was briefly hired as the church's official pastor, but apepars to have relinquished that office by the end of 1825. He was listed in an 1826 Pittsburgh city directory as a minister residing in that city. Rev. Lawrence Greatrake remained in Pittsburgh at least until 1827. The 1820 Census of Baltimore County District 1 lists Lawrence "Greaterick" as the head of the Franklin Paper Mill, which was founded by Aaron Levering in 1807-08. There is no listing for Laurence, Sr. or his son Laurence in the 1830 District 1 Baltimore census. In 1830 the Franklin paper and woollen mills were sold to Lewin Wethered -- possibly an indication that Laurence, Sr. had died. His daughter Mary Ann married a Captain Roberts; daughter Eliza was briefly married to Franklin Peale. Laurence, Jr. married Maria Jaquett (either in 1824 or 1834 -- date uncertain). Parish records in England provide the following information: Laurence Greatrake / Greatrix / Greatrex / Greatorex -- wife: Eliza _____ children: Chas. Laurence Greatrake b. 08 May 1793; Hemel Hempstead, Hertford, England George Greatrake b. 27 Oct 1794; Hemel Hempstead, Hertford, England Henry Joseph Greatrake b. 18 Feb 1798; Hemel Hempstead, Hertford, England Lawrence, Sr. & Jr. Greatrake found in: Passenger and Immigration Index, 1500s-1900s Passenger and Immigration Lists: Philadelphia, 1800-1850 Laurence Greatrake: Marriage Index: 1740-1920 Married: Jun 01, 1834 [sic - 1824?] County: New Castle, DE Spouse name: Maria Jaquett Genealogy of the Jaquett Family, Page 112-114 VIII. 367. Peter Jaquett [1718-1772] md. Nancy -- son of Peter & Maria Jaquet Genealogy of the Jaquett Family,, Page 114 438. Jesse, (c. 1774-99); m. Sarah Brumfield. 20 Dec 1791 in Cecil, MD; resided Baltimore, MD children of Jesse and Sarah: 476. Maria, b. c. 1797 (Baltimore?) m. Lawrence Greatrake 477. Sarah, b. c. 1798 (Baltimore?) Genealogy of the Jaquett Family,, pp. 129-130 May 21, 1799. Peter Jaquett, of Long Hook, apptd. guardianof Maria and Sarah Jaquett, minor orphan children of Jesse Jaquett, dec'd. The will of Major Peter Jaquett was dated June 18, 1834... he bequeaths to his nephew Peter, son of his deceased brother Nicholas Jaquett, his Bible... he makes bequests to Maria Jaquett, wife of Lawrence Greatrake, and her sister Sarah Jaquett, adopted daughters of his late wife; -- Mary Ann Greatrake, wife of Captain Roberts, and her sister Maria Greatrake, wife of Mr. Southerland, and Sarah Greatrake and Lydia Greatrake, daughters of Eliza Greatrake; Maria [Jacquett] Greatrake found in: US - Census Index (1870) State: Pennsylvania County: Allegheny Town: Allegheny Ward 1 Age: 77 Birth Location: Delaware Tombstone inscription: Union Dale cemetery, Division One, Brighton Road, Pittsburgh PA 15212, Allegheny County: George W. Greatrake Second Son of Rev. Lawrence and Ann Maria [Maria Jaquett], _____ 6, 1824 - Feb 9, 1854 lived in Alleghany city, PA 1849-50 Louisa Greatrake Age: 20 born c. 1830 Birth place: PA Gender: Female Home in 1850 (lived with John F. COle family) Allegheny Ward 4, Allegheny, PA Samuel F. Cole -- b. Pittsburgh, JUne 9, 1845, son of John F. and Elizabeth M. (Greatrake) Cole. Elizabeth was the daughter of Joquett Greatrake, a Baptist minister of French extraction. Elizabeth Davis married Henry Fink in 1819 in New Castle Hundred. They moved to Ohio later. ... a connection to Laurence Greatrake who lived in New Castle Hundred 1800-1819. Henry Greatrake was either the son of Laurence Jr. or Senior. Laurence Jr. was a famous Baptist preacher and Laurence Sr. was a papermaker on the Brandywine. H.G.G. Brandywine Paper Mills Reminiscences of Wilmington: 38 www.accessible.com/amcnty/DE/Delaware/delaware27.htm Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution by Anthony F C Wallace: Greatrake, Lawrence, pp. 217-18: "...in the 1820s, a steady stream of English and French mechanicians... came to America... in the Philadelphia area,among the best known were the... Greatrake family on the Brandywine.... Lawrence Greatrake [Sr.], technical manager for Thomas Gilipin" (in Delaware Co. near Philadephia) 258: "Franklin Peale (son of Charles Wilson Peale) married the daughter of the Gilipins' mechanical expert, Thomas Greatrake. The Greatrakes were Quakers and the young woman [Eliza] was a "Quaker Preacher" of extreme religious zeal... the marriage was annulled..." the Greatrake family immigrated from Hemel Hempstead, UK to the state of Delaware, circa 1800. Lawrence Greatrake, was a well-known paper maker. Robert Richardson ' Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, Volume II. (1869) CHAPTER III. Another individual, who made himself quite notorious about this time, was Lawrence Greatrake, a regular Baptist preacher, of a restless spirit and strong passions, who occupied himself in itinerating through the country, wherever he could obtain a hearing, either in Baptist or Pædobaptist congregations, breathing forth misrepresentation and abuse of [99] Mr. Campbell and his teachings. The bitter spirit, however, by which he was characterized, rendered his reckless assertions doubtful to thoughtful and impartial hearers, and served rather to further the Reformation by exciting their curiosity to read Mr. Campbell's writings or to hear him for themselves. As to Mr. Greatrake, he continued his itinerant labors for a considerable time, and published a scurrilous pamphlet against Mr. Campbell; but afterward, falling into disgrace, became an apostate, and finally, in passing through a piece of woods on his way to a place of shelter, was suddenly crushed to death by a falling tree. A Laurence Greatrake reportedly died in Paris, Tennessee c. 1830. Reminiscences of some churches in the original bounds of the Baltimore Association: The first Baptist Church in Maryland of which we have any account is that of Chesnut Ridge, afterwards Saters, Baltimore County... The oldest church bearing the name of Particular Baptist in the Baltimore Association was called Winter’s Run, afterwards Harford, Harford County. In 1772, besides the main establishment at Winter’s Run, the church consisted of three other branches; one near Chesnut Ridge, which met for worship in the house belonging to the General Baptists; the second was at Patapsco; and the third near Winchester... The First Baltimore church was established in 1795 with eleven members, all of whom except Elder Lewis Richards were dismissed from Harford Church. The second church of Baltimore was constituted by Elder John Healy and a few English Baptists, and their meeting-house built in 1797. This church may be called, in the Baltimore Association, the mother of preachers, as Harford was called the mother of churches. The first licensed in this church was Elder Daniel Dodge, after him was Lawrence Greatrake, William Brinkers, Joseph Trapnell, W. Curtis, William Reck, Joseph Cone, Bartholomew T. Welch and Joseph H. Jones. Historical Society of Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Magazine of History & Biography Greatrake, Lawrence: (1956) 81:396-399, 404 Lawrence Greatrake: Bibliography: [Letters] To Alexander Campbell, by A Regular Baptist, 30 p.; 22 cm. (9 in.) Pittsburgh: Eichbaum & Johnston, [Aug.] 1824 [Letters] To Alexander Campbell, by A Regular Baptist, alias Laurence Greatrake, 36 p.; 22 cm. (9 in.) Pittsburgh: Eichbaum & Johnston, [Nov.] 1824 CLP Main Oliver Room (Oakland) - Closed Stacks r 265 R17 The Harp of Zion: to which is added, a brief retrospective and prospective view of the Baptist society / by a Regular Baptist Pittsburgh: Johnston and Stockton, Printers, 1827. Sewickley Pub Lib 286 REG 1827 HIS -- zaccp2 b22674304 (See also: Classified Catalogue of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh: 1903 Page 179: Greatrake, Laurence: Harp of Zion, 1827 The Parallel and Pioneer, or, a Pocket Mirror for Protestant Christendom, by Lawrence Greatrake 100 p.; 23 cm. (9 in.) New Lisbon: Printed at the Office of the Palladium, 1830 Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, IN Lights and Shades of the Waterite Reformer and One Fact Apostle, alias Alexander Campbell 56 p. Pittsburgh: Printed for the Publisher, 1836 An anti-missionary dissertation on the commission in Mark 16, 15... [nd 1838] Note: The 1824 pamphlet by Elder Walter Scott is: A reply, to a series of iniquitous "Letters to Alexander Campbell, by a regular Baptist," alias, the Rev. Mr. Greatrake. Together with an address, to the saints in Pittsburgh, and the third Epistle of Peter, or; A looking glass, to the present hired ministers. Pittsburgh: Printed for the publisher by John McFarland, 1824 (under construction) |
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