PERSECUTION IN SWITZERLAND. 



raagistorial authority which had been assumed 

 by the Romish church. Upon a representation, 

 in 1646, from the commission of the Kirk of 

 Scotland, James Bell, and Colin Champbell, 

 baillies of Glasgow, were committed to prison 

 by the Parliament, merely for having said, that 

 &quot; Kirkmen meddled too much in civil matters.&quot;* 

 Even so late as the middle of the eighteenth 

 century, when Whitefield, Wesley, and other 

 pious men, began to address the ignorant villa 

 gers of England on the most important subjects, 

 &quot; a multitude has rushed together, shouting and 

 howling, raving, and cursing, and acccompany- 

 ing their ferocious cries and yells with loathsome 

 or dangerous missiles, dragging or driving the 

 preacher from his humble stand, forcing him, 

 and the few who wished to hear him, to flee for 

 their lives, sometimes not without serious injury 

 before they could escape. And these savage 

 tumults have, in many cases, been well under 

 stood to be instigated by persons, whose advan 

 tage of superior condition in life, or even express 

 vocation to instruct the people better, has been 

 infamously lent in defence of the perpetrators, 

 against shame or remorse, or legal punishment 

 for the outrage. And there would be no hazard 

 in affirming, that, since Wesley and Whitefield 

 oegan to conflict with the heathenism of the 

 country, there have been in it hundreds of in 

 stances answering in substance to this descrip 

 tion. Yet the good and zealous men who were 

 thus set upon by a furious rabble of many hun 

 dreds, the foremost of whom active in direct vio 

 lence, and the rest venting their ferocious de 

 light, in a hideous blending of ribaldry and exe 

 cration, of joking and cursing, were taxed with 

 a canting hypocrisy, or a fanatical madness, for 

 speaking of the prevailing ignorance, in terms 

 equivalent to those of the prophet, The people 

 are destroyed for lack of knowledge. &quot;f 



But we need not go back even to the distance 

 of half a century in order to find instances of 

 religious intolerance among Protestant commu 

 nities and churches ; our own times unhappily 

 furnish too many examples of a bigoted, intolerant, 

 and persecuting spirit. Little more than two 

 years have elapsed since the Methodist chtipel 

 in Barbadoes was thrown down and demolished 

 by the mob-gentry, and with the connivance of 

 the public authorities of that slave trafficking 

 island, and Mr. Shrewsbury, a worthy aud re 

 spected pastor and missionary, obliged to flee for 

 his life. Previous to this outrage, he suffer 

 ed every species of insult, contumely, and re 

 proach. He was abused as a villain, and hissed 

 at in the streets, not by mere rabble, but by the 

 great vulgar; by merchants from their stores, 

 and individuals in the garb of gentlemen. By 

 such characters his chapel was surrounded, and 

 partly filled, on Sunday the 5th October, 1823. 



* Kairr. s Sketches. 



; Foster s &quot;Essay on Popular Ignorance. 

 32 



Thin glass bottles had been previously prepared 

 and filled with a mixture of oil and assafoetida, 

 and all of a sudden, they were thrown with 

 great violence in the midst of the people, and 

 one was aimed at the head of the preacher; and 

 during the whole service, stones were rattling 

 against the chapel from every quarter. On the 

 next Sabbath an immense concourse of people 

 assembled, &quot; breathing out threatenings and 

 slaughter ;&quot; and from 20 to 30 of the gentlemen- 

 mob planted themselves around the pulpit appa 

 rently ready for any mischief. Men wearing 

 masks, and having swords and pistols, came 

 galloping down the street and presenting their 

 pistols, fired them at the door; and it was oriai- 

 nally designed to have fire crackers among the 

 females, to set their clothes ou fire. At length, on 

 Sabbath, the 19th, this execrable mob, consisting 

 of nearly 200 gentlemen, and others, again assem 

 bled, with hammers, saws, hatchets, crows, and 

 every other necessary implement ; and in the 

 course of a few hours, the lamps, benches, pews, 

 pulpit, and even the walls, were completely de 

 molished. They entered the dwelling-houso 

 broke the windows and doors, threw out the 

 crockery ware, chopped up tables, chairs, and 

 every article of furniture; tore the manuscripts 

 of the preacher, and destroyed a library of more 

 than 300 volumes. All this was done under the 

 light of the full moon, in the presence of an im 

 mense crowd of spectators, without the least at 

 tempt being made to check them either bv the 

 civil or military authorities while the unfortu 

 nate preacher, with his wife in an advanced state 

 of pregnancy, had to flee to a neighbouring island 

 to save his life ! Such is the tolerant and hu 

 mane conduct of gentlemen Protestants of the 

 nineteenth century! gentlemen who would, no 

 doubt, consider it very unhandsome were they to 

 be compared to Goths and Vandals, or to the 

 rude and barbarous savages of Papua or New 

 Holland.* 



About the same period, the authorities of De- 

 merara set on foot a persecution against Mr. 

 Smith, Missionary irom the London Society, 

 under various pretexts : but his real crime in the 

 eyes of his persecutors, was, his unwearied zeal 

 in instructing the negroes in the knowledge of 

 religion. He was condemned to death by a 

 court-martial, in the face of every principle of 

 justice : he died in prison, was refused the pri 

 vilege of a Christian burial, and his friends were 

 prohibited from erecting a stone to mark the spot 

 where his body wasj^. The whole details of 

 this transaction present a scene of savage bar 

 barity, created by the lust of gain, scarcely to be 

 paralleled in the history of Europe. 



In Switzerland, which was formerly the head 



* For a more particular detail of these exccraMa 

 transactions, see &quot; Report of the Wesleyan Mission 

 ary Society for 1324:&quot; and the debates in Parliament 

 in 1825. 





