THE EDITOR IN HANOVER.
During the last month we visited this county for the purpose of showing the glad tidings to the people concerning the kingdom of God. The appointment in Hanover was an old colonial house called “the Fork Church.” When we arrived we found the doors locked and barred, and the windows nailed down to prevent the ingress of the people to hear us. This was done by the Episcopalian parson, vestry, or their agents. It was certainly an act of great assurance on their part to shut their fellow-citizens out of a house that belongs to the people by the double right of conquest and gratuity. When Church-of-Englandism, the Baptist-persecuting, harlot-daughter of Rome, which gloried in the Headship of the crazy and licentious kings of Britain, lost the affection and allegiance of the colonists of Virginia, they expelled by force and arms the cassocked and scarlet adherents of this royal superstition. They told them that tithes and state religion should henceforth find no more place among free men, who would have no longer sectarian monopolies in the Old Dominion reared, supported, and endowed out of taxes extorted from the hard earnings of oppressed and unprivileged creeds. In harmony with this resolve, a voice from the heaven decreed, that all State Church houses, and glebes, should be confiscated, and vested in the overseers of the poor for public use. The Church-of-England parsonocracy were no longer to monopolise the pulpits, which were declared open to the preachers of all sects whatever. If the people did not care to use them, the overseers were at liberty to sell them, and to apply the proceeds to education or the relief of the poor. This was the fate of the Fork Church. It was sold, and purchased by a Major Doswell, as we are informed, who bestowed it on the public for their use as “a free house;” that is, a house for any one to speak in whom the people might desire to hear.
The house is said to be about 140 years old, and to have been built with bricks imported from England. Being the property of no sect, it was allowed to get out of repair. The old Tory religionists conceived this to be a good opportunity to “make a claim,” as they say among the squatters. Accordingly some of the party got up a general subscription for the restoration of the building. The money was not raised from Episcopalians alone, but from all sorts of persons without regard to creed. With the funds thus levied they went to work upon the old Tory principle of spiritual monopoly. They fitted it up as an Episcopal temple, and then claimed it as their own. They procured a parson, whom they settled upon a glebe hard by to read other men’s prayers sanctified by Act of Parliament, and to grind again for the thousandth time “divinity of other days,” for the healing of their souls, incurable, if they did but know it, by such vain and impotent expedients. Some have the simplicity to think that restoration and possession have given them a right of property in the house! But, we suspect, that these very soft specimens of humanity would be the very first to repudiate the principle if applied to themselves. If a robber find an empty house, and he fit it up with other people’s money and a little of his own, and having converted it into comfortable quarters according to his taste, does it therefore become his? Yet it is his as much as the Fork Church is the property of a remnant of the old colonial leaven.
Well, this coterie of Hanoverians had the presumption to close the doors against their fellow-citizens, and to tell them in effect that they should hear no one in that house whose doctrine was not agreeable to their parson and his vestry. This was the old principle of George-the-third episcopacy revived. A notice was handed to “the Reverend Mr.” Bowers to be read, informing the people that Messrs. Magruder, Anderson, and Thomas would hold meeting there on the seventh and eighth of June. On receiving it he consulted with one of his friends, and then handed it back to the messenger without reply. The result we have reported, and shall now dismiss the case by stating, that it is the intention of some to lay the matter before the grand jury, and if necessary before the Legislature, to ascertain if such proceedings are to be tolerated in the seventy-fifth year of American redemption from the bondage of “Church and State.”
Having the honour of exclusion from this synagogue by such a party, we held no meeting on that day. Messengers were sent about the neighbourhood to notify the people that the appointment for the 8th instant would be filled elsewhere. The notice was short, but effectual to the assembling of a respectable congregation about two miles from the Fork. We spoke to them on the purpose of God in the creation of all things, to which they listened with profound attention, if not with tenacity of remembrance. We trust, however, that all will not be forgotten; but that some of the seed sown may have fallen into honest and good hearts, and bring forth fruit with the increase of God to eternal life in his kingdom.
