Page "Muggletonianism" Paragraph 48

Muggletonians, famously, had no use for prayer, public worship or preaching.

The first two are clearly pointless if God takes no notice.

But the third follows less smoothly from the principles.

In ordinary times, preaching is morally dangerous because those who hear and respond by mocking the faith crystallise their own damnation.

How much better had they never heard at all.

But, as the end of time draws nigh, the urgent task is to rouse the elect to seize their salvation.

It is a last chance.

Had Reeve and Muggleton taken their own pretensions more seriously, they might have seen preaching in a better light.

We may suspect Muggletonian aversion to preaching has been less a matter of principle than that they have been particularly poor in the performance thereof.

Muggleton himself ruefully records that out of his family, friends and neighbours he managed only to convert his two daughters and his cousin Roger in Northamptonshire.

If the truth is that those who converted to Muggletonianism did so as a result of inner contemplation, then Richard Farnham and John Bull may have been more honest in explaining their own calling as resulting from their perusal of scripture.