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that a fatal error was committed, and that those are justly chargeable with sin who are still continuing the system in all its overgrown excesses."―Jamaica Papers.

The Rev. W. Whitehorne, who was formerly a lawyer of extensive practice in the island, but renounced his secular pursuits, to devote himself to the ministry in connexion with the Baptist Mission, has given the following historical sketch of the leader system :

"The nature of the system is this. A man of some influence upon the estate, (usually in the time of slavery the driver of the gang, or some other principal person,) commences a meeting: this may be either before or after he has attended a chapel. He collects a lot of persons, ranging from 10 to 200 in number, and after some absurd and superstitious forms and ceremonies, they become his (spiritual) children, and they own him as 'daddy,' The sway for good or evil, which is now established and exercised over them, is unbounded; their obedience, their labour, their property, and their entire persons are under his sovereign control. He goes to a minister, and carries his troop of 'children' with him; by means of a few hackneyed religious phrases, he is easily persuaded to receive them into his congregation, and the 'daddy' is duly installed as leader. The minister looks to him to watch over, and give an account of the flock under his charge, to convey his commands to them, and to see that they duly attend to them, and that they make the regular contributions, &c.; while he (the leader) is pledged to the flock to get them baptized and received into church fellowship, as soon as he can. The minister can know nothing of the people, beyond what the leader thinks fit; and as he is surrounded by his own flock, and they are under his complete control, the minister can discover little or nothing of his character. When however a quarrel happens to break out in one of these classes, the most horrible discoveries are frequently made. I have known some very good men among the leaders, (some of whom, by the way, have loudly condemned the system :) they however are the exception. For the most part, the leaders are proud, overbearing, avaricious, and lascivious men; the flock have to pander to their views, and they have a galling yoke to bear."-Letter to the Rev. C. S. Renshaw, New York Evangelist.

To weaken the force of the startling evidence of this gentleman, the Committee's circular remarks, "Mr. Whitehorne says that the leaders, as a body, are bad men, when in fact he has had no means of becoming acquainted with them." How this can be we do not understand. He has long been a resident, if he be not a native of the island, and his professional pursuits must have given him a complete insight into the social condition of all classes; whilst his devotion to the cause of Christ, which led him to abandon his worldly advantages, bespeaks a witness that has claims on the confidence of impartial inquirers, far more than can be secured by those who are the interested advocates of a system that has made them what they are.

The following extracts from "The Exposition," published by missionaries of the London Missionary Society, will supply additional illustrations of the working of this system :—

"Thomas Burke was a sub-leader, and unaware of the connexion of his head leader with the missionary, the Rev. H. C. Taylor, at Old Harbour, whence he was trans

ferred with his class to Four Paths, under the Rev. James Reid. His residence is at Cool Spring, in the mountains of Clarendon, at a distance of thirty miles from Old Harbour. At present he is a member of the London Society's mission church, at Mount Zion, and appears to be a sincere man.

"William Hall, from Marshall's Pen,* first tell us to pray. He begin the work. He put our knee on the ground, then take our hand, and raise us before the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This is the way he set us off.

"We then meet to pray and sing hymns. Hall tells us what to say. We had no book at all. Both John and William Hall tell us we must pray to John the Baptist, and join John the Baptist's class.'

"Burke here repeated the hymns and prayers which Hall taught them to use in their meetings. For brevity's sake we give only two examples, selected as being the shortest and most intelligible. The first is a kind of litany, the second a prayer; both were addressed to John the Baptist.

“John á Baptize.—Do my Lord. Me pray for my sin.-Do my Lord. Me pray for my soul.--Do my Lord. Remember your duty.--Do my Lord. Sinner dead he must.-Do my Lord. Me pray for keep me out of de fire.-Do my Lord.'

"O God, have mercy 'pon my soul. And I come pray to you now to make me get baptize. If you can, make me go to the river to wash up all my sin. If we no baptize in the river, we full up with sin. When we baptize we see our pardon.' "Burke added here, 'We think John Baptist himself was God, and that when we pray to him he carry we to God.'

"Every Friday we never eat from morning until quite night. Some of the people faint away; their friends did get water and wash their face, and tell them keep heart till night. Hall say, if we eat every day we should not go to God. We must starve our flesh, we must not eat on Friday. In the evening, when the fast broke, and we eat, we use white cups. Then we set up all night and sing hymns, and watch the Lord out and watch him in till day broke.

"At that time we have two wives; he no tell we must not do so. We must marry, he no tell us that. We drink rum till we drunk; we fight; many of us thieve, he no tell we it was wrong. [The details which follow, illustrating the licentious practices of the leaders on the estates, are too gross for publication; they are therefore suppressed.] When we see John Hall, who come to lead, we do so, he say it no harm.'"+-pp. 15, 16.

"Robert Fairclough, who was a leader connected with the Baptist church at Rio Bueno, and is now a member of the church at First Hill, declares that the strongest man upon the estate where he ruled dared not resist his sentence. Nor was it in his official capacity and performances only that he exacted deference and submission, but if in his ordinary intercourse with the people, at any time or place, any one of them should say Pshaw' to him, he would, at the next meeting of the class, send two of their number as constables to bring the offender to the house, and would there

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"* Marshall's Pen is in Manchester, at a distance of at least thirty miles from Cool Spring.

"William, John, and Moses Hall, are brothers. Previous to their coming to reside on Marshall's Pen, they lived in the Liguanea mountains, and at the time to which the narrative relates, they were all three members of the East Queen Street Baptist church, Kingston. At present John Hall is a leader under the Rev. John Williams. Moses is a deacon of the Rev. J. M. Phillippo. William is dead. During the absence of our brother Slatyer from the island, in the year 1840, John imposed on the local ignorance of the missionary temporarily supplying the station, and was admitted to the church at Ridgmount, but left again before his return."

inflict punishment upon him. Nor would the punishment be slight. He has compelled a man to crouch in a painful posture upon the ground so long, that when permitted to rise he has been unable to do so without assistance. This reclaimed leader made the above confessions in the presence of several persons, who well knew him in his previous character, and they all confirmed his statements.

"Mark Bywater, a member of the Independent church at Kingston, and who resided with the Rev. W. G. Barrett during a great part of the year 1841, witnessed the following exercise of the leader's power in the mountains of St. Andrew's. A leader of East Queen Street chapel, Kingston, sentenced a young woman to go round the class house upon her knees, and beg pardon of every one in the room, because unable to pay a fine which had been imposed for absence.

“An aged individual came one day to the Rev. James Reid, Baptist missionary, but before he could be induced to open the cause of his coming, the old man proceeded deliberately to bare his knees, and ere he could be prevented he was kneeling before the astonished minister ! 'So the leader always make me do,' was the humble reply of this victim of spiritual slave-driving.

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Williams, a leader travelling from Montego Bay, halted for a night in the village of Arcadia. The class was summoned to meet him. In the course of the proceedings he uttered something ludicrous, at which one of the persons behind him laughed. Turning himself round to see who had been so irreverent, had the effect of quelling the thoughtless mirth, and at the same time of concealing the offender. He however fixed on a man whom he suspected, and commanded him to be taken, saying, 'He is mocking our Lord Jesus Christ. The wrong man was taken, but his protestations availed nothing for him; he was forthwith placed with bared knees on the ground, and with his hands elevated over his head. During the night his tears flowed fast, but the leader would not relent, and until the dawning of the morning he remained in that painful and ignominious situation. The real offender on the occasion was Nicholas Brodie, a man still residing upon Arcadia, and a member of the church at First Hill. The victim of the leader's severity was John Clinton Mac Anuff, also resident upon the estate still, and a member of the Baptist church at Rio Bueno.

"A man from New Ground Estate came one morning in great trouble to the Rev. Robert Jones, stating, as the cause of his distress, that the leader had put him back for six months, for omitting to clean the pathway to the class house. He said, if death should meet him during that time he did not know what to do, for the leaders say, if they put the people back, God puts them back, and if they take them on, God takes them on.

"Robert Fairclough, when he was a leader acting for the Rev, B. B. Dexter, performed the service of bowing down,' and 'setting off,' on many persons, in the manner described in the foregoing pages.

"We have many persons in our congregations who were once 'set off' in the manner described, and they all declare it was the invariable practice of the leaders, to subject persons to such a ceremony as their introduction to a religious life.

"For the rite of setting off no qualification was required, but a willingness to submit to it. The Rev. Messrs. Vine and Alloway conversed with a young man at Richmond Pen, in Trelawney, who proved to be ignorant of such a person as Jesus Christ. He was, however, an inquirer, and had been set off' by the leader Fairclough."-Exposition, &c. pp. 17-19.

We earnestly hope that these may be found to be extreme cases and of rare occurrence, but it was a perilous experiment to entrust spiritual authority to men, who had so long been accustomed to employ brute force to coerce their brethren in bonds. Nothing but the transforming

power of extensive knowledge and eminent piety could fit them to act with "the meekness of wisdom," towards those who had so long been the victims of their petty tyranny and brutal lusts.

The well-known tendency of the human mind to attach undue importance to ritual observances, has always been found in peculiar strength amongst tribes just emerging from heathenism. Hence the missionaries of Rome, having appealed to this principle of our nature, and induced the poor Indians to receive baptism at their hands, without any adequate instruction, have been able to boast of the numbers of their converts; a proceeding which they can justify to themselves on the principle, that they impart grace in baptism, and that thus they communicate to the passive recipients of the rite that state of mind which our Baptist brethren regard as a prerequisite in all candidates. The importance which the latter attach to that ordinance, ought to awaken in the minds of the wise and thoughtful amongst them, a consciousness of danger in that very direction. Their strong and well-known attachment to their peculiarities has betrayed them into unseemly haste, and, we fear, that they have in very many instances, not built up their churches, in Jamaica at least, with "gold, silver, and precious stones," but with "wood, hay, and stubble!"

Let the following extracts speak :

"As duly published in their newspaper, these brethren immerse, at brief intervals, from 50 to 200 persons at a time. A short time ago the Rev. Mr. Dutton immersed on one occasion 234 persons. The Rev. J. E. Francies, of Lucea, when he had been at the station but a few months, immersed 200 at one time. And the Rev. Mr. Williams, before he had been on the island six weeks, and in a neighbourhood where no Baptist missionary had preceded him, immersed 126 persons. Similar baptisms of large masses of the people are reported also by Messrs. Knibb, Dendy, Hutchins, Oughton, and others. These multitudinous baptisms are repeated by the same missionary several times during a year. In the course of the year 1840, Messrs. Clark and Dutton, of Brown's Town, immersed seven hundred and twenty nine."—Exposition, p. 11.

"I see no reason to conclude," says Mr. Barrett," that the large and rapid increase in the Baptist churches in Jamaica, unparalleled in the history of Protestant churches in any other part of the world, has arisen from an extraordinary outpouring of the influences of the Holy Spirit, but rather from admission to the church being made too easy and indiscriminate. Too much regard is paid by the negroes, naturally a superstitious race, to the mere eating of the bread at the sacramental table, and to the act of immersion. To a superstitious veneration for the latter, inculcated at first by the black Baptists from America, and fostered by the leaders under the European missionaries, may be attributed the decided preference of thousands to attend the ministry of the most ignorant and unfit Baptist leader, or to sit at home sabbath after sabbath, rather than to avail themselves of the instructions of a Pædobaptist minister. That it arises from this cause, rather than from an intelligent appreciation of the grounds of difference between Pædobaptists and Antipædobaptists, is evident from the fact that numbers of Baptist members and inquirers have had their children baptized at the Established Church, whilst others have acted as sponsors at the same ceremony.” -Reply, p. 5.

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Mr. Green offers the following remark upon this :

"Mr. Barrett after all seems to think that the work of conversion is going on too rapidly in Jamaica to be sound. This I take to be the meaning of his hasty, indiscriminate baptisms.' In a letter to myself of August 10th, last, he says on this subject, 'What can be thought of one minister baptizing in one year seven hundred and seventy-seven persons? There was nothing equal to it in apostolic times.' Mr. Barrett has read the Acts of the Apostles to but little account. According to his argument, the sound conversion of three thousand by one sermon is an impossibility; their increase within much less than a year to five thousand is a mere chimera. He can be no believer in the predictions which intimate that converts shall fly as a cloud and as the doves to their windows, and that Christ shall have followers numerous as the morning dew-drops. He can have but low views of the omnipotence of Divine influence, and must be calculating on a much slower progress of the cause of God than would promise anything like its speedy triumph in the world. I do not envy him his sentiments. But few missionaries will sympathize with him, and facts in the history of the society with which he himself is connected, tell against him."Review, p. 31.

This is met with great truth and justice in the following passage of the Exposition:—

"Now before we assert what we know of those baptisms, or adduce a fact in support of what we assert, we ask-Is there not, in the bare announcement of such baptisms, something to stagger the faith of the friends of missions? Can any or all of the second causes which are said to have contributed to the extraordinary success which they imply, be deemed sufficient to account for them? If an ordinary proportion of the multitudes which those brethren annually add to their churches can be regarded as regenerate persons, Jamaica must have been blessed with a more than pentecostal effusion of the Spirit from on high, and her revivals exceed anything that America herself has seen. If such a baptism of the Spirit had indeed been vouchsafed, it would account for all-nothing is too hard for the Lord;-but then would it not be unaccountable that the gracious rain should be so partial as to bestow floods on the Baptists, but scarcely a sprinkling on the fields of other Christian labourers? Nay, if a rain from heaven, or a "dew from the Lord," has thus made their congregations like Gideon's well-saturated fleece, while all around has remained comparatively dry, it is a phenomena in missions; a solemn fact, which calls for inquiry, and deserves to be investigated by a deputation composed of the wisest of the elders of our British Israel. Another circumstance, increasing the marvel, is that while the blessing has been given as a special favour to the Baptists, there are three localities of their own mission excepted from it, which places happen to be occupied by missionaries who repudiate the methods employed by their successful brethren, and protest against them as unscriptural, and calculated rather to destroy than to save-to confirm in sin, rather than to convert from sin. And when the mental condition of many of the people among whom this miracle of conversion is wrought, (the almost total blank which their minds present on the subject of their moral state and relation to God,) is considered, in connexion with the fact, that the truth' is the sole and never superseded instrument of regeneration, the work of the Baptist missionaries in Jamaica is seen to exceed by far the achievement of the apostles, upon and immediately after the day of Pentecost. The disproportion between the instrumentality which conveyed the power, and the success attained, is greater in Jamaica than it was in Judea.

"We have been surprised, therefore, that the weekly announcements of the Baptist newspaper have not themselves, apart from the fact that some were calling in ques

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