Page:Records of the Life of the Rev. John Murray.djvu/207

most illegally shrouded in silence, and a vote was thus surreptitiously obtained, that he should forthwith depart from the borders of Gloucester; of this vote he was advertised by an officer—let us not say of justice. Still, however, he continued witnessing both to small and great, what Moses and the prophets had testified, concerning Jesus of Nazareth, that he died for our sins, and rose again for our justification. The most unwarrantable means were employed, old slanders were resuscitated, and new accusations brought forward; tales which had been repeatedly confuted, were new garbed, and sent abroad, swelling the bosom of integrity with unutterable anguish. Among countless other calumnies which were afloat, a story was embellished, and published, originally propagated by one Maxwell, wherein the preacher, the lover of the Redeemer, is represented as treating the Eucharist in a ludicrous manner! although the gentleman—Mr. afterwards General Greene, at whose house, and in whose presence, the irreverent profanation was said to have taken place—had written to Doctor S——— and others, completely exonerating the accused. Mr. Murray's sentiments upon the sacred and consolatory ordinance of the Lord's Supper, are explained and expatiated upon, in his Letters and Sketches of Sermons, to which the interested reader is referred. It cannot be denied, that characters generally respectable, combined to stimulate the mob to the most desperate measures, but every unwarrantable project was frustrated. The doors of the meeting-house being now closed, the parlours of respectable friends became the places of assembling, until at length a spacious room was consecrated for that purpose. Letters of excommunication were now addressed, by the established Minister, to seventeen of the most respectable Church members, and this, for their attachment to the Gospel of God our Saviour. While others, availing themselves of a Provincial Law, endeavoured to expel the Ambassador of their God, as a Vagrant. To meet, and obviate which difficulty, the kind friend under whose especial patronage he then was, presented him with a deed of gift, which constituted him a freeholder in Gloucester. The months of March and April, in this year, were, by the Preacher, devoted to visiting his friends in Boston, and various parts of Rhode Island, and toward the close of April, he returned to his highly favoured home, rejoicing that the zeal, and attachment of the Gloucesterians, were nothing diminished, and their meetings for scriptural investigations were joyfully resumed. In the month of May, 1775, the leading officers of the Rhode Island Brigade, assembled in the neighbourhood of Boston, despatched a respectable messenger, with a letter, soliciting the