Excerpt from The Primitive Government of Christian Churches: Also, Liturgical Considerations Among the reasons, my brethren, which induced the speaker to undertake, at your request, the performance of the present service, he is unwilling any one should reckon, a sense of his competency to the task. If one's ability to speak justly of another, is at all proportional to their degrees of mutual conformity in talents and virtues, there are not many persons among the acquaintance of your late pastor, of whatever experience and attainments, who ought to think themselves adequate to a complete description of him. An intimacy of nearly sixteen years, has made him who addresses you very conscious, that his inferiority in age, though a great disqualification, is probably the least considerable point in his unfitness to that undertaking. He was led, however, to hope, that he would receive so much assistance from the papers of his lamented friend, that he might almost make him his own biographer; but, to his great surprise, that peculiar man was found to have left not a sentence about himself, among all his manuscripts; nor have many particulars in his history been ascertained, besides such as are of extensive notoriety. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.