Reeve embarked upon his career as God's chosen prophet by issuing, in 1653, an eight-page pamphlet entitled
A General Epistle from the Holy Spirit unto all prophets, ministers and speakers in the world. Reeve pronounced sentence of eternal damnation on two classes of people: those who heard of his commission but despised it, and those who continued to preach the message of the existing churches. Reeve says such ministers are not sent by God. They possess no commission and their opinions are merely their own. "You preach to the people out of the bottomless pit of your own lying imagination, which is the Devil." And perhaps more tellingly, "You know not the Lord Jesus who requires mercy and not sacrifice, who causeth the sun to shine upon the just and unjust." Reeve was beginning to tread on very dangerous ground. In 1656,
James Nayler, a Quaker, was to be convicted of blasphemy after a trial before parliament. "After a debate which reveals the savagery of frightened men, Nayler was sentenced to be flogged, pilloried, branded, his tongue to be bored and then to be imprisoned indefinitely. This was milder punishment than many MPs wanted." Earlier, in 1653, Reeve's
General Epistle was rapidly making enemies amongst those who supported
Oliver Cromwell's policy of religious toleration as well as those bitterly opposed to it – and for the same reason in both cases. What was the point, the argument ran, of granting toleration to minorities if they then used it as licence to vilify everyone else? Reeve was clearly impelled by a Godly imperative rather than political tact. Reeve and Muggleton were arrested under the
Blasphemy Act 1650, the
Transcendent Spiritual Treatise providing the evidence. Reeve was examined by the
Lord Mayor of London,
John Fowke, on three heads; self-deification, cursing Oliver Cromwell and denying the Trinity. Reeve denied all charges. "We own the Trinity more than any Men, both Father, Son and Spirit, are all one Person and one God Christ Jesus." A further charge brought by ministers outraged by the
General Epistle was dropped, possibly because of the difficulty of framing a case, or possibly because the minister in attendance was from outside the jurisdiction. Reeve and Muggleton were remanded to
Newgate prison to be tried by jury on 17 October 1653. They were convicted on a single count of denying the Trinity and sentenced to six months in Old Bridewell house of correction. During this period, Reeve's
A Remonstrance from the Eternal God (effectively his appeal to Cromwell) was printed and published by Jeremiah Mount and well received. The pair were released in April 1654 to find they had a following. As a result, a number of important letters were written by Reeve during 1654, principally to Rev.
William Sedgwick, an Anglican minister in Ely, to the Earl of Pembroke and to Isaac Pennington the younger. On the face of it, Reeve's letter to these important persons were filled with failure. All three correspondents eventually preferred the Quaker viewpoint. Reading the letters one gets the impression Reeve doesn't much care. He's found the keystone belief for which he has long searched; universal mortality. People die, their souls die with them, the whole universe will soon expire and God has already died. Professor
William M. Lamont remarks that most of Reeve's contemporaries would have found this last item disturbingly blasphemous. It was to provide the subject matter for Reeve's final book, Joyfull News from Heaven, or the Souls Mortality Proved. Reeve's health never recovered from his prison experiences. From this time, his wife and daughter provided the family livelihood. But his wife died, probably on 29 March 1656. After this, Reeve was a pauper. But he had one great book left in him
A Divine Looking-Glass (1656). At the opening of this book it says that all writings come "of divine inspiration or human imagination" So confident was Reeve that only the Commission of the Last Witnesses was of divine origin that he said in a letter of 15 August 1656 to Alice Webb "if the Lord Jesus does not bear witness unto our testimony and make it evident that he has sent us in a few months then you may conclude that there was never any true prophets .. " Reeve did not see himself as founding a faith so much as announcing imminent events to take place in the skies above London. The record of his prophetic experiences, as given in Lodowicke Muggleton's
Acts of the Witnesses, is not naive reportage. Some of its embedded expectations are quite explicit, such as harking back to the
Book of Revelation or to the clear parallels with Moses' taking on the first commission. Other references are meant to be felt more obliquely. We are told of Reeve's reluctance to assume his task, implying the matter derived from the will of God, not the pushiness of the prophet. We are told of Reeve's earlier experiences which he had interpreted as being for his personal benefit alone, thus implying he is an old hand who can be relied upon to evaluate such things correctly. The story is framed by the expectations of the times. Reeve died in July 1658 and was buried in the now-removed Bethlehem Burial Ground (the
New Churchyard). ==Reevonians==