the progress of society; or rather, as the beneficent course of Providence cannot be checked, it is in men of the present generation but knotting a whip-cord to lash their own posterity.

But the Quaker asked for conscience more than security against penal legislation. He denied the value of all learning, except that which the mind appropriates by its own intelligence. The lessons of tradition were no better than the prating of a parrot, and letter learning may be hurtful as well as helpful. When the mind is not free, the devil can accompany the zealot to his prayers and the doctor to his study. The soul is a living fountain of immortal truth; but a college is in itself no better than a cistern, in which water may stagnate. The pedant may plume himself in the belief that erudition is wisdom; but the waters of life well up from the soul in spontaneous freedom; and the unlearned artisan need not fear to rebuke the proudest rabbis of the university.

The Quaker equally claimed the emancipation of conscience from the terrors of superstition. He did not waken devotion by appeals to fear. He could not grow pale from dread of apparitions, or, like Grotius, establish his faith by the testimony of ghosts; and, in an age when the English courts punished witchcraft with death, he rejected the delusion as having no warrant in the free experience of the soul. To him no spirit was created evil; the world began with innocency; and, as God blessed the works of his hands, their natures and harmony magnified their Creator. God made no devil; for all that he made was good.

The Quaker was warned against the delusions of self-love. His enemies sneered at his idol as a delirious will-o'-the-wisp, that claimed a heavenly descent for the offspring of earthly passions; but Fox and Barclay and Penn as earnestly denounced "the idolatry which hugs its own conceptions," mistaking the whimseys of a feverish brain for the calm revelations of truth. "How shall I know," asks Penn, "that a man does not obtrude his own sense upon us as the infallible Spirit?" And he answers, "By the same Spirit." The Spirit witnesseth to our spirit. The Quaker repudiates the errors which the bigotry of sects, or the zeal of selfishness, or the

delusion of the senses, has engrafted upon the unchanging principles of morals; and accepting intelligence wherever it emerges from the collision of parties and the strife in the world of opinions, he gathers together the universal truths which of necessity constitute the common creed of mankind. Quakerism "is a most rational system." Judgment is to be made not from the rash and partial mind, but from the eternal light that never errs. The divine revelation is universal, and compels assent. The jarring reasonings of individuals have filled the world with controversies and debates; the one true light pleads its excellency in every breast. Neither may the divine revelation be confounded with individual conscience; for the conscience of the individual follows judg ment, and may be warped by self-love and debauched by lust. The Turk has no remorse for sensual indulgence, because he has defiled his judgment with a false opinion. The papist, if he eat flesh in Lent, is reproved by the inward monitor; for that monitor is blinded by a false belief. The true light is therefore not the reason of the individual, nor the conscience of the individual; it is the light of universal reason; the voice of universal conscience, "manifesting its own verity, in that it is confirmed and established by the experience of all men." "It constrains even its adversaries to plead for it." "It never contradicts sound reason," and is the noblest and most certain rule; for "the divine revelation is so evident and clear of itself, that by its own evidence and clearness it irresistibly forces the well-disposed understanding to assent."

The Bible was the religion of Protestants; had the Quaker a better guide? The Quaker believes that the Spirit is the guide which leads into all truth; and reads the scriptures with delight, but not with idolatry. It is his own soul which bears the valid witness that they are true. The letter is not the Spirit; the Bible is not religion, but a record of religion. "The scriptures "-such are Barclay's words-" are a declaration of the fountain, and not the fountain itself."

Far from rejecting Christianity, the Quaker insisted that he alone held it in its primitive simplicity. The skeptic forever vibrated between opinions; the Quaker was fixed even to dogmatism. The scoffer pushed freedom to indifference; the

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Quaker circumscribed freedom by obedience to truth. George Fox and Voltaire both protested against priestcraft; Voltaire in behalf of the senses, Fox in behalf of the soul. To the Quakers, Christianity is freedom. And they loved to remember that the patriarchs were graziers, that the prophets were mechanics and shepher, that John Baptist, the greatest of envoys, was clad in ugh garment of camel's hair. To them there was joy i e thought that the brightest image of divinity on earth had been born in a manger, had been reared under the roof of a carpenter, had been content for himself and his guests with no greater luxury than barley loaves and fishes, and that the messengers of his choice had been rustics like themselves. Nor were they embarrassed by knotty points of theology. Was the Trinity defended or denied by minute criticism on various readings, they avoided the use of the word; but the idea of God with us, the union of Deity with humanity, was to the Quaker the most sublime symbol of man's enfranchisement.

As a consequence of this faith, every avenue to truth was to be kept open. "Christ came not to extinguish, but to improve the heathen knowledge." "The difference between the philosophers of Greece and the Christian Quaker is rather in manifestation than in nature." He cries "Stand" to every thought that knocks for entrance, but welcomes it as a friend if it gives the watchword. Happy in the wonderful bond which admitted him to a communion with all the sons of light, of every nation and age, he rejected with scorn the school of Epicurus; he had no sympathy with the follies of the skeptics; and esteemed even the mind of Aristotle too much bent upon the outward world. But Aristotle himself, in so far as he grounds philosophy on virtue and self-denial, and all contemplative sages, orators and philosophers, statesmen and divines, were gathered as a cloud of witnesses to the same unchanging truth. "The Inner Light," said Penn, "is the domestic God of Pythagoras." The voice in the breast of George Fox, as he kept sheep on the hills of Nottingham, is the spirit which had been the good genius of Socrates. Above all, the Christian Quaker delighted in "the divinely contemplative Plato," the "famous doctor of gentile theol

ogy," and recognised the identity of the Inner Light with the divine principle of Plotinus. Quakerism is as old as humanity.

The Inner Light is to the Quaker not only the revelation of truth, but the guide of life and the oracle of duty. The doctrine of disinterested virtue-the doctrine for which Guyon was persecuted and Fénelon disgraced, the doctrine which tyrants condemn as rebellion, and priests as heresy was cherished by the Quaker as the foundation of morality. Selfdenial he enforced with ascetic severity, yet never with ascetic superstition. He might array himself fantastically to express a truth by an apparent symbol, but he never wore sackcloth as an anchorite. "Thoughts of death and hell to keep out sin were to him no better than fig-leaves." He would obey the imperative dictate of truth even though the fires of hell were quenched. Virtue is happiness; heaven is with her always.

The Quakers knew no superstitious vows of celibacy; they favored no nunneries, monasteries, "or religious bedlams; but they demanded purity of life as essential to the welfare of society, and founded the institution of marriage on permanent affection, not on transient passion. Their matches, they were wont to say, are registered in heaven. Has a recent school of philosophy discovered in wars and pestilence, in vices and poverty, salutary checks on population ? The Quaker, confident of the supremacy of mind, feared no evil, though plagues and war should cease, and vice and poverty be banished by intelligent culture. Despotism favors the liberty of the senses; and popular freedom rests on sanctity of morals. To the Quaker, licentiousness is the greatest bane of good order and good government.

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The Quaker revered principles, not men; truth, not power; and therefore could not become the tool of ambition. "They are a people," said Cromwell, "whom I cannot win with gifts, honors, offices, or places." Still less was the Quaker a slave to avarice. To him the love of money for money's sake was the basest of passions, and the rage of indefinite accumulation was "oppression to the poor, compelling those who have little to drudge like slaves."

"That the

sweat and tedious labor of the husbandmen, early and late, cold and hot, wet and dry, should be converted into the pleasure, ease, and pastime of a small number of men, that the cart, the plough, the thresh, should be in inordinate severity laid upon nineteen parts of the land to feed the appetites of the twentieth, is far from the appointment of the great gov ernor of the world." It is best the people be neither rich nor poor; for riches bring luxury, and luxury tyranny.

The system aimed at a reformation of society, but only by means addressed to conscience. It demanded that children should be brought up, not in the pride of caste, still less by methods of violence. Life should never be taken for an offence against property, nor the person imprisoned for debt. And the same train of reasoning led to a protest against war. The Quaker, for himself, renounced the use of the sword; but, aware that the vices of society might entail danger on a nation not imbued with his principles, he did not absolutely deny to others the right of defence, while he hoped from the progress of civilization a universal and enduring peace.

The Quaker regarded "the substance of things," and broke up ceremonies as the nests of superstition. Every Protestant refuses the rosary and the censer; the Quaker rejects common prayer, and his adoration of God is the free language of his soul. He remembers the sufferings of divine philanthropy, but uses neither wafer nor cup. He trains up his children to fear God, but never sprinkles them with baptismal water. He ceases from labor on the first day of the week, for the ease of creation, and not from reverence for a holy day. The Quaker is a pilgrim on earth, and life is the ship that bears him to the haven; he mourns in his mind for the departure of friends by respecting their advice, taking care of their children, and loving those that they loved; and this seems better than outward emblems of sorrowing. His words are always freighted with innocence and truth; God, the searcher of hearts, is the witness to his sincerity; but kissing a book or lifting a hand is a vanity, and the sense of duty cannot be increased by an imprecation.

The Quaker distrusts the fine arts, they are so easily perverted to the purposes of superstition and the delight of the