XVI.

lished harmonies in this best of all possible worlds; the CHAP. illiterate Quaker adhered strictly to his method; like the timid navigators of old time, who carefully kept near the shore, he never ventured to sea except with the certain guidance of the cynosure in the heart. He was consistent, for he set no value on learning b. ii. 26. acquired in any other way. Tradition cannot enjoin a ceremony, still less establish a doctrine; historical faith is as the old heavens that are to be wrapped up as a scroll.

Penn, 1.

130.

Barclay,

30.

1, 2, 133.

140, 137.

130, 131.

The constant standard of truth and goodness, says William Penn, is God in the conscience, and liberty of conscience is therefore the most sacred right, and the Penn, ii. only avenue to religion. To restrain it is an invasion of the divine prerogative. It robs man of the use of the instinct of a Deity. To take away the great charter of freedom of conscience is to prevent 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 whipcord to lash their own posterity. The selfishness of bigotry is the same in every age; the persecutors of to-day do not differ from those who inflamed the people of Athens to demand the death of Socrates; and the Quaker champions of freedom of mind would never shrink from its exercise, through fear of prisons or martyrdom.

But the Quaker asked for conscience more than security against penal legislation. He proclaimed an insurrection against every form of authority over conscience; he resisted every attempt at the slavish subjection of the understanding. He had no reverence for the decrees of a university, a convocation, or a synod; no fear of maledictions from the Vatican. Nor was this all. The Quaker denied the value of all learning,

1.277.

310

XVI.

30, 355,

352.

THE RUSTIC QUAKER REBUKES THE RABBIS.

CHAP. except that which the mind appropriates by its own intelligence. The lessons of tradition were no better Barclay, 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, and truth to him who is learned and not wise, who knows words and not things, is of no more worth than a beautiful piece of sculpture to a Vandal. Let then the pedant plume himself in the belief, that erudition is wisdom; the waters of life, welling up from the soul, gush forth in spontaneous freedom; and the illiterate mechanic need not fear to rebuke the proudest rabbis of the university.

Sam.

Fisher.

The Quaker equally claimed the emancipation of conscience from the terrors of superstition. He did not waken devotion by appeals to fear. He could Barclay. 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, without a jar in the whole frame. Discord proceeds from a perversion of powers, whose purpose was benevolent; and the spirit becomes evil only by a departure from truth.

Fox, 180. 324.

Penn,

3.29.

The Quaker was sions of self-love.

equally warned against the deluHis enemies, in derision, sneered at

XVI.

23.

35.

his idol as a delirious will-in-the-wisp, that claimed a CHAP. heavenly descent for the offspring of earthly passions; and Fox, and Barclay, and Penn, earnestly denounced By "the idolatry which hugs its own conceptions," mistaking the whimseys of a feverish brain for the calm revelations of truth. But "How shall I know," asks Penn, L. 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 Barclay, 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 exists, 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. There is a natural sagacity of sympathy, which separates what belongs to the individual from that which commends itself to universal reason. Quakerism" is a most rational system." Judgment is to be made not Besse, 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 Penn, il debates; the true light pleads its excellency in every Barclay breast. Neither may the divine revelation be confounded with individual conscience; for the conscience of the individual follows judgment, and may be warped by self-love and debauched by lust. The Turk has no remorse for sensual indulgence, for 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.

ii. 498.

24.

Penn, L

329.

138-140

XVI.

THE INNER LIGHT INTERPRETS THE SCRIPTURES.

342 CHAP. 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." Moreover it has the characteristic of necessity. "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 Prop. ii. understanding to assent.'

Barclay, 128.

Ib. 129.

Ib. 4.

But would the Inner Light bend to the authority of written inspiration? The Bible was the religion of Protestants; had the Quaker a better guide? The Quaker believed in the unity of truth; there can be no contradiction between right reason and previous revelation, between just tradition and an enlightened conscience. But the Spirit is the criterion. The Barclay, Spirit is the guide which leads into all truth. The Quaker reads the Scriptures with delight, but not with idolatry. It is his own soul which bears the valid Penn, 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."

5.

326.

i.

Far from rejecting Christianity, the Quaker insisted that he alone maintained its primitive simplicity. The skeptic forever vibrated between opinions; the Quaker was fixed even to dogmatism. The infidel rejected religion; the Quaker cherished it as his life. The scoffer pushed freedom to dissoluteness; the Quaker circumscribed freedom by obedience to truth.

gers

XVI.

George Fox and Voltaire both protested against priest- CHAP. craft; 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 shepherds, that John Baptist, the greatest of envoys, was clad in a rough garment of camel's hair. To them there was joy in the 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 messenof his choice had been rustics like themselves. No were they embarrassed by knotty points of theology. Their creed did not vary with the subtilties of verbal criticism; they revered the eternity of the Inner Light without regard to the arguments of grammarians or the use of the Greek article. Did philosophers and divines involve themselves in the mazes of liberty and fixed decrees, of foreknowledge and fate, the monitor in the Quaker's breast was to him the sufficient guaranty of freedom. Did men defend or reject the Trinity by learned dissertations and minute criticisms on various readings, he avoided the use of the word, and despised the jargon of disputants; but the idea of God with us, the incarnation of the Spirit, the union of Deity with humanity, was to the Quaker the dearest and the most sublime symbol of man's enfranchisement.

461

As a consequence of this faith, every avenue to truth was to be kept open. "Christ came not to extinguish, Pen but to improve the heathen knowledge." "The difference between the philosophers of Greece and the Christian Quaker is rather in manifestation than in bid 1 nature." He cries Stand, to every thought that

327