every thought that knocks for entrance; but welcomes it as a friend, if it gives the watchword. Exulting 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 every contemplative sage, 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, was the spirit which had been the good genius and guide of Socrates. Above all, the Christian Quaker delighted in "the divinely contemplative Plato," the "famous doctor of gentile theology," and recognised the identity of the Inner Light with the divine principle which dwelt with 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. He demands the uniform predominance of the world of thought over the world of sensation. The blameless enthusiast, well aware of the narrow powers and natural infirmities of man, yet aims at perfection from sin; and, tolerating no compromise, demands the harmonious development of man's higher powers with the entire subjection of the base to the nobler instincts. The motives to conduct and its rule are, like truth, to be sought in the soul.

Thus 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. Self-denial 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.

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. Seeking wisdom, and not the philosopher's stone, to him the love of money for money's sake was the basest of passions, and the rage of indefinite accumulation was 66 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 Governor of the world." It is best the people be neither rich nor poor; for riches bring luxury, and luxury tyranny.

The supremacy of mind, forbidding the exercise of tyranny as a means of government, attempted a reformation of society, but only by means addressed to conscience. The system contained a reform in education; it demanded that children should be brought up, not in the pride of caste,

still less by methods of violence; but as men, by methods suited to the intelligence of humanity. 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 believed in the power of justice to protect itself; for himself, he renounced the use of the sword; and, 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, but looked forward with hope to the period when the progress of civilization should realize the vision of a universal and enduring peace.

The supremacy of mind abrogated ceremonies; the Quaker regarded "the substance of things," and broke up forms as the nests of superstition. Every Protestant refused 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 holiday. 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 superstitious 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 senses. Yet, when they are allied with virtue, and express the nobler sentiments, they are very sweet and refreshing. The comedy where, of old, Aristophanes excited the Athenians to hate Socrates, and where the profligate gallants of the court of Charles II. assembled to hear

the drollery of Nell Gwyn heap ridicule on the Quakers, was condemned without mercy. But the innocent diversions of society, the delights of rural life, the pursuits of science, the study of history, would not interfere with aspirations after God. For apparel, the Quaker dresses soberly, according to his condition and education; far from prescribing an unchanging fashion, he holds it "no vanity to use what the country naturally produces," and reproves nothing but that extravagance which "all sober men of all sorts readily grant to be evil."

Like vanities of dress, the artifices of rhetoric were despised. Truth, it was said, is beautiful enough in plain clothes; and Penn, who was able to write exceedingly well, often forgot that style is the gossamer on which the seeds of truth float through the world.

Careless of style, the Quakers employ for the propagation of truth no weapons but those of mind. They distributed tracts; but they would not sustain their doctrine by a hireling ministry. "A man thou hast corrupted to thy interests will never be faithful to them; " and an established church seemed "a cage for unclean birds." When a great high-priest, who was a doctor, had finished preaching from the words, “Ho every one that thirsteth, come buy without money," George Fox "was moved of the Lord to say to him, 'Come down, thou deceiver! Dost thou bid people come to the waters of life freely, and yet thou takest three hundred pounds a year of them?' The Spirit is a free teacher."

Still less would the Quaker employ the methods of persecution. He was a zealous Protestant, but in the season of highest excitement he pleaded for absolute liberty of worship, and sought to enfranchise the Roman Catholic himself. To persecute, he esteemed a confession of a bad cause; for the design that is of God has confidence in itself, and knows that any other will vanish. "Your cruelties are a confirmation that truth is not on your side," was the remonstrance of a woman of Aberdeen to the magistrates who had imprisoned her husband.

In like manner, the Quaker never employed force to

effect a social revolution or reform, but, refusing obedience to wrong, deprived tyranny of its instruments. The Quaker's loyalty, said the Earl of Arrol at Aberdeen, is a qualified loyalty; it smells of rebellion to which Alexander Skein, brother to a subsequent governor of West 1676. New Jersey, calmly answered: "I understand not loyalty that is not qualified with the fear of God rather than of man.' 99 The Quaker never would pay tithes; never yielded to any human law which traversed his conscience. He did more: he resisted tyranny with all the moral energy of enthusiasm, bearing witness against blind obedience not less than against will worship. Believing in the supremacy of mind over matter, he sought no control over the government except by intelligence; and therefore he needed to hold the right of free discussion inviolably sacred. He never consented to the slightest compromise of this freedom. Wherever there was evil and oppression, he claimed the right to be present with a remonstrance. He delivered his opinions freely before Cromwell and Charles II., in face of the gallows in New England, in the streets of London, before the English commons. heaviest penalties that bigotry could devise never induced him to swerve a hair's-breadth from his purpose of speaking freely and publicly. This was his method of resisting tyranny. Algernon Sydney, who took money from Louis XIV., like Brutus, would have plunged a dagger into the breast of a tyrant; the Quaker, without a bribe, resisted tyranny by appeals to the monitor in the tyrant's breast, and he labored incessantly to advance reform by enlightening the public conscience. Any other method of revolution he believed an impossibility. Government - such was his belief. will always be as the people are; and a people imbued with the love of liberty create the irresistible necessity of a free government. He sought no revolution but that which followed as the consequence of the public intelligence. Such revolutions were inevitable. "Though men consider it not, the Lord rules and overrules in the kingdoms of men." Any other revolution would be transient. The Quakers submitted to the restoration of

The