XVI.

30, 385,

352.

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 illiteFisher. rate mechanic need not fear to rebuke the proudest rabbis of the university.

Sam.

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.

i.

Penn,

329.

The Quaker was sions of self-love.

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

XVI.

346.

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 Barclay, "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, ii. 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 erred. The divine revelation is universal, and compels assent. The jarring reasonings of individuals have filled the world with controversies and Penn, ii debates; the true light pleads its excellency in 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. B

every

ii. 498.

24. Barclay,

55.

Penn, i. 329.

138-140,

XVI.

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." Ib. 129. "It never contradicts sound reason," and is the noblest

Barclay,

128.

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."

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 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.

Penn, 1.

326.

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.

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 messengers of 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 nost 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 Ibid. L. nature." He cries Stand, to every thought that

327

CHAP. knocks for entrance; but welcomes it as a friend, if it

XVI. gives the watchword. Exulting in the wonderful bond

Penn, i.

326.

538; iii.

53.

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 folbid. lies 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 261 of Socrates. Above all, the Christian Quaker delighted in "the divinely contemplative Plato," the "famous doctor of gentile theology," and recognized the unity of the Inner Light with the divine principle which Ibid. ii. dwelt with Plotinus. Quakerism is as old as humanity.

Penn, i.

619.

619

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 Fox, xi. 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 Fenelon