her believe, that the Spirit of God, it
rightly understood, would have protested against condemnation for a
crime, which does not exist?

But the mischief, if a proper distinction be not made between the agency
of the Spirit and that of the will of man, may spread farther, and may
reach the man himself, and become injurious both to his health, his
intellect, and his usefulness, and the Divine Being may be made again
the author of it all.

Many, we all know, notwithstanding their care and attention, have found
that they have gone wrong in their affairs in various instances of their
lives, that is, events have shewn that they have taken a wrong course.
But if there be those who suppose themselves in these instances to have
been acted upon by the Spirit or God, what is more likely than that they
may imagine that they have lost his favour, and that looking upon
themselves as driven by him into the wrong road, they may fall into the
belief, that they are among the condemned reprobate, and pine away,
deprived of their senses, in a state of irretrievable misery and
despair?

Others again may injure their health, and diminish their comfort and
their utility in another way. And here I may remark, that if I have seen
what the world would call superstition among the Quakers, it has been
confined principally to a few females, upon whose constitution, more
delicate than that of men, an attention to undistinguished impressions,
brought on in a course of time by a gradual depreciation of human
reason, has acted with considerable force. I fear that some of these, in
the upright intention of their hearts to consult the Almighty on all
occasions as the sole arbiter of every thing that is good, have fostered
their own infirmities, and gone into retirements so frequent, as to have
occasioned these to interfere with the duties of domestic comfort and
social good, and that they have been at last so perplexed with doubts
and an increasing multitude of scruples, that they have been afraid of
doing many things, because they have not had a revelation for them. The
state of such worthy persons is much to be pitied. What must be their
feelings under such a conflict, when they are deserted by human reason?
What an effect will not such religious doubts and perplexities have
upon their health? What impediments do they not throw in the way of
their own utility?

I should be sorry if by any observations, such as the preceding, I
should be thought