own
powers as positively to pronounce, that the notions of the Quakers are
utterly false, as to the illicitness of wars under the Christian system?
The arguments of the Quakers on this subject are quite as good, in my
apprehension, as any that I have heard advanced on the other side of the
question. These arguments too are unquestionably much more honourable to
Christianity, and much more consistent with the nature and design of the
Gospel dispensation. They are supported also by the belief and the
practice of the earliest Christians. They are arguments again, which
have suggested themselves to many good men, who were not Quakers, and
which have occasioned doubts in some instances, and conviction in
others, against the prejudice of education and the dominion of custom.
And if the event should ever come to pass, which most Christians expect,
that men will one day or other turn their swords and their spears into
ploughshares and pruning-hooks, they, who live in that day, will applaud
the perseverance of the Quakers in this case, and weep over the
obstinacy and inconsistency of those who combated their opinions.

But the great question after all is, whether the Quakers believe
themselves in this or in any other of their religious scruples, to be
right, as a Christian body? If there are those among them who do not,
they give into the customs of the world, and either leave the society
themselves, or become disowned. It is therefore only a fair and a just
presumption, that all those who continue in the society, and who keep up
to these scruples to the detriment of their worldly interest, believe
themselves to be right. But this belief of their own rectitude, even if
they should happen to be wrong, is religion to them, and ought to be
estimated so by us in matters in which an interpretation of Gospel
principles is concerned. This is but an homage due to conscience, after
all the blood that has been shed in the course of Christian
persecutions, and after all the religious light that has been diffused
among us since the reformation of our religion.

CHAP. XIII.

SECT. I.

_Next trait is that of a money-getting spirit--Probability of the truth
of this trait examined--An undue eagerness after money not unlikely to
be often the result of the frugal and commercial habits of the
society--but not to the extent, as insisted on by the world--This
eagerness, wherever it exists, seldom chargeable with avarice._

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