spiritual. It unites often philosophy with revelation. It explains a
great number of the difficult texts with clearness and consistency. That
it explains all of them I will not aver. But these which it does
explain, it explains in the strictest harmony with the love, goodness,
justice, mercy, and wisdom of God.

As to the creed of the Quakers, we have seen its effects. We have seen
it to be both encouraging and consolatory. We have seen it produce
happiness in life, and courage in death. The doctrine of the possibility
of human perfection, where it is believed, must be a perpetual stimulus
to virtue, it must encourage hope and banish fear. But it may be said,
that stimulative and consolatory as it may be, it wants one of the marks
which I have insisted upon, namely, a sound foundation. But surely they,
who deny it, will have as many scriptural texts against them as they who
acknowledge it, and will they not be rendering their own spiritual
situation perilous? But what do the Quakers mean by perfection? Not the
perfection of God, to which there are no limits, as has been before
explained, but that which arises to man from the possibility of keeping
the divine commands. They mean that perfection, such as Noah, and Job,
and Zacharias, and Elizabeth, attained, and which the Jewish rabbies
distinguished by the name of Redemption, and which they conceived to be
effected by the influence of the Holy Spirit, or that state of man in
Christian morals, which, if he arrives at it, the Divine Being (outward
redemption having taken place by the sacrifice of Christ) is pleased to
accept as sufficient, or as the most pure state at which man, under the
disadvantages of the frailty of his nature, can arrive. And is not this
the practicable perfection, which Jesus himself taught in these words,
"Be ye perfect, even as your Father, which is in heaven is perfect." Not
that he supposed it possible, that any human being could be as perfect
as the Divine Nature. But he proposed, by these expressions, the highest
conceivable model of human excellence, of which our natures were
capable, well knowing that the higher our aspirations the higher we
should ascend, and the sooner we should reach that best state of
humanity that was attainable. And here it is, that Christianity, as a
rule of moral conduct, surpasses all others. Men, in general, look up to
men for models. Thus Homer makes one of his heroes, when giving counsel
to his son, say, "Always e