e had
concluded, a gentleman-like old man (a physician by profession)
arose, and delivered a few moral sentences in an agreeable
manner; soon after he had sat down, the whole congregation rose,
I know not at what signal, and made their exit. It is a singular
kind of worship, if worship it may be called, where all prayer is
forbidden; yet it appeared to me, in its decent quietness,
infinitely preferable to what I had witnessed at the Presbyterian
and Methodist Meeting-houses. A great schism had lately taken
place among the Quakers of Philadelphia; many objecting to the
over-strict discipline of the orthodox. Among the seceders there
are again various shades of difference; I met many who called
themselves Unitarian Quakers, others were Hicksites, and others
again, though still wearing the Quaker habit, were said to be
Deists.

We visited many churches and chapels in the city, but none that
would elsewhere be called handsome, either internally or
externally.

I went one evening, not a Sunday, with a party of ladies to see a
Presbyterian minister inducted. The ceremony was woefully long,
and the charge to the young man awfully impossible to obey, at
least if he were a man, like unto other men. It was matter of
astonishment to me to observe the deep attention, and the
unwearied patience with which some hundreds of beautiful young
girls who were assembled there, (not to mention the old ladies,)
listened to the whole of this tedious ceremony; surely there is
no country in the world where religion makes so large a part of
the amusement and occupation of the ladies. Spain, in its most
catholic days, could not exceed it: besides, in spite of the
gloomy horrors of the Inquisition, gaiety and amusement were not
there offered as a sacrifice by the young and lovely.

The religious severity of Philadelphian manners is in nothing
more conspicuous than in the number of chains thrown across the
streets on a Sunday to prevent horses and carriages from passing.
Surely the Jews could not exceed this country in their external
observances. What the gentlemen of Philadelphia do with
themselves on a Sunday, I will not pretend to guess, but the
prodigious majority of females in the churches is very
remarkable. Although a large proportion of the population of
this city are Quakers, the same extraordinary variety of faith
exists here, as every where else in the Union, and the priests
have, in some circles, the same unbounded influen