Established
Church and with all known varieties of Dissent, their passion for a
full reception of Christ at the fountain-head, their searchings of
the Scriptures, their private raptures and meditations, their prayers
and consultations in public, had resulted in a simple re-issue of the
Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount. Quakerism, in its kernel,
was but the revived Christian morality of meekness, piety,
benevolence, purity, truthfulness, peacefulness, and passivity. There
were to be no oaths: Yea or Nay was to be enough. There were to be no
ceremonies of honour or courtesy-titles among men: the hat was to be
taken off to no one, and all were to be addressed in the singular, as
_Thou_ and _Thee_. War and physical violence were unlawful,
and therefore all fighting and the trade of a soldier. Injuries to
oneself were to be borne with patience, but there was to be the most
active energy in relieving the sufferings of others, and in seeking
out suffering where it lurked. The sick and those in prison were to
be visited, the insane and the outcast; and the wrongs and cruelties
of law, whether in death-sentences for mere offences against
property, or in brutal methods of prison-treatment, were to be
exposed and condemned. For the rest, the Friends were to walk
industriously and domestically through the world, honest in their
dealings, wearing a plain Puritan garb, and avoiding all vanities and
gaieties.--Had it been possible for such a sect to come into
existence by mere natural growth, or the unconcerted association of
like-minded persons in all parts of the country at once, even then,
one can see, there would have been irritation between it and the rest
of the community. The refusal to pay tithes, the refusal of oaths in
Courts of Law or anywhere else, the objection to war and to the trade
of a soldier, the _Theeing_ and _Thouing_ of all
indiscriminately, the keeping of the hat on in any presence, would
have occasioned constant feud between any little nucleus of Quakers
and the society round about it. But the sect had not formed itself by
any such quiet process of simultaneous grouping among people who had
somehow imbibed its tenets. It had come into being, and in fact had
shaped its tenets and become aware of them, through a previous
fervour of itinerant Propagandism such as had hardly been known since
the first Apostles and Christian missionaries had walked among the
heathen. The first Quaker, the man in whose dreamin