openly into view.
But after all it is not from the extravagances and perversions of a
dogma that the main lesson is to be learnt. With the Bible open before
them, and with hearts alive to the teachings of holiness, the generality
of religious-minded Quakers were not likely to be satisfied with what
Warburton rightly called not so much a religion as 'a divine
philosophy, not fit for such a creature as man,'[485] nor with a
religious vocabulary summed up, as a writer in the 'Tatler' humorously
said, in the three words, 'Light,' 'Friend,' and 'Babylon.'[486] There
was no reason why the worship of the individual should not be very free
from the prevalent errors of the sect, and be in a high sense pure and
Christian. For the truths which at one time made Quakerism so strong are
wholly separable, not only from the superficial eccentricities of the
system, but from its gravest deficiencies in form and doctrine. There is
nothing to forbid a close union of the most intensely human and personal
elements of Christian faith with that refined and pervading sense of a
present life-giving Spirit which was faithfully borne witness to by
Quakers when it was feeblest and most neglected elsewhere. If Quaker
principles, instead of being embodied in a strongly antagonistic form as
tenets of an exclusive and often persecuted sect,[487] had been
transfused into the general current of the national religious life, they
would at once have escaped the extravagances into which they were led,
and have contributed the very elements of which the spiritual condition
of the age stood most in need. Not only in the moderate and constantly
instructive pages of Barclay's 'Apology' for the Quakers, but also in
the hostile expositions of their views which we find in the works of
Leslie and their other opponents, there is frequent cause for regret
that so much suggestive thought should have become lost to the Church at
large. The Quakers were accustomed to look at many important truths in
somewhat different aspects from those in which they were commonly
regarded; and the Church would have gained in power as well as in
comprehension, if their views on some points had been fully accepted as
legitimate modes of orthodox belief. English Christianity would have
been better prepared for its formidable struggle with the Deists, if it
had freely allowed a wider margin for diversity of sentiment in several
questions on which Quaker opinion almost universally differed f