nking, and making money. "The growth of Quakerism," says Mr.
T. Hancock, the author of this outspoken essay, "lies in its
enthusiastic tendency. The submission of Quakers to the commercial
tendency is signing away the life of their own schism. Pure enthusiasm
and the pursuit of money (which _is_ an enthusiasm) can never coexist,
never co-operate; but," he adds, "the greatest loss of power reserved
for Quakerism is the reassumption by the Catholic Church of those
Catholic truths which Quakerism was separated to witness and to
vindicate."

I confess myself, however, so far Quaker too that I care little for the
written testimony of friends or foes. I have, in all my religious
wanderings and inquiries, adopted the method of oral examination; so I
found myself on a recent November morning speeding off by rail to the
outskirts of London to visit an ancient Quaker lady whom I knew very
slenderly, but who I had heard was sometimes moved by the spirit to
enlighten a little suburban congregation, and was, therefore, I felt the
very person to enlighten me too, should she be thereunto moved. She was
a venerable, silver-haired old lady, clad in the traditional dress of
her sect, and looking very much like a living representation of
Elizabeth Fry. She received me very cordially; though I felt as if I
were a fussy innovation of the nineteenth century breaking in upon the
sacred, old-fashioned quiet of her neat parlour. She "thee'd and thou'd"
me to my heart's content: and--to summarize the conversation I held with
her--it was to the disuse of the old phraseology and the discarding of
the peculiar dress that she attributed most of the falling off which she
was much too shrewd a woman of the world to shut her eyes to. These
were, of course, only the outward and visible signs of a corresponding
change within; but this was why the Friends fell off, and gravitated, as
she confessed they were doing, to steeple-houses, water-dipping, and
bread-and-wine-worship. She seemed to me like a quiet old Prophetess
Anna chanting a "Nunc Dimittis" of her own on the passing away of her
faith. She would be glad to depart before the glory had quite died out.
She said she did not hope much from the Conference, and, to my
amazement, rather gloried in the old irreverent title given by the
Independents to her forefathers from their "quaking and trembling" when
they heard the Word of God, though she preferred still more the older
title of "Children of the Ligh