one of the cardinal commandments, and in his application of it to the
oaths of the court and of the state. The Sermon on the Mount has in all
ages been considered difficult to enact in common life, but it would
have been hard to find any sentence in it which in the days of Fox and
Penn, with their interpretation, would have brought upon a conscientious
person a heavier burden of inconvenience. Not only did it make the
Quakers guilty of contempt of court and thus initially at fault in all
legal business, but it exposed them to a natural suspicion of disloyalty
to the government. It was a time of political change, first the
Commonwealth, then Charles, then James, then William; and every change
signified the supremacy of a new idea in religion, Puritan, Anglican,
Roman Catholic, and Protestant. Every new ruler demanded a new oath of
allegiance; and as plots and conspiracies were multiplied, the oath was
required again and again; so that England was like an unruly school,
whose master is continually calling upon the pupils to declare whether
or no they are guilty of this or that offense. The Quakers were
forbidden by their doctrine of the oath to make answer in the form which
the state required. And they suffered for this scruple as men have
suffered for the maintenance of eternal principles.

To the social eccentricity of the irremoveable hat and the singular
pronoun, and to the civil eccentricity of the refused oath, George Fox
and his disciples added a series of protests against the most venerable
customs of Christianity. They did away with all the forms and ceremonies
of Churchman and of Puritan alike. Not even baptism, not even the Lord's
Supper remained. Their service was a silent meeting, whose solemn
stillness was broken, if at all, by the voice of one who was sensibly
"moved" by the Spirit of God. They discarded all orders of the ministry.
They refused alike all creeds and all confessions.

Not content with thus abandoning most that their contemporaries valued
among the institutions of religion, the Quakers made themselves
obtrusively obnoxious. They argued and exhorted, in season and out of
season; they printed endless pages of eager and violent controversy;
they went into churches and interrupted services and sermons.

Amongst these various denials there were two positive assertions. One
was the doctrine of the return to primitive Christianity; the other was
the doctrine of the inward light. Let us get back, th