e any
private resentment against them, but to those who become reputed enemies
in the course of wars, so that they fix no boundaries of land or ocean,
and no limits of kindred, to their love, but consider Jew and Gentile,
Greek and Barbarian, bond and free, as their brethren. Hence neither
fine nor imprisonment can induce them to learn the use of arms, so as to
become qualified to fight against these, or to shed their blood. And
this principle of love is not laid as it were upon the shelf, like a
volume of obsolete laws, so that it may be forgotten, but is kept alive
in their memories by the testimony which they are occasionally called to
bear or by the sufferings they undergo by distraints upon their
property, and sometimes by short imprisonments, for refusing military
service.

But while these circumstances may have some influence in the production
of this trait of benevolence to man in the character of the Quakers, the
one by preventing the hateful sight of the loss of his dignity, and the
other by destroying the seeds of enmity towards him, there are others,
interwoven into their constitution, which will have a similar, though a
stronger tendency towards it.

The great system of equality, which their discipline daily teaches and
enforces, will make them look with an equal eye towards all of the human
race. Who can be less than a man in the Quaker society, when the rich
and poor have an equal voice in the exercise of its discipline, and when
they fill equally the important offices that belong to it? And who is
there out of the society, whom the Quakers esteem more than human? They
bow their knees or, their bodies, as I have before noticed, to no man.
They flatter no man on account of his riches or his station. They pay
homage to no man on account of his rank or title. Stripped of all
trappings, they view the creature man. If then they view him in this
abstracted light, they can view him only as an equal. Bit in what other
society is it, that a similar estimate is made of him? The world are
apt in general to make too much of those in an elevated station, and
those again in this station are apt to make less of others beneath them
than they ought. Thus an under or an over valuation of individuals
generally takes place in society; from whence it will unavoidably
happen, that if some men are classed a little below gods, others will be
classed but a little above the brutes of the field. Their discipline,
again, has a ten