h brought before
my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and
serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist,
sent to molest you--for ye sate betwixt the fires of two persecutions,
the out-cast and off-scowering of church and presbytery.--I have seen
the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle, with
the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of
the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye
as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remembered Penn before his accusers, and
Fox in the bail-dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells
us, and "the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet."

Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you,
above all church-narratives, to read Sewel's History of the Quakers.
It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox, and the
primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than any
thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to
stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy,
no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here
read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps
hath been a by-word in your mouth,)--James Naylor: what dreadful
sufferings, with what patience, he endured even to the boring through
of his tongue with red-hot irons without a murmur; and with what
strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they
stigmatised for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could
renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet
keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still!--so different from
the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they
apostatize, _apostatize all_, and think they can never get far enough
from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of
some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated.

Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart; and love the early Quakers.

How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to
the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted
formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have
seen faces in their assemblies, upon which the dove sate visibly
brooding. Others again I have watched, when my thoughts should have
been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect n