His pleasure. Hath He begun to break our bonds and
deliver us, and shall we now distrust Him? Are we in a worse condition
than Israel was when the sea was before them, the mountains on either
side, and the Egyptians behind, pursuing them?"

Brave men and faithful! It is not necessary that the present generation,
how quietly reaping the fruit of your heroic endurance, should see eye to
eye with you in respect to all your testimonies and beliefs, in order to
recognize your claim to gratitude and admiration. For, in an age of
hypocritical hollowness and mean self-seeking, when, with noble
exceptions, the very Puritans of Cromwell's Reign of the Saints were
taking profane lessons from their old enemies, and putting on an outside
show of conformity, for the sake of place or pardon, ye maintained the
austere dignity of virtue, and, with King and Church and Parliament
arrayed against you, vindicated the Rights of Conscience, at the cost of
home, fortune, and life. English liberty owes more to your unyielding
firmness than to the blows stricken for her at Worcester and Naseby.

In 1667, we find the Latin teacher in attendance at a great meeting of
Friends, in London, convened at the suggestion of George Fox, for the
purpose of settling a little difficulty which had arisen among the
Friends, even under the pressure of the severest persecution, relative to
the very important matter of "wearing the hat." George Fox, in his love
of truth and sincerity in word and action, had discountenanced the
fashionable doffing of the hat, and other flattering obeisances towards
men holding stations in Church or State, as savoring of man-worship,
giving to the creature the reverence only due to the Creator, as
undignified and wanting in due self-respect, and tending to support
unnatural and oppressive distinctions among those equal in the sight of
God. But some of his disciples evidently made much more of this "hat
testimony" than their teacher. One John Perrott, who had just returned
from an unsuccessful attempt to convert the Pope, at Rome, (where that
dignitary, after listening to his exhortations, and finding him in no
condition to be benefited by the spiritual physicians of the Inquisition,
had quietly turned him over to the temporal ones of the Insane Hospital,)
had broached the doctrine that, in public or private worship, the hat was
not to be taken off, without an immediate revelation or call to do so!
Ellwood himself seems to ha