God, the spiritual body of Christ. "It is that in which God and Christ are as wrapt up."*"It is not the essence of God precisely taken. It is a real substance, a spiritual, heavenly, and invisible principle." "This substance or seed, or spiritual body of Christ... was as really united to the word as his outward body was." "Christ in us is not a third spiritual nature distinct from that which is in the man Christ Jesus, who was crucified according to the flesh at Jerusalem. For the same that is in us, was and is in him. In him was the fountain; we have the stream." "The seed being in us, the man Christ Jesus is in us: not in his whole manhood, but according to what is proper to us." In fine, says Sewel," the Quakers believe this light to be the grace of God, &c."‡

Such are the accounts which their most enlightened writers have given of this fundamental tenet. They are at antipodes with each other. Well might the venerable bishop of Cork beseech Penn to stop their career of publishing and of proselytizing until they should have an understanding among themselves, and be of one sentiment.§. . . . . . This light is not the natural light; it is not the conscience; it is not the soul. It is a distinct substance; it is the seed; it is the measure of God; it is Christ; it is the Spirit; it is the Spirit of Christ; it is Christ and the Spirit; it is the love of God; it is the Saviour of men; it needs redemption itself; it is not a creature; it is divine; it is omnipresent; it is eternal; it is God-though not the entire Eternal Being; it is the essence of God, say some; it is not God, say others. The orthodox may worship it, said West. Penn said amen! the society said yes. But when Naylor and a few desperate characters tried the force of this dogma in actual practice; and when the religious world cried out against the blasphemy, and when the misguided judges branded Naylor with the hot iron and sent him to the dungeon, instead of putting him into an hospital, the society also forsook Penn's theory, and pronounced their anathema over the fallen victim Moreover, it is the vehicle of God.

.....

* Bar. Apol. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 13.

† Apol. Prop. v. and vi. and Quak. Confirmed, sect. 4, and his large works, Lond. 1692, and p. 627, Bennet's Confut. of Quak. p. 115.

Vol. ii. p. 547. In his "Testimony, &c." against Penn.

It is that in which God and Christ are as wrapt up! It is his grace.

What a tissue of contradictions! what man or angel-I do not say Quaker, can tell us what this thing is? It is a pure anomaly; it is an absolute non-descript in the list of existences; it is a being; it is not God; it is not angel nor man. And seriously, it is not beast, nor fish, nor fowl, nor creeping thing; it is not a divine perfection; it is not an angelic nor human attribute. It is a being which had escaped the vigilant researches of rabbis and doctors, and plain orthodox divines-aye, and of modern philosophers who have been carrying the lamp of discovery into all the recesses of moral and physical science. A being equally removed above the eagle eye of Newton, and the nice chemical investigations of Sir Humphrey Davy. A being which had yet, by its anomalous light, irradiated the gloomy cloisters of the mystic, as it does now the bosom of the Friend! Hence, we are entitled to the conclusion, that the system of the Friends is radically defective in regard to a moral standard, or rule of faith and manners. It has removed the only perfect rule, and it has produced no substitute to which the proverb is not applicable. "Sicut plumbea Lesbiæ ædificationis regula: ad lapidis enim figuram transmo vetur-nec manet regula."

* «Ώσπερ της Λεσβίας.” η. τ. λ. Aristot. Εth. lib. v. cap. 14.

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CHAPTER VII.

ON THE DEFECTS OF THE RELIGIOUS SYSTEM OF THE SOCIETY IN POINT OF DOCTRINES.

"Doctrina eorum pallium est ex laceris veterum hæresium panniculis consutum."-I. Markii Orat. 2.

An opinion has gained currency, that the doctrines of the society cannot be distinctly ascertained; that they are either concealed, or, from their peculiar nature, are not tangible to reason. That the world cannot understand their opinions, is, in fact, an early dogma of the society itself. And they have been anxious to persuade the public that the christian world can no more penetrate their secret love, than the ancient vulgar could the veil of the Eleusinian mysteries; and they throw down the same gauntlet of defiance. "Procul oh! procul este profani."*

But this is only a species of ruse de guerre played off for concealment or defence. The doctrines of the society can be distinctly ascertained. They have authors who were fully into the secrets of the society. Their writings are regarded as inspired oracles by every orthodox Friend; and as long as they are Friends, and profess to be the followers of those worthies who organized the society, the volumes of those elders, and not the detached opinions of individuals in modern times, must determine their orthodoxy. Were they to condemn the doctrines of Fox, or of Penn, or of Barclay, or of Pennington, or of Whitehead, they could no longer claim the name of Friends. They would surrender the testimony of their fathers, sealed by their blood, and transmitted to their children, as a legacy never to be parted

* See Smith's Catechism, p. 94, and Penn ii. p. 455.

The yearly meeting at Philadelphia, in 1821, directed the youth of the society to the " writings of their primitive Friends," to open their eyes on the fallacy and danger of changeable doctrines. See also the strong language of the society on this, in their Vind. Mosh. vol. iv. p. 304, ed. 1821.

On the Defects of their System in Point of Doctrines. 219

with, but with their name and existence. Were they to admit that those writers were, in a single instance, in error, or that they made even a recantation, they would surrender the very principle on which they have erected their system, and which distinguishes them from every other sect. These writers testified that they were guided by immediate revelations; and the society has given full credence to their inspirations. Their messages were received as "the word of the Lord God" to the body.** From these writings we shall produce all our documents.

But a difficulty meets us at the very threshold; a difficulty, however, which arises not so much from the obscurity of these writers as from the want of consistency. They wrote so much, and so long, and so fast, that, inspired or not inspired, certain it is, their folios bear the melancholy proofs of human frailty. What is confidently advanced, from "the Spirit," in one folio, is sometimes flatly denied in a second folio by the same high authority. This is the sin which greatly besets the sixteen hundred folio pages of Penn. They are patched up out of pieces composed at remote periods, of a long life spent in a tempest of controversy. They are, in faet, a kind of guage on which the growing opinions of the society were graduated. They faithfully mark the progress of their principles, inch by inch, through the purifying ordeal of opposition, toward that death-like stillness in which they have slumbered for a century. Emerging from the tenebrosity of mysticism, they laboured it through the rugged mazes of Socinianism, and they finally settle down in an ambiguous homogenity with Pelagius and Arminius.

I mention this particularly, to guard against an array of quotations from private opinions, or from different parts of their works. And let the members of the society look to it. If it

* Burroughs' Epist. to his Works. Penn vol. ii. 186, 291, &c. Fox's Journ. passim.

+ Fox, the founder of the society, taught his followers to consider it insufferable heresy to call the scriptures "the word of God." But he had no scruples of conscience in calling his own inspirations, in the shape of Epistles, "the word of the Lord God," as he actually does four times in one Epistle. Journ. vol. i. p. 357, 358, 359. Phil. edit. of 1808.

66

The reader is referred for proof to chap. vi. in the gleanings on the Light, &c." in this work.

As from the London Epistles 8vo. edit. 1806, Balt. which contains much orthodoxy in its modern form.

can, by fair quotations, be made out, that Penn formed his system out of a particlar class of doctrines, they are bound in honour to uphold his consistency. He publicly professed to be led by the "spirit of the eternal God." The society have admitted his claims. Hence, no orthodox Quaker can admit that he was in error, or retracted ought of what he had advanced. And as their writers, from Barclay to Henry Juke, are but copyers of Penn, and have not, in any instance, if they speak truth, ever contradicted him, then his opinions may be fairly considered as the public opinions of the body. However, to do the subject justice, I shall quote from any of their approved authors indiscriminately.

The christian and learned world has ever held that system to be radically defective from which are excluded the peculiar doctrines of the gospel. That system, therefore, which excludes from the list of its peculiar tenets the sacred doctrine of the most Holy Trinity; which denies the personal distinction between Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost; which rejects the real atonement of Jesus Christ the second person, in human nature, at Jerusalem; which denies the necessity of the atonement; which so far disclaims the necessity of the knowledge and the faith of Christ's outward sufferings, and outward death, and outward resurrection, as to avow, that heathen nations, who never heard of these, have, by the inward light, the same opportunities of salvation as Christians have by divine revelation; which admits of no other justification before God than certain nameless undefinable operations on the mind by the inward light, and no other faith than the bending of the mind inward on this same lightthat system must be defective in the last degree.

§ 1. Of the Most Holy Trinity.-In the christian system this article is fundamental. On it rests the weight of all the peculiar doctrines of the gospel. It is brought forward in the sacred scriptures with clearness and proof adequate to its importance. There is one God. This is not contested. It is no less evident that there are, in the one Jehovah, three ;* each of whom is God,

* Gen. i. 25, xi. 6, 7. Isa. xxxiv. 16, xlviii. 16. Math. iii. 16, 17. 1 John v. 7.