“ One may justifiably admire a painting forever, without its teaching us how to stretch canvas, far more how to wield the brush; and we might watch for a century successive generations of Mrs. Frys, without comprehending what it is in Quakerism which produces such people. ”

“ No sect so small has in any country to suffer so little, and no sect so separate is considered so completely to represent in its social life all that its countrymen approve. There are literally no inconveniences to be suffered by converts, not even the slight social repulsion sometimes expressed by the hotter members of evangelical or orthodox: churches towards Unitarians. Nevertheless, the society does not materially increase. ”

“ The point, however, is the non-increase of the society in England, and we should be inclined to attribute it to two causes, which are in essence the same. One, no doubt, is the singular and, to us, quite unintelligible ignorance which prevails as to its tenets. We very much doubt if the Friends themselves are quite aware of the extent to which this is the case, of the blank surprise with which most members of the lower middle class would receive a query as to the Quaker creed. "They think it wrong to fight, to swear, or to wear fine clothes," would be the nearest approach to an answer. ”

“ One would have thought, reasoning a priori, that out of the thousands of perturbed inquirers now seeking a haven of rest, a large section would have found in the society just what they are seeking for, namely, a creed they can accept embedded in a strong organization; and that the body, so far from decaying, would have received so many converts that it would have been in danger not so much of extinction, as of that transformation which many sects have experienced when their members have grown rather too numerous for their Church system. ”

“ Nothing would surprise us less than to find the Friends become extinct in England just as their society in India became a numerous and powerful denomination, protected by a native prepossession that to injure men who would not resist was, at the very least, decidedly unlucky. ”

“ The Society, on the contrary, receives few accessions, and this not from any unwillingness on its own part, such as distinguishes the adherents of some creeds, but from abstinence on the part of inquirers. There is an impression abroad indeed that Quakers, from their long intermarriage, their general social standing, and a certain semi-aristocratic habit of exclusiveness which is their greatest social foible, have come to look upon themselves in some degree as a caste, and are reluctant to receive converts, more especially among the poor ”

“ And we would ask them, too, whether they are not too cautious in admitting converts - far more cautious than the Apostles - and whether Christ would have rejected a disciple because he had not yet fully accepted all the precepts of the faith. If Quakerism is to live, and above all, to retain its power of "ruling out" its erring friends, it must obtain converts, and not wait like a fair statue, hoping that the worshipper will find in the stone itself an explanatory voice. ”

“ The society, so far from declining in public favor, has increased in it, till to be a Quaker is to be presumably a respectable man, and till a Quaker is the one sectarian for whom Churchmen and Dissenters alike vote, with a sort of feeling that his creed is to be reckoned to the credit side. ”

“ Two members of the Cabinet either are or have been Quakers, while the number of members of Parliament attached more or less to the denomination - men, that is, who either are Quakers or would be, but for the society's civil rules about marriage and the like - is extraordinary, twenty-three or nearly four per cent. Of the whole House. So great is the respect for the Friends, that legal and social rules are alike waived in their favor ”

“ A very great number of the liberal orthodox are strongly drawn towards the Quaker view of the inner light; of that action of the Holy Spirit as a guide to the purified conscience of each individual in the affairs of life, which is the central idea of all Friends; and many of them, though not so many, are inclined towards the Quaker deduction that external ordinances are superfluous, or hampering limitations on the action of that light. ”

“ The official view of the society as to non-resistance is, no doubt, a difficulty to Englishmen, whose first impulse is always resistance, and who do not see that Christ denounced the use of force when required ”

“ It is not very easy to understand the very gradual, but very decided decay of the Society of Friends in Great Britain. They now number, according to their own official statistics, only fourteen thousand, eight hundred and ninety-two members, and are, in fact, one of the smallest of the Christian sects. Churches which are scarcely heard of, such as the Bible Christians, outnumber them almost ten-fold; out-of-the-way denominations, like the Swedenborgians, gain far more adherents every year ”

“ They not only reject baptism as a visible ordinance, and the Lord's Supper, but they avoid the creation of any kind of Church functionaries and any form of worship calculated to have a propagandist influence. ”

“ Thc non-priestly character of the ecclesiastical organization of the society excites no annoyance or reprehension, while the great secular object of its teaching, the duty of philanthropy under the guidance of Christian principle, is the inspiring motive of the age, the ideal of, hundreds of thousands outside Quakerism. ”

“ One does not quite readily imagine a copper-colored Quaker, with no particular clothes on, but there is much in their doctrine of the Spirit which would exceedingly attract Hindoos, their dislike for "ordinances" is the dislike shown by all the great Hindoo reformers, and Indians are probably the only numerous people Who would really act heartily on the doctrine 0£ non-resistance, if they embraced it, -would accept all its consequences to the full, including violent death. ”

“ They are, we see from a report in the Christian World, somewhat exercised by backslidings of their members as to the usual ordinances of Christianity, men who are at once good Quakers and good men having been known to doubt audibly whether it would not be wiser to admit of baptism and the communion as visible and symbolic acts, and at the last annual meeting many bore their testimony against those views. ”

“ The grand characteristic, too, of its moral system, so far as that is separate, the elevation of self-restraint, apart from the object of the self-restraint, into a kind of sacredness, is in full accord with the teaching of the strongest modern divisions of orthodox opinion. ”

“ This cause points to some defect either in the propagandist zeal of the society or its propagandist agency; and so does the second, the belief mentioned above, that the society is reluctant to receive converts; and both indicate what we conceive to be the true reason. The Friends carry their dislike of external ordinances so far that they reduce their Society below the level of a living organism, able to assimilate other organisms. ”