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 nothing but a blank inanity.  But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings.—­If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences.  Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching.  It is seldom indeed that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth.  Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard—­you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds—­with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which “she thought might suit the condition of some present,” with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty.—­The men, for what I observed, speak seldomer.

Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a sample of the old Foxian orgasm.  It was a man of giant stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have danced “from head to foot equipt in iron mail.”  His frame was of iron too.  But he was malleable.  I saw him shake all over with the spirit—­I dare not say, of delusion.  The strivings of the outer man were