It is upon the excitement of the passions, which must have risen to a furious height, before such desperate actions as those, which have been specified, could have commenced, that the Quakers have founded their second argument for the prohibition of games of chance, or of any amusements or transactions, connected with a monied stake.  It is one of their principal tenets, as will be diffusively shewn in a future volume, that the supreme Creator of the universe affords a certain portion of his own spirit, or a certain emanation of the pure principle, to all his rational creatures, for the regulation of their spiritual concerns.  They believe, therefore, that stillness and quietness, both of spirit and of body, are necessary for them, as far as these can be obtained.  For how can a man, whose earthly passions are uppermost, be in a fit state to receive, or a man of noisy and turbulent habits be in a fit state to attend to, the spiritual admonitions of this pure influence?  Hence one of the first points in the education of the Quakers is to attend to the subjugation of the will; to take care that every perverse passion be checked; and that the creature be rendered calm and passive.  Hence Quaker children are rebuked for all expressions of anger, as tending to raise those feelings, which ought to be suppressed.  A raising even of their voices beyond due bounds is discouraged, as leading to the disturbance of their minds.  They are taught to rise in the morning in quietness, to go about their ordinary occupations with quietness, and to retire in quietness to their beds.  Educated in this manner, we seldom see a noisy or an irascible Quaker.  This kind of education is universal among the Quakers.  It is adopted at home.  It is adopted in their schools.  The great and practical philanthropist, John Howard, when he was at Ackworth, which is the great public school of the Quakers, was so struck with the quiet deportment of the children there, that he mentioned it with approbation in his work on Lazarettos, and gave to the public some of its rules, as models for imitation in other seminaries.

But if the Quakers believe that this pure principle, when attended to, is an infallible guide to them in their religious or spiritual concerns; if they believe that its influences are best discovered in the quietness and silence of their senses; if, moreover, they educate with a view of producing such a calm and tranquil state; it must be obvious, that they can never allow either to their children, or to those of maturer years, the use of any of the games of chance, because these, on account of their peculiar nature, are so productive of sudden fluctuations of hope, and fear, and joy, and disappointment, that they are calculated, more than any other, to promote a turbulence of the human passions.

SECT.  IV.

Another cause of their prohibition is, that, if indulged in, they may produce habits of gaming—­these habits after the moral character-they occasion men to become avaricious—­dishonest—­cruel—­and disturbers of the order of nature—­observations by Hartley from his essay on man.