Many people of other religious societies, if they were to visit the meetings of the Quakers while under their silent worship, would be apt to consider the congregation as little better than stocks or stones, or at any rate as destitute of that life and animation which constitute the essence of religion.  They would have no idea that a people were worshipping God, whom they observed to deliver nothing from their lips.  It does not follow, however, because nothing is said, that God is not worshipped.  The Quakers, on the other hand, contend, that these silent meetings form the sublimest part of their worship.  The soul, they say, can have intercourse with God.  It can feel refreshment, joy, and comfort, in him.  It can praise and adore him; and all this, without the intervention of a word.

This power of the soul is owing to its constitution or nature.  “It follows, says the learned Howe, in his ‘Living Temple,’ that having formed this his more excellent creature according to his own more express likeness; stampt it with the more glorious characters of his living image; given it a nature suitable to his own, and thereby made it capable of rational and intelligent converse with him, he hath it even in his power to maintain a continual converse with this creature, by agreeable communications, by letting in upon it the vital beams and influences of his own light and love, and receiving back the return of its grateful acknowledgments and praises:  wherein it is manifest he should do no greater thing than he hath done.  For who sees not that it is a matter of no greater difficulty to converse with, than to make a reasonable creature?  Or who would not be ashamed to deny, that he who hath been the only author of the soul of man, and of the excellent powers and faculties belonging to it, can more easily sustain that which he hath made, and converse with his creature suitably to the way, wherein he hath made it capable of his converse?”

That worship may exist without the intervention of words, on account of this constitution of the soul, is a sentiment which has been espoused by many pious persons who were not Quakers.  Thus, the ever memorable John Hales, in his Golden Remains, expresses himself:  “Nay, one thing I know more, that the prayer which is the most forcible, transcends, and far exceeds, all power of words.  For St. Paul, speaking unto us of the most effectual kind of prayer, calls it sighs and groans, that cannot be expressed.  Nothing cries so loud in the ears of God, as the sighing of a contrite and earnest heart.”

“It requires not the voice, but the mind; not the stretching of the hands, but the intention of the heart; not any outward shape or carriage of the body, but the inward behaviour of the understanding.  How then can it slacken your worldly business and occasions, to mix them with sighs and groans, which are the most effectual prayer?”

Dr. Gell, before quoted, says—­“Words conceived only in an earthly mind, and uttered out of the memory by man’s voice, which make a noise in the ears of flesh and blood, are not, nor can be accounted a prayer, before our father which is in Heaven.”