And as they are not accustomed to consider their fellow-creatures as below themselves, so neither are they accustomed to look with enmity towards them.  Their tenet on the subject of war, which has been so amply detailed, prevents any disposition of this kind.  For they interpret those words of Jesus Christ, as I have before shewn, which relate to injuries, as extending not to their fellow-citizens alone, but to every individual in the world, and his precept of loving enemies, as extending not only to those individuals of their own country, who may have any private resentment against them, but to those who become reputed enemies in the course of wars, so that they fix no boundaries of land or ocean, and no limits of kindred, to their love, but consider Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, bond and free, as their brethren.  Hence neither fine nor imprisonment can induce them to learn the use of arms, so as to become qualified to fight against these, or to shed their blood.  And this principle of love is not laid as it were upon the shelf, like a volume of obsolete laws, so that it may be forgotten, but is kept alive in their memories by the testimony which they are occasionally called to bear or by the sufferings they undergo by distraints upon their property, and sometimes by short imprisonments, for refusing military service.

But while these circumstances may have some influence in the production of this trait of benevolence to man in the character of the Quakers, the one by preventing the hateful sight of the loss of his dignity, and the other by destroying the seeds of enmity towards him, there are others, interwoven into their constitution, which will have a similar, though a stronger tendency towards it.

The great system of equality, which their discipline daily teaches and enforces, will make them look with an equal eye towards all of the human race.  Who can be less than a man in the Quaker society, when the rich and poor have an equal voice in the exercise of its discipline, and when they fill equally the important offices that belong to it?  And who is there out of the society, whom the Quakers esteem more than human?  They bow their knees or, their bodies, as I have before noticed, to no man.  They flatter no man on account of his riches or his station.  They pay homage to no man on account of his rank or title.  Stripped of all trappings, they view the creature man.  If then they view him in this abstracted light, they can view him only as an equal.  Bit in what other society is it, that a similar estimate is made of him?  The world are apt in general to make too much of those in an elevated station, and those again in this station are apt to make less of others beneath them than they ought.  Thus an under or an over valuation of individuals generally takes place in society; from whence it will unavoidably happen, that if some men are classed a little below gods, others will be classed but a little above the