The same may be said with respect to many of the bad laws, which are to be found in the codes of the different nations of the world.  Legislators no doubt have often thought themselves spiritually guided when they made them.  And judges, who have been remarkable for appealing to the divine Spirit in the course of their lives, have made no hesitation to execute them.  This was particularly the case with Sir Matthew Hale.  If there be any one, whose writings speak a more than ordinary belief in the agency of the Spirit of God, it is this great and estimable man.  This spirit he consulted not only in the spiritual, but in the temporal concerns, of his life.  And yet he sentenced to death a number of persons, because they were reputed to be witches.  But what true Quaker believes in witchcraft? or does he not rather believe, that the Spirit of God, it rightly understood, would have protested against condemnation for a crime, which does not exist?

But the mischief, if a proper distinction be not made between the agency of the Spirit and that of the will of man, may spread farther, and may reach the man himself, and become injurious both to his health, his intellect, and his usefulness, and the Divine Being may be made again the author of it all.

Many, we all know, notwithstanding their care and attention, have found that they have gone wrong in their affairs in various instances of their lives, that is, events have shewn that they have taken a wrong course.  But if there be those who suppose themselves in these instances to have been acted upon by the Spirit or God, what is more likely than that they may imagine that they have lost his favour, and that looking upon themselves as driven by him into the wrong road, they may fall into the belief, that they are among the condemned reprobate, and pine away, deprived of their senses, in a state of irretrievable misery and despair?

Others again may injure their health, and diminish their comfort and their utility in another way.  And here I may remark, that if I have seen what the world would call superstition among the Quakers, it has been confined principally to a few females, upon whose constitution, more delicate than that of men, an attention to undistinguished impressions, brought on in a course of time by a gradual depreciation of human reason, has acted with considerable force.  I fear that some of these, in the upright intention of their hearts to consult the Almighty on all occasions as the sole arbiter of every thing that is good, have fostered their own infirmities, and gone into retirements so frequent, as to have occasioned these to interfere with the duties of domestic comfort and social good, and that they have been at last so perplexed with doubts and an increasing multitude of scruples, that they have been afraid of doing many things, because they have not had a revelation for them.  The state of such worthy persons is much to be pitied.  What must be their feelings under such a conflict, when they are deserted by human reason?  What an effect will not such religious doubts and perplexities have upon their health?  What impediments do they not throw in the way of their own utility?