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knocks for entrance; but welcomes it as a friend, if it
Chap. XVI.} Penn, i. 326. |
gives the watchword.
Exulting in the wonderful bond which admitted him to a communion with all the sons of light, of every nation and age, he rejected with scorn the school of
Epicurus; he had no sympathy with the follies of the skeptics, and esteemed even the mind of Aris-
totle too much bent upon the outward world.
But Aristotle himself, in so far as he grounds philosophy on virtue and self-denial, and every contemplative sage, orators and philosophers, statesmen and divines, were gathered as a cloud of witnesses to the same unchanging truth.
‘The Inner Light,’ said
Penn, ‘is the Domestic God of
Pythagoras.’
The voice in the breast of
George Fox, as he kept sheep on the hills of
Nottingham, was the spirit which had been the good genius and guide of
Socrates.
Above all, the
Christian Quaker delighted
in ‘the divinely contemplative
Plato,’ the ‘famous doctor of gentile theology,’ and recognized the unity of the
Inner Light with the divine principle which dwelt with
Plotinus.
Quakerism is as old as hu-
manity.
The Inner Light is to the
Quaker not only the revelation of truth, but the guide of life and the oracle of duty.
He demands the uniform predominance of the world of thought over the world of sensation.
The blameless enthusiast, well aware of the narrow powers and natural infirmities of man, yet aims at perfection from sin; and tolerating no compromise,
demands the harmonious development of man's higher powers with the entire subjection of the base to the nobler instincts.
The motives to conduct and its rule are, like truth, to be sought in the soul.
Thus the doctrine of disinterested virtue—the doctrine for which
Guyon was persecuted and
Fenelon 
