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Like vanities of dress, the artifices of rhetoric were
despised.
Truth, it was said, is beautiful enough in plain clothes; and
Penn, who was able to write exceedingly well, too often forgot that style is the gossamer on which the seeds of truth float through the world.
Careless of style, the Quakers employ for the propagation of truth no weapons but those of mind.
They distributed tracts; but they would not sustain their doctrine by a hireling ministry.
‘A man thou hast corrupted to thy interests will never be faithful to them;’ and an established church seemed ‘a cage for
unclean birds.’
When a great high-priest, who was a doctor, had finished preaching from the words ‘Ho every one that thirsteth, come buy without money,’
George Fox ‘was moved of the
Lord to say to him, “Come down, thou deceiver!
Dost thou bid people come to the waters of life freely, and yet thou takest three hundred pounds a year of them?”
The Spirit is a free teacher.’
Still less would the
Quaker employ the methods of persecution.
He was a zealous Protestant, but in the season of highest excitement, he pleaded for absolute liberty of worship, and sought to enfranchise the
Roman Catholic himself.
To persecute, he esteemed a confession of a bad cause; for the design that is of God has confidence in itself, and knows that any other
will vanish.
‘Your cruelties are a confirmation, that truth is not on your side,’ was the remonstrance of a woman of
Aberdeen to the magistrates who had im-
prisoned her husband.
In like manner, the
Quaker never employed force to effect a social revolution or reform, but, refusing obedience to wrong, deprived tyranny of its instruments
