And, in the second, they contend that there is a distrust of Divine Providence in his moral government of the world.

They are founded, again, they conceive, on false principles, inasmuch as the Quakers confound causes with sub-causes, or causes with occasions. If a person, for example, were to get over a hedge, and receive a thorn in his hand, and die of the wound, this thorn would be only the occasion, and not the cause, of his death. The bad state, in which his body must have been, to have made this wound fatal, would have been the original cause. In like manner, neither the theatre nor the ball-room are the causes of the bad passions that are to be found there. All these passions must have existed in persons previously to their entrance into these places. Plays, therefore, or novels, or public dances, are only the sub-causes, or the occasions, of calling forth the passions in question. The real cause is in the infected. state of the mind, or in the want of knowledge, or in the want of a love of virtue.

Prohibitions, therefore, though they may become partial checks to vice, can never, they believe, be relied upon as effectual

guardians

guardians of virtue. Bars and bolts seldom prevent thieves from robbing a house. But if armed men should be in it, who would venture to enter in? In the same manner the mind of man should be armed or prepared. It should be so furnished, that men should be able to wander through a vicious world amidst all its foibles and its follies, and pass uncontaminated by them. It should have that tone given to it, which should hinder all circumstances from becoming occasions. But this can never be done by locking up the heart to keep vice out of it, but by filling it with knowledge and with a love of virtue.

"That this is the only method to be relied upon in moral education, they conceive, may be shown by considering upon whom the pernicious effects of the theatre, or of the ball-room, or of the circulating library, principally fall. Do they not fall principally upon those who have never had a dignified education? Empty noddles,' it is said, 'are fond of playhouses'; and the converse is true, that persons, whose understandings have been enriched, and whose tastes have been corrected, find all such

6.

recreations

recreations tiresome: at least they find so much to disgust them, that what they approve does not make them adequate amends. This is the case, also, with respect to novels. These do harm principally to barren minds. They do harm to those who have no proper employment for their time, or to those who, in the manners, conversation, and conduct of their parents, or of others with whom they associate, have no examples of pure thinking, or of pure living, or of a pure taste. They, on the other hand, who have been taught to love good books, will never run after or be affected by bad ones. And the same mode of reasoning, they conceive, is applicable to other cases. For, if people are taught to love virtue for virtue's sake, and, in like manner, to hate what is unworthy because they have a genuine and living knowledge of its unworthiness, neither the ball nor concert-room, nor the theatre, nor the circulating library, nor the diversions of the field, will have charms enough to seduce them, or to injure the morality of their minds.

"To sum up the whole: The prohibitions of the Quakers, in the first place, may be

come

come injurious, in the opinion of these philosophical moralists, by occasioning greater evils than they were intended to prevent. They can never, in the second place, be relied upon as effectual guardians of virtue, because they consider them to be founded on false principles. And if at any time they can believe them to be effectual in the office assigned them, they believe them to be productive only of a cold or a sluggish virtue."

CHAP

CHAPTER IX.

SECTION I.

Reply of the Quakers to these objections-They say, first, that they are to be guided by revelation in the education of their children-and that the education which they adopt is sanc. tioned by revelation, and by the practice of the early Christians-They maintain, again, that the objections are not applicable to them; for these presuppose circumstances concerning them which are not true-They allow the system of filling the mind with virtue to be the most desi rable-but they maintain that it cannot be acted upon abstractedly and that, if it could, it would be as dangerous as philosophical moralists make the system of the prohibitions.

To these objections the Quakers would make the following reply:

They do not look up either to their own imaginations, or to the imaginations of others for any rule in the education of their children. as a Christian Society they conceive themselves bound to be guided by revelation, and by revelation only, while it has

VOL. I.

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any