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. Those, 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

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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 1.

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 sanctioned by revelation, and by the practice of the early Christians-They maintain, again, that the objections are not applicable to them, for they presuppose circumstances concerning them which are not true-They allow the system of filling the mind with virtue to be the most desirable-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

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any injunctions to offer which relate to this subject.

In adverting to the Old Testament, they find that no less than nine out of the ten commandments of Moses, are of a prohibitory nature; and in adverting to the New, that many of the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the Apostles, are delivered in the form of prohibitions.

They believe that revealed religion prohibits them from following all those pursuits which the objections notice; for though there is no specific prohibition of each, yet there is an implied one in the spirit of Christianity. Violent excitements of the passions on sensual subjects must be unfavourable to religious advancement. Worldly pleasures must hinder those which are spiritual. Impure words, and spectacles, must affect morals. Not only evil is to be avoided, but even the appearance of evil. Whilst, therefore, these sentiments are acknowledged by Christianity, it is to be presumed that the customs which the objections notice are to be avoided in Christian education: and as the Quakers consider these to be forbidden to themselves, they feel themselves obliged

obliged to forbid them to others. And in these particular prohibitions they consider themselves as sanctioned both by the writings and the practices of the early Christians. In looking at the objections which have been made with a view of replying to them, they would observe, first, that these objections do not seem to apply to them, as a Society, because they presuppose circumstances concerning them which are not true. They presuppose, first, that their moral education is founded on prohibitions solely; whereas they endeavour, both by the communication of positive precepts and by their example, to fill the minds of their children with a love of virtue. They presuppose, again, that they are to mix with the world, and to follow the fashions of the world; in which case a moderate knowledge of the latter, with suitable advice when they are followed, is considered as enabling them to pass through life with less danger than the prohibition of the same; whereas they mix but little with others of other denominations. They abjure the world, that they may not imbibe its spirit. And here they would observe, that the knowledge which