The cardinal virtue of charity, like the patriotism of ’76, is more frequently professed than practised. It is placed at the head of all the christian virtues by St. Paul, one of the ablest divines that ever graced a pulpit or wielded a pen. Charity is a child of heaven—the substratum of philanthropy, the brightest star in the christian’s diadem—the connecting link between man and his Creator—the golden chain that reaches from earth to mansions of bliss. It spurns from its presence the scrofula of green-eyed jealousy—the canker of self-tormenting envy— the tortures of heart-chilling malice, and the typhoid of foaming revenge. It neutralizes and tames the fiercer passions of man and prepares him for that brighter world where this darling attribute reigns triumphant without a rival. Could its benign influence reach the hearts of all mankind, the partition walls of sectarianism would crumble and disappear—national and individual happiness would increase, and many of the dark clouds of human woe and misery would vanish before its heart-cheering and soul-enlivening rays, like the morning fog before the rising sun. It is a true and impartial mirror set in the frame of love and resting on equity and justice. These preliminary remarks are elicited from a review of the life of the subject of this biographette, whose father was among the persecuted Quakers of New England, and was compelled to fly from Connecticut to New Jersey in consequence of his religious tenets. It is an inconsistency of human nature that when those who have suffered by religious persecution from superior force obtain the reigns of power, they often become the persecutors of all who will not succumb to their authority and dogmatical notions. In the biography of Charles Carroll the reader has recognised one example. Under the administration of the “Cambridge Platform,” commenced by the ecclesiastical convention of New England in 1646, and completed in 1648, a sterner policy was pursued towards the Quakers than against the Roman Catholics. On this “Platform” the municipal and legislative regulations were based for about sixty years. In 1656, the legislature of Massachusetts passed a law prohibiting every master of a vessel from bringing a Quaker into the colony under a penalty of one hundred pounds. The next year a law was passed by the same body, inflicting the most barbarous cruelties upon the members of this sect, such as cutting off their ears, boring their tongues with a hot iron, &c., unless they would desist from their mode of worship and doff their straight coats and ugly bonnets. In 1669, a law was passed banishing them on pain of death, and four of them who refused to go were executed. Some historians have endeavoured to excuse this cruelty on the ground that the Quakers provoked their persecutors by promulgating their doctrines too boldly. This reason is too far-fetched, and shrinks at once from the scrutiny of charity and justice.