All these side structures, names and laws are usurpation, and the true ministers or servants of the kingdom, can but regard them as such, and labor to melt them all away and put all the good material there is in them into “God’s building,” “the temple of God,” and thus make this material useful and acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. As to clerical airs, the peculiar cut of the coat, the white necktie, and all other such “outward signs of inward grace,” they are the offspring of shallowness, weakness and folly, and wholly incompatible with the plainness, meekness and humility of Jesus and of good taste and sense. LIGHT WITHIN. All the perversions, innovations and corruptions of the pure and holy religion of Jesus Christ that have found way into it and disgraced it, have been introduced under some pretext of doing good—some plea of a supposed benevolent nature. In some form or other they have all claimed to have the good of the cause in view, and in some way have put up some kind of claim to divine authority. Some of them were introduced by good men, with good intentions, who saw not the evil that would follow, while others, no doubt, were introduced by “designing men.” George Fox was probably a good man, or a man of good intentions, and, when he talked of the “light within,” and tried to sustain his position by Scripture, he had no idea of the evil that would follow—much less did he design it. Though he quoted Scripture, it was not as a rule of faith and practice; not as a system of religion, nor as supreme authority, but merely to give currency to the theory he was laboring to introduce and support it in the minds of the people. The leading idea in the new theory was that the _light within_ was the guide—the unerring rule; that it was from God, and that he who followed it was following the will of God, the influence of the Spirit. He certainly did not intend to turn the hearts of the people away from God and lead them to follow the imaginations of their own hearts. He clearly designed no such wickedness as this; but what has followed? Where has the “light within” led his followers? It has led some of them to neglect and forsake the word of God; to regard the Bible simply as a good book, a true history and guide to the people of its time, but not as an authority, a rule of faith and practice for us. It has led some of them into Spiritualism, others into Universalism, and some, more recently, into exciting revival, mourners’ bench-meetings, in which old members have been trying to “get religion,” as seekers do in Methodist and other revivals. Many of them have been led into out-and-out infidelity. This is where the “light within” has led them. Original Quakerism has virtually run out.