A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume 2: Taken from a View of the Education and Discipline, Social Manners, Civil and Political Economy, Religious Principles and Character, of the Society of FriendsClarkson, Thomas
Religion
A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume 2: Taken from a View of the Education and Discipline, Social Manners, Civil and Political Economy, Religious Principles and Character, of the Society of Friends
Clarkson, Thomas
Society of Friends
Upon the whole, it must be stated that it is wholly owing to the more
than ordinary professions of the Quakers, as a religious body, that the
charges in question have been exhibited against such individuals among
them, as have been found in particular trades. If other people had been
found in the same callings, the same blemishes would not have been so
apparent. And if others had been found in the same, callings, and it
had been observed of these, that they had made all the beautiful
regulations which I have shown the Quakers to have done on the subject
of trade, these blemishes would have been removed from the usual range
of the human vision. They would have been like the spots in the sun's
disk, which are hid from the observation of the human eye, because they
are lost in the superior beauty of its blaze. But when the Quakers have
been looked at solely as Quakers, or as men of high religious
profession, these blemishes have become conspicuous. The moon, when it
eclipses the sun, appears as a blemish in the body of that luminary. So
a public departure from publicly professed principles will always be
noticed, because it will be an excrescence or blemish, too large and
protuberant, to be overlooked in the moral character.
CHAP. V.
_Settlement of differences--Quakers, when they differ, abstain from
violence--No instance of a duel--George For protested against going to
law, and Recommended arbitration-Laws relative to arbitration--Account
of an arbitration-society, at Newcastle upon Tyne, on Quaker-principles
--Its dissolution--Such societies might be usefully promoted._
Men are so constituted by nature, and their mutual intercourse is such,
that circumstances must unavoidably arise, which will occasion
differences. These differences will occasionally rouse the passions;
and, after all, they will still be to be settled. The Quakers, like
other men, have their differences. But you rarely see any disturbance of
the temper on this account. You rarely hear intemperate invectives. You
are witness to no blows. If in the courts of law you have never seen
their characters stained by convictions for a breach of the
marriage-contract, or the crime of adultery; so neither have you seen
them disgraced by convictions for brutal violence, or that most
barbarous of all Gothic customs, the duel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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