A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume 3: 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 3: 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
And as they are not accustomed to consider their fellow-creatures as
below themselves, so neither are they accustomed to look with enmity
towards them. Their tenet on the subject of war, which has been so amply
detailed, prevents any disposition of this kind. For they interpret
those words of Jesus Christ, as I have before shewn, which relate to
injuries, as extending not to their fellow-citizens alone, but to every
individual in the world, and his precept of loving enemies, as extending
not only to those individuals of their own country, who may have any
private resentment against them, but to those who become reputed enemies
in the course of wars, so that they fix no boundaries of land or ocean,
and no limits of kindred, to their love, but consider Jew and Gentile,
Greek and Barbarian, bond and free, as their brethren. Hence neither
fine nor imprisonment can induce them to learn the use of arms, so as to
become qualified to fight against these, or to shed their blood. And
this principle of love is not laid as it were upon the shelf, like a
volume of obsolete laws, so that it may be forgotten, but is kept alive
in their memories by the testimony which they are occasionally called to
bear or by the sufferings they undergo by distraints upon their
property, and sometimes by short imprisonments, for refusing military
service.
But while these circumstances may have some influence in the production
of this trait of benevolence to man in the character of the Quakers, the
one by preventing the hateful sight of the loss of his dignity, and the
other by destroying the seeds of enmity towards him, there are others,
interwoven into their constitution, which will have a similar, though a
stronger tendency towards it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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