But there is one feature of the system of Friends which deserves a recognition here—its inimical regard to classical and scientific learning. I do not say that all Friends are thus hostile, or that they are all alike hostile to liberal learning but I charge this hostility on the system. That such is its character, appears from the denunciation, the indiscriminate proscription of Barclay, and that not in a few places in his book. It appears in the general hostility of Friends to all colleges and seminaries where the elevated branches are thoroughly taught. Not one young Friend out of five hundred, even in this free country, ever obtains a liberal education in fact or in name; certainly never becomes graduated in the arts at any chartered institution, and where an instance occurs, it is always attended with special difficulties. They have no college of liberal science in the world! Some, I know, of the suspected worldly sort in Philadelphia have proposed and would have forwarded so excellent an object, but they were always awed into despondency by the unlettered, all-knowing light within. And in this, their obsequiousness was quite consistent, for if schools, academies, and universities are all in their nature wrong, and as such forbidden of God, it is certainly right to desist totally and at once from the prosecution of their cause! Incidental evils they will always include, but the system is not chargeable with these, unless in its nature it approves and fosters them. There will always be, perhaps, hypocrites at the communion table but christianity does not make them, and the purest ministry of the gospel will often become a savor of death unto death, but sinners themselves and not such a ministry are to blame for the consequence. And so the best organized system of intellectual education that the world has seen has often presented the appalling spectacle of profligate and wicked students perverting its privileges. But what of that? Shall we burn our colleges? Why not our primary school houses too? What beneficient institution, what bounty of the blessed God is not perverted and abused in this naughty world....[74]