for, to individuals or groups of men and women, what it was to the early English Puritans. To it was intrusted all the honor, reverence, obedience, and transcendent responsibility in the life, the hope, and the salvation of men, which had but recently been given, in awe and dread, to a now dishonored and repudiated Church, against which scorn and contempt and hate could hardly enough embitter reproach and invective. With that Book in hand, men and women, than whom there have never lived those more earnest and sincere, sat down in absorbed soul-devotion, to exercise their own thinking on the highest subjects, to decide each for himself what he could make of it. Those who have lived under a democracy, or a full civil, mental, and religious freedom like our own, well know the crudity, the perversity, the persistency, the conceits and idiosyncrasies into which individualism will run on civil, social, and political matters of private and public interest. How much more then will all exorbitant and eccentric, as well as all ingenious and rational, manifestations of like sort present themselves, when, instead of dealing with ballots, fashions, and social issues, men and women take in hand a book which, so to speak, they have just seized out of a descending cloud, as from the very hand of God. It was easy to claim the right of private judgment; but to learn how wisely to use it was quite a different matter. It was, however, in those earnest, keen studies, those brooding musings, those searching and subtle processes of speculation and dialectic argument engaged upon the Bible and upon institutional religion, that the wit, the wisdom, the logic, and the vigor of the understanding powers of people of the English race were sharpened to an edge and a toughness known elsewhere in no other. The aim of Prelatists, Conformists, and clerical and civil magistrates in religion, to bring all into a common belief and ritual, was hopeless from the start. It made no allowance for the rooted varieties and divergencies in nature, taste, sensibility, judgment, and conscience in individuals who were anything more than animated clods. How was it possible for one born and furnished in the inner man to be a Quaker, to be manufactured into a Churchman? It soon became very evident that bringing such a people as the English into accord in belief and observance under a hierarchical and parochial system would be no work of dictation or persuasion, but would require authority, force, penalties touching spiritual, mental, and bodily freedom, and resorting to fines, violence, and prisons.