It may now be proper to state the motives which have again induced me publicly to address you, and to inform you what course it is my intention to pursue; and as I have no standing in the church, and am aloof from those scenes which must sometimes give rise to asperities, even in the bosom of meekness, have no personal acquaintance with you, and have been taught to respect your private character, I enter upon the subject, uninfluenced by many of the passions and prejudices which sway and control the opinions of man. But although not in membership, I feel a deep interest in the Society of Friends, and while I am without that sectarian spirit, which in the narrow breasts of some individuals, confines all true worship to a particular description of people, (and which I am happy in believing is no part of a quaker's faith;) long observation has convinced me, that there is no society whose principles and discipline are more eminently successful in inculcating the moral doctrines of christianity, and there is none whose religious tenets are more in conformity with my own ideas of true spiritual worship. I have perused your religious discourses with some attention, and as they appear to me to be in a style, seldom, if ever before, heard in the meetings of the Society of Friends; are abounding in terms which if not rightly understood may lead into great error, and with propositions, which, in the conclusions that may be drawn from them, may be destructive to religion, I thought I should not be unprofitably employed in endeavouring to separate your principles from the mass of expletives and allusions, in which they are enveloped; to discover the true object which you have in view, and to show the inconsistencies in which you have involved yourself by your attempts to define inscrutable things: and if I should sometimes be thought to indulge in language unsuitable to the solemnity of the subject, my only excuse can be, that when you occasionally favour your auditors with a display of your reasoning powers, there is such a neglect of all order in your arrangement, and such metaphorical confusion in your ideas, that when you arrive at your usual conclusion, "now how plain this is," the effect is so comic that it would extort a smile from gravity itself. In the examination of the doctrines of every christian teacher, the first and most essential point, is their conformity to the Scriptures; but as your many deviations from them have been shown with sufficient clearness in a pamphlet lately published, I shall not enter into the subject generally, although I may occasionally refer to them. Neither do I propose to enter upon an analysis of each particular discourse, for they are mixed up of so many heterogeneous materials, are so diversified in their objects, and so devious in their courses, that the end I have in view will perhaps be best answered, by referring only to such topics, as in their consequences, are of most importance.