I fear you will consider me as presumptuous, yet I must venture to entreat you to examine the course you have been pursuing; to consider whether the habit you have acquired of looking for some hidden novelty in every passage of Scripture, does not prevent you from perceiving its obvious meaning; and whether the manifest inconsistencies in which this practice involves you, is not sufficient proof of your being under the guidance of a different spirit from that which you claim as a director. I have no disposition to question the uprightness of your motives, but I am fully persuaded that the applause with which you have been surrounded, has given an unhappy bias to your mind; and that if it was under a right direction, you would be enabled to see, that it is not the letter of the Scripture, but the habit, (in which you so largely indulge,) of seeking for meanings other than the letter, which has caused so many false interpretations and divisions among men: that the letter is intended to teach us our moral and spiritual duties, and points out with sufficient clearness the way in which we should walk; and that the nice distinctions and elaborate refinements of the orator, neither have a tendency to enlighten the understandings nor purify the hearts of the audience, though they often gratify the vanity of the one and amuse the imaginations of the other. LETTER V. In reading your discourses my attention was particularly engaged by the sermon delivered at Newtown, in Bucks County, and it did seem to me so much at variance with the principles which induce the Quakers to assemble for public worship, that were there no other evidence, it would be sufficient to prove that you are not under the guidance of that spirit, by which, in former days, their ministers were governed. That society believe that the great object of such assembling is to endeavour, by shutting out all external things, to discipline the mind to that pure and silent worship and waiting upon God, in which they may experience Christ to be their shepherd and teacher; and although this solemn silence may sometimes be profitably interrupted for the purposes of admonition, instruction and encouragement, yet that no minister can, (when under right direction,) expatiate on topics irrelevant to the subject. A little examination must, I think, convince us that your sermon, so far from being delivered under such impressions, carries on the face of it, the proof of a mind struggling for distinction: and that in this effort, much has been introduced foreign to the subject on which you professed to treat, and however innocent in itself, very unsuitable to the place, and peculiarly calculated to withdraw the mind from the object for which the assembly were ostensibly gathered.