I am not so ignorant of the situation of the Society of Friends, as to be uninformed of the uneasiness which is felt by some of its members under its established rules of order and discipline; and as I know that your preaching was one of the principal causes of it, I did think it of some importance to endeavour to ascertain your opinions on the subject. It was indeed a laborious work to travel through the many pages over which they are dispersed; to remove the various matters with which they were encumbered, and collect the scattered fragments. Yet after all my toil, I found my work not half accomplished. These fragments when brought together, were of such various sizes and colours, so diversified in shape, and heterogeneous in their materials, that it surpassed my skill to arrange them in any way consistent with order and propriety; and if the knowledge of them can afford any instruction, it must be from the striking contrast between their wild deformity, and the rational rules of order and discipline which they are intended to supersede. You say that all aversion to order and discipline arises from the want of a right knowledge of ourselves: that when we come to this right knowledge, we shall be so perfect in these things, that there will be no contests or divisions among us: that all order and discipline must be fixed by the divine Lawgiver, and that then it cannot be violated; and therefore that all attempts to censure or control a member must proceed from those who counterfeit its meaning, in order to _lord_ it over others: that each member of society is in himself a little world, which, if kept in right order and subjection, all would be harmony and discipline; but, when this is not the case, all attempts to enforce them tend to increase the confusion: that we all have the law within ourselves, therefore order and discipline must never be contrived by mortals: that the Quaker discipline is unsound, because it is in the letter; but that there are some true Quakers, and that each of these has all discipline and order within himself. Now what is all this? Is it not a second growth of that _Fungus_ which was engendered in the hot bed of fanaticism many years past; and has not the sober sense of the humble Christian, or the wit and humour of a Butler, been able to eradicate it from the soil of the Christian church? Are we again to have among us those men above ordinances, who mistake confusion for order, and the destruction of our faith for the consummation of religion? These questions must present themselves to every mind when examining your opinions; for, when stripped of all glosses, and exhibited in their genuine colours, they mean that all written rules of order and discipline are restraints upon the liberty of the saints: that no rules should be established by men, for that every man has the rule written in his own heart, and that there alone he is accountable.