It fell to the lot of Robert Barclay to record the doctrines of the early Quakers, and none of them was better fitted for the task; for he was learned and pious, clear in his perceptions and logical in his arrangement, and well able to give his reasons for his faith. He knew that superstition and fanaticism were the Scylla and Charybdis of religion, and how much care was necessary to prevent us, while avoiding the one, from being swept into the whirlpool of the other. He was surrounded by instances of the unhappy effects of that exaltation of mind, which induced individuals to believe they had arrived at such an unerring state of spiritual knowledge, that the recorded opinions and advice of their pious predecessors, and even the scriptures, (being only in the letter,) were to them neither authority nor a guide; and that they had derived the fulness of knowledge from the fountain itself. That to them reason itself had ceased to be of use, since they were under the constant influence of a clear and distinct revelation, as stable and certain as any of the instincts of our nature: and such was the fever of the brain, that when their prophecies were contradicted by the event, it did not impair their confidence in their own inspirations, _because it was the Lord who chose to deceive them, and they were deceived_. He had not adopted the fantastical idea that every passage of scripture has a mystical meaning; but declares them to be the revelations of the spirit of God to the saints, and that they contain a faithful historical account of the actings of God's people in various ages; a prophetical account of several things, whereof some have passed, and some to come; and a full and ample account of all the chief principles of the doctrine of Christ. That they are profitable for correction and instruction in righteousness, and that _divine inward revelations can never contradict the outward testimony of the scriptures, or sound reason_. Here all is plain and consistent. No man of sound mind can believe that the revelations of infinite wisdom are ever contradictory; and as the evidence of the divine origin of the scriptures is such as no individual can produce, he was warranted in his conclusion, that all pretensions to the spirit in contradiction to them, are delusions of the devil. And indeed no man of observation can cast his eyes round him, and contemplate the various illusions into which the human mind is seduced on religious subjects, without perceiving the absolute necessity of a standard or rule by which its wanderings may be checked and its aberrations corrected, and we find Locke concurring with Barclay, in stating the scripture revelations and right reason, as the true standards by which our faith is to be tried.