The fact of inspiration is denied by no Christian—the full recognition of its present and constant operation is in some degree a peculiarity of Friends. It is not uncommon outside the Society to hear expressions implying that Divine inspiration is a thing of the past; a quite exceptional gift, familiar only in apostolic times. It seems to me that this limitation of its range amounts almost to a denial of its reality. I can hardly understand the idea that God did occasionally long ago speak to human beings, but that He never does so now. It seems, at any rate, inconsistent with any worthy sense of His unchangeableness. Many of us have come to believe that one of the greatest hindrances to a real belief in or recognition of inspiration has been the exceedingly crude and mechanical conception of it as attributed to the letter of Scripture. From this hard and shallow way of thinking about inspiration, Friends have generally been preserved in proportion as they have held firmly the old Quaker doctrine of the inner light. Some, no doubt, have gone too far in the direction of transferring the idea of infallibility from the Bible to themselves. But, on the whole, I believe the doctrine of Fox and Barclay (_i.e._, briefly, that the “Word of God” is Christ, not the Bible, and that the Scriptures are profitable in proportion as they are read in the same spirit which gave them forth) to have been a most valuable equipoise to the tendency of other Protestant sects to transfer the idea of infallibility from the Church to the Bible. Nothing, I believe, can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it. That we may all have such experience if we will but attend to the Divine influences in our own hearts, is the cardinal doctrine of Quakerism. Whether this belief, honestly acted on, will manifest itself in the homespun and solid, but only too sober morality of the typical everyday Quaker, or whether it will land us in the mystical fervours of an Isaac Penington, or the apostolic labours of a John Woolman or a Stephen Grellet, must depend chiefly upon our natural temperament and special gifts. The range of the different forms taken by the doctrine is as wide as the range of human endowment and experience. A belief which is the common property of the prophet and the babe will, of course, yield every variety of practical result.