The whole of the Quaker view of ministry depends upon the frank disregard of outward and visible signs in favour of the inward and spiritual grace. To make both essential, or each essential to the other, seems necessarily to land one in impenetrable intricacies, if not in a vicious circle. If one of the two alone is essential, there can of course be no question which it is. Whether inward and spiritual graces, in other words, holiness, can flourish without the use of outward observances, must ultimately be a question of experience and observation. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” It might perhaps be difficult for one born and bred in the Society to appeal explicitly to this test. But having entered it within the last few years, I may perhaps without impropriety say that Friends need surely not shrink from the inquiry whether the practical standard of holiness amongst their members is on a level with that of other Christians. If it be so—if love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance be not lacking amongst us—surely we may well ask, Wherein does our free ministry fail of its due effect? “It fails,” some would no doubt reply, “not in the quality, but in the quantity of its results. However excellent the results in the life and conversation of Friends individually, they are not a growing body, and therefore not a healthy branch of the Church at large.” I shall deal elsewhere with the subject of our long dwindling in former times, and our present slow increase in numbers. I will content myself here with the obvious reply that the numerical increase or decrease of a denomination can never afford a satisfactory test of the spiritual fruitfulness of its ministry; mere numbers being always affected by many other causes, some of which have but little connection with spiritual health. It even gives but a very doubtful measure of the mere numbers to whom the influence of the preaching in question may extend. It must, no doubt, be admitted that the personal and the numerical tests are apt to yield conflicting results; that the purest form of religion is rarely the most popular, though it is likely to have the most lasting, and, in the end, the most widely spread, influence. But if purity and popularity are in any sense incompatible, can we hesitate as to the direction towards which we should lean?[15]