And not only do we guard our own liberty—we refrain from attempting to limit that of others. If our conscientious abstinence from certain practices is inevitably understood as in some sense casting a shadow of reproach or blame upon those practices, we yet are careful to abstain from condemning those who are acting in obedience to their own measure of light. I believe we must with boldness and humility acknowledge that such practical witness-bearing as we believe ourselves called to implies that we are as “a city set on a hill.” We do not attempt to lay down rules applicable at once and equally to all. The homeward road cannot be altogether the same for dwellers on the hill and dwellers on the plain; the goal alone is one.[18] The most important and the best known of the special testimonies of which I have now to speak is that which has been steadily borne by our members against all war. Friends have ever maintained and acted upon the belief that war and strife of all kinds are opposed to the spirit and the teaching of Christ, and have felt themselves, as His disciples, precluded from engaging in them. They have steadfastly refused to take up arms at the bidding of any human authority, or in the presence of any danger. This course of conduct has, of course, brought them into frequent collision with the civil power, and needs for its justification, as Friends are the first to acknowledge, the warrant of a higher than any national authority. It is, indeed, an awful position which we have thus been bold to take up—the position of those who feel themselves called upon to act as the salt of the earth, as leaders who refuse to be led. I do not hesitate to confess that this attitude of possible resistance to the demands of our country in the presence of a common danger was the one part of the Quaker ideal which I for a time seriously hesitated to accept. So long as I understood it to be accompanied by or based upon any condemnation of those who conscientiously believe that their duty to God requires them to yield unqualified obedience to the demands of their country for military service, I was unable to accept it. But when I came to understand that the Quaker testimony against all war did not take the form of any ethical theory of universal application, but was simply the acting out in one’s own person and at one’s own risk of obedience to that which one’s own heart had been taught to recognize as Divine authority, even where its commands transcended and came into collision with those of the nation, I felt at once that the position was not only perfectly tenable, but was the only one worthy of faithful disciples.