Amongst lesser matters as to which Friends have made a stand upon principle against prevailing customs, may be mentioned “the superstitious observance of days,” especially that of fasts or thanksgivings prescribed by the civil government (a power which we do not regard as competent to prescribe religious exercises), and the practice of wearing mourning, and placing “inscriptions of a eulogistic character” on tombstones. In Friends’ burial-grounds nothing beyond the name, and the dates of birth and death, is permitted. The objections to wearing mourning are obvious, both on the ground of unnecessary expense and trouble at a time when the mind should surely be left as much as possible undisturbed, and also on that of its being an expression (and an expression so formal as to be of doubtful sincerity) of grief and gloom in regard to providential dispensations which, however painful, we should desire to accept with cheerful submission. There is obviously much to be said for this application of the principle of simplifying our customs, and adjusting our dress and other surroundings to the permanent rather than the transient circumstances of our lives. To simplify life to the very uttermost—is not this truly in itself a worthy aim; nay, the one inexorable condition of excellence? We have just now been engaged with comparatively trivial matters—straws which show as no more solid thing can do which way the wind blows. These things are important, not in themselves, but in relation to the principles in honest obedience to which they have been worked out. Simplicity—“the simplicity which is in Christ”—the simplicity, not of exclusion, but of Divine all-subduing supremacy—this is the keynote of our ideal; and it is a keynote to which the human heart must always in some degree respond. At the bottom of all art, of all beauty, and surely, we may say, of all goodness, lies the principle of subordination—the necessity of a perpetual choice between the permanent and the transient, the essential and the superficial. Quakerism is an honest endeavour to carry out this principle in the Christian life; to weigh “in the balance of the sanctuary” the meat that endureth against the meat that perisheth; to cleave to the eternal at the sacrifice, if necessary, of all that is temporal. I am, of course, not absurd enough to claim that this endeavour is peculiar to Quakerism. My object throughout is to show what are the eternal and unassailable principles of truth to which Quakerism appeals, to which it clings as to its strongholds. And I believe that the severe sifting away of non-essentials which lies at the foundation of our revolt from accepted ecclesiastical practices, and which has ramified in detail into these minor testimonies, often rigidly and at times even laughably worked out by individuals, is a process more and more urgently needed in these days of rapid growth in all material and intellectual resources.