Life and society are both full of terrible struggles. Perhaps there is no conflict of them all, more enduring in its character, or more racking to those necessarily engaged in it, than that which is fought by those who take the Sermon on the Mount as their declared pattern, and attempt to carry out the principles it enunciates. To forgive when smitten is God-like; but, oh, how difficult for any mere man! To love an enemy is an injunction coming down to us from a higher and purer source than that which gave the philosophy once taught in the Groves of Academe; but, oh, how impossible for any man to do in reality, until he has been baptized with fire! While others have waged this conflict desultorily and in isolated instances, for nearly three centuries, the Quakers have waged it as a sect, entitling themselves alike to wonder and admiration. They have practised a non-resistance unaccountable to the fiery children of the world, and stark madness on any other supposition than that there is really a special protecting Hand over those who heed the peaceful injunction. They have triumphed alike in society and in savage life, when the strong hand failed and the maxims of worldly wisdom became powerless. And on the faces of the men and women of the sect, to-day--beneath the broad hat of the Friend, under the close gray bonnet of his wife, on brow and cheek of the Quaker maiden with her softly-folded hair, and even in eye and lip of the young man subjected to temptations which have power to fever and wreck all others,--in all, there is the record of a long line of men at peace with God, themselves, and the world, as easily read and as unmistakable as are the traces of toil, unrest, and consuming passion on the countenances of those who have fought through the world with the defiant heart and the strong hand. They have met despisers as well as foes, outside of their own charmed circle; but they have also met admirers. And to-day there are men who could not and who would not take up their cross of self-control and occasional self-denial so long and so patiently carried,--but who cannot and will not refuse to them the tribute of heart-felt admiration, and who often heave fruitless sighs towards that land of mental peace from which they are themselves excluded, because they neither share its blood nor know the tongue of its speech.