P. S. I may mention that I have been somewhat encouraged by a perusal of the Proceedings of the late First-day School Conference in Philadelphia, where, with some things which I am compelled to pause over, and regret, I find much with which I cordially unite, and which seems to indicate a providential opening for good. I confess to a lively and tender sympathy with my younger brethren and sisters who, in the name of Him who "went about doing good," go forth into the highways and byways to gather up the lost, feed the hungry, instruct the ignorant, and point the sinsick and suffering to the hopes and consolations of Christian faith, even if, at times, their zeal goes beyond "reasonable service," and although the importance of a particular instrumentality may be exaggerated, and love lose sight of its needful companion humility, and he that putteth on his armor boast like him who layeth it off. Any movement, however irregular, which indicates life, is better than the quiet of death. In the overruling providence of God, the troubling may prepare the way for healing. Some of us may have erred on one hand and some on the other, and this shaking of the balance may adjust it. JOHN WOOLMAN'S JOURNAL. Originally published as an introduction to a reissue of the work. To those who judge by the outward appearance, nothing is more difficult of explanation than the strength of moral influence often exerted by obscure and uneventful lives. Some great reform which lifts the world to a higher level, some mighty change for which the ages have waited in anxious expectancy, takes place before our eyes, and, in seeking to trace it back to its origin, we are often surprised to find the initial link in the chain of causes to be some comparatively obscure individual, the divine commission and significance of whose life were scarcely understood by his contemporaries, and perhaps not even by himself. The little one has become a thousand; the handful of corn shakes like Lebanon. "The kingdom of God cometh not by observation;" and the only solution of the mystery is in the reflection that through the humble instrumentality Divine power was manifested, and that the Everlasting Arm was beneath the human one. The abolition of human slavery now in process of consummation throughout the world furnishes one of the most striking illustrations of this truth. A far-reaching moral, social, and political revolution, undoing the evil work of centuries, unquestionably owes much of its original impulse to the life and labors of a poor, unlearned workingman of New Jersey, whose very existence was scarcely known beyond the narrow circle of his religious society.