"This was his dying testimony: 'The cross of Christ is the perfect law of God, written in the heart ... there is but one Lord, one faith, and but one baptism.... No rational being can be a real Christian and true disciple of Christ until he comes to know all these things verified in his own experience.' He was a good man, a true Christian, and a Quaker of the Quakers. His very errors were the errors of a Quaker, and since the generation of the personal disciples of George Fox it would be difficult to point out any man who had a simpler and firmer faith in the central truth of Quakerism than Elias Hicks."[197] [197] The same, p. 293. Regarding some of the bitter criticisms uttered against Elias Hicks at the time of the controversy in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and repeated by the biographers and advocates of some of his opponents, Turner says: "This concensus of condemnation by such excellent Christian men would blast Hicks's character effectually, were it not for the remembrance that we have heard these shrieks of pious horror before. Just so did Faldo and Baxter, Owen and Bunyan, unite in anathematizing George Fox and the first Quakers. Turning from these invectives of theological opponents to Hicks's own writings, we at once discover that this arch-heretic was a simple, humble-minded, earnest Quaker of the old school."[198] [198] The same, p. 291. James Mott, Sr., of Mamaroneck, N. Y., was among the friendly, although judicial critics of Elias Hicks. In a letter written Eighth month 5, 1805, to Elias, he said: "I am satisfied that the master hath conferred on thee a precious gift in the ministry, and I have often sat with peculiar satisfaction in hearing thee exercise it." He then continues, referring to a special occasion: "But when thou came to touch on predestination, and some other erroneous doctrines, I thought a little zeal was suffered to take place, that led into much censoriousness, and that expressed in harsh expressions, not only against the doctrines, but those who had embraced them.... I have often thought if ministers, when treating on doctrinal points, or our belief, were to hold up our principles fully and clearly, and particularly our fundamental principle of the light within, what it was, and how it operates, there would very seldom be occasion for declamation against other tenets, however opposite to our own; nor never against those who have through education or some other medium embraced them." This would seem to be as good advice at the beginning of the twentieth century as it was in the first years of the nineteenth. In the matter of estimating Elias Hicks, Walt Whitman indulged in the following criticism, supplementing an estimate of his preaching. Dealing with some opinions of the contemporaries of Elias Hicks, he says: