To the Editor of THE FRIEND: A LETTER. YOUR highly esteemed monthly being an "Independent" one, we know you will not be so unprecedent as to put forth pros, and not allow the cons equality of space. My allusions go for their source to a sentence in the editorial, "Excitements,” in the last (September) number of THE FRIEND. The curse of sects is the non-exercise of a more tolerant spirit to other sects. Would it not be well for us, who pretend to have raised ourselves somewhat above clashing partyism— who hold ourselves Friends, not only to one another of kindred beliefs, but also to the world's multifarious faiths-would it not at least be more consistent with our pre declared statements, to be more charitable toward those who are groping for truth in different directions from those we ourselves are travelling, albeit we are right, they wrong? Every belief in the world has its "absurdities”—in the eyes of another believer, and a different. So we may label one another's faiths as humbugs, absurdities, dogmas and monstrosities; but, I ask, does it so make, change, or even affect them? And, too, let us first see that we have no beam in our own eye. I will not only agree with the remark that, "It may be that the absurdities of Spiritualism are another outgrowth of this perverted sentiment," (excitement,) but I doubt not they really are ;-remember, I say the absurdities of it only. Counterfeits axiomatically pre-suppose a genuine. Whether, indeed, there may be a genuine-a something more, behind all these humbugs and absurdities, I cannot say. Entertain the stranger; there may be an angel in it after all. At the least, fighting evil, but increases evil. G. NOTES AND COMMENTS. WE take pleasure in calling attention to an article on the present condition of the society of Friends, which we copy from the Friend's Intelligencer of 9th mo. 21. THE papers published by the colored people, contain long lists of enquiries after missing relatives that are heart-rending. The amount of misery and sorrow that these little paragraphs represent is appalling. We do not know how often these inquiries are satisfactorily answered. but the removals of many families from south to north and north to south makes a channel for communication, which has been for many weary years entirely lacking. The Independ. ent of Sept. 12th contains an extract from a letter of Frederick Douglass to the editor of that paper, which tells us of at least one re-uuited family-tie of the thousands that have so long been sundered. "I have been," he writes to the editor of The Independent, "keeping a kind of hotel all summer! My poor brother Perry-after a bondage of fifty-six years, deeply marked by the hardships and sorrows of that hateful condition; and after a separation from me during forty years, as complete as if he had lived on another planet-came to me two months ago, with his family of six, and took up his abode with me. To him -dear old fellow!-one who has carried me on his shoulders many a time (for he is older than I, though my head seems to contradict it)-one who defended me from the assaults of bigger boys when I needed defense-I have been mainly devoting myself, and gladly so "I have now completed for him a snug little cottage on my own grounds, where my dear old slavery-scarred and long-lost brother may spend in peace, with his family, the remainder of his days. Though no longer young, he is no sluggard. Slavery got the best of his life, but he is still strong and hopeful. I wish his old master could see him now-cheerful, helpful, and ‘taking care of himself' If slavery were not dead, and I did not in some sort wish to forget its terrible hardships, blighting curses, and shocking horrors, I would try to write a narrative of my brother Perry's bondage. But let the old system go! I would not call its guilty ghost from the depths into which its crimes have cast it. I turn gladly from the darkness of the past to the new and better dispensation now dawning." LITERARY NOTICES. The College, The Market and The Court.- This book is a masterly setting-forth of "woman's relation to Education, Labor and Law." Every woman who reads it must feel herself strengthened anew for her work, whatever that work may be. It is so comprehensive as to leave little to be said iu addition to it. The author's study of women is so thorough, that she develops hidden traits for our admiration in the character of the world's heroines. Yet she does not make idols of these women, but gives only a fair and just estimate of them. We think that there are many women, who when they read of the many kinds of work which women have done and are now doing, will feel so ashamed of their own idleness as to go heartily to work at whatever their hands find to do. Every part of the book is so good that we hesitate where to select, for the whole is worthy of quotation, and we might open it anywhere and find something which would be food for earnest thought. The following seems to present the real causes of opposition to the admission of women to the full privileges of labor, more powerfully than we have ever seen it done before. The world's eyes are slowly opening to the need of a pure life in men; and it helps to show men what they ought to be, when women knock on the doors of their workshops and insist on entering. 'What!' says the soldier, must my sister follow me to the field to take this blood-stained hand; to see me decked in the spoils of fallen men; or hunting unprotected women like a brute beast, till they fall senseless on the bodies of those they loved?' 'Shut her out!' cries the minister of state, Shall my sister see these hands, dripping with blood-money, bribed by a slave power, or a party interest, signing papers that condemn children yet unborn to the miseries of hopeless war?' 'Shut her out!' cries the advocate. I am preparing to defend this man for luring helpless innocence to the brink of hell, for building up a fortune on dollars wrung from starving women, for putting a bullet through his brother because he did not live a purer life than his own.' She Turn her out!' cries the judge. 'She will see that my scales are loaded. heard that railroad company offer me a bribe. She caught a whisper just now from the husband of yonder outraged woman. She will hear the liquor-dealer's counsel, and see the golden lure that South Carolina offers when the fugitive stands at the bar. Turn her out!' Turn her out!' says the physician. 'Shall she hear me jeer at what she deems holy? Would you have her grow shame less also?' Shut her out. says the trader, 'while I mark my goods! This spool of cotton is short fifty yards; mark it two hundred. This yard of Muslin was made at Manchester: sew on the Paris tack. This shawl was woven in France: label it Cashmere. Color that cheese with annotto, weigh down that butter with salt, dilute that rose-water from the spring, grate up turnip to mix with that horseradish, but turn that woman out!' Turn her out!' cries the priest, last of all. 'Polemics and theology have no charms for her. She will ask me why I do not do justly and love mercy. Turn her out!' Turn her out!' and in the shudder which creeps over him while he speaks, man sees not only how tender and strong is the love for the sister that hung on the same maternal bosom; but he sees also what the gospel without and the gospel within deinaud of the son no less than the daughter of God." OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. We think ourselves fortunate in having read the story of little Nell for the first time, in the pleasant form of the Diamond Edition. "Go ye and do likewise." THE FRIEND. VOL. II. NOVEMBER, 1867.- NO. 23. WORSE THAN AN INFIDEL. "He that provideth not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, is worse than an infidel."—1 TIMOTHY, V. 8. A S if anything could be! As if this word, infidel, did not imply a status in the moral universe a worse than which is not to be conceived a hell of ignominy to which there is no underlying deep! I know of men not over-scrupulous in their morality-men who still think that slavery was right-men who will feed a drunkard's appetite-men who, without a smile, can call it paying wages when they give a woman twenty cents a day, and even less, in times like these and these men would not like to be called Infidels. It would seem that Infidelity ought to be something very terrible, when such men can look down upon it. It ought to be the sum and essence of all villainy; and yet the apostle, he than whom no other, save perhaps Jesus, ever did so much to bring in the reign of all the great humanities, thought that every man who did not provide for his own, and specially for those of his own house, was worse than an infidel! And he was right. And yet I do not blame any one for not wishing to be called an infidel. I would not like to wear a great placard with this inscription, 66 I am an infidel." It might only signify that I did not believe this or that dogma, article or creed, and I might make the term respectable by showing that in this sense Paul was an infidel, Luther and Channing infidels, the greatest of their time; but still I should most strenuously object to being so placarded. Because this word, if taken in its ordinary sense-that is, as implying simple disbelief in something which another man believes-is purely negative; and if all the world must know that I am no believer in certain forms and processes of thought, I must insist that it shall also know the nature of these forms and processes. It might think, if nothing more was said, that I did not believe in God, or Righteousness, or Immortality, when I believe in them with all my heart and soul; but not in Mr. Mansel's God, nor Bishop Hopkins' righteousness, nor Calvin's immortality-not, that is to say, in three Gods, or a pro-slavery righteousness, or an eternal hell. But I will not be satisfied with having anybody know what I do not believe. It does not indicate my character at all. If I were an artist 1 would not be content with having anybody know that I was not a PreRaphaelite; or, if I were a scientific man, to have it said that I was not a Darwinian; or, if I dealt in abstract thought, to have it go abroad that I a was no Spencerian. And so, as moral and religious man, I will not be content with having it reported that I am not this thing or that. This negative result is but the smallest part of my experience. It is much to those the sum of whose experience is that which I deny. But with me it is but weighing anchor. And what of the new countries and the wide sea? What of the fresh breezes and the bellying sails? These are my life -these are the wealth and joy of my experience. Do not talk to me about the wharves, the head-lands, and the steeples which I have left behind. race have been its infidels, they have been so much more and better that it is absurd to call them by a name which indicates so little the real stuff of which their lives were made, just as absurd as it would be to accuse the winter cold of treating cruelly the autumn leaves, when in truth it never touches them till they have done their work, and then converts them to some further use, and builds with them the leafy rafters of another and another spring; and (2), to beware lest we are infidel, as these were not, to truth, and justice, and reform, or to the highest and the deepest aspirations which God had planted in our inmost souls. It was the infidelity of the understanding that Paul was thinking of— intellectual non - acceptance of another's creed. I need not prove that this is not a crime. The Church has visited it with rack and sword. The world still visits it with such abuses as it may. But the theory of persecution is glaringly absurd. You may pour molten lead into a man's mouth, but you cannot pour religion into his soul. You cannot send a man to heaven or to hell against his will. How then? Is infidelity of this sort, though not a crime, still a misfortune? I should not wonder, then, at any one's not wishing to be called an infidel. Not but that great and wise and holy men have been so called, and rightly too, because they could not think of cherishing the current doctrines of their day. When we consider that from time to time the men who give the Church her note of holiness have been almost invariably in doubtful odor with the defenders of her orthodoxy, and as such have been called heretics and infidels -as such been crucified and torn asunder-we are almost tempted to assume the name with pride, and wear it as a badge of honor. The Apocalyptic heaven was not large enough for Paul. He that leaned upon the A single illustration is enough to Master's breast declared that Paul was suit all purposes. Take it from the no apostle. Dr. Newman has to be history of that sect which has used illogical before he can believe that this epithet with greater freedom and Origen was saved. 'Tis a nice point malignity than any other. About three of honor whether one shall go to hundred years ago a bonfire was kindled heaven if Humboldt isn't there, nor in Geneva, and one Michel Servetus Locke, nor Fichte, nor Descartes, nor was bound in the midst of it. John Franklin, nor Spinoza. One would Calvin had promised him that if he rather give up Rufus Choate's society, came to Geneva he should never go or John Calvin's, or St. Bernard's, or out of it alive; and he always kept the great Pope Hildebrand's. If the such promises. So now Servetus was serenest brows the sunlight ever kissed to be burned, and the brute Farel, to go thus forever stigmatized, Calvin's dearest friend, was to stand shall we be base enough to withhold by and see it done, and fling reour foreheads from the brand? But proaches at him. For he had called they will not be thus forever stigma- the triune God a monster-the threetized; and the part of wisdom is (1), headed dog, Cerberus—and he had to show that though the leaders of its said that Christ was God, but that so are were Moses and the prophets. In it is what we disbelieve that stamps short, he was an infidel: he would not believe what Calvin told him to. But of these two men judge for yourselves which was the more fortunate. Or take another illustration still more to the point. Go back with me some eighteen centuries and consider Jesus, but for one moment, with reference to the orthodoxy of his time. Was he not at variance with it on almost every point? That said a man should not gather sticks upon the Sabbath, and lo! he goes into the corn-fields with his disciples. That would have burdened him with a thousand rules of conduct and methods of observance, and he spurned them all. That bade him look to Moses, but his own soul bade him look to God. At thirty years of age this Galilean carpenter, whose world till now had been the circuit of a dozen miles, finds himself immersed in the innumerable distractions of the Holy City. Who would not prophesy that its dim glories, its ancestral rites, would prove too much for him that six months' time would find him praying at the street corners, wearing a phylactery, learning of the rabbis, and sacrificing with the priests. And he stood out from them all. He visited their mummeries with measureless scorn. He called them hypocrites, blind guides, whited sepulchres. They could not endure him. things they valued most, with him were food for laughter; and when they could bear it no longer they tried him, after a fashion of their own, and then tortured the life out of him, outside the walls of the city. But who dares offer pity unto him who now for eighteen hundred years has been the leader and inspirer of a world of souls. It was what he disbelieved, and the ardor with which he disbelieved it, that made him what he was. He will stand forever as the matchless unbeliever; and if he dared to disbelieve, how then can disbelief be necessarily either the cause or consequence of error, sin, or shame? No, The our lives with folly, or makes them reservoirs of crime. To disbelieve the true, the excellent, the great voices of the Spirit in its greatest hours, the immortal principles of love and duty is sad enough, is terrible. But to disbelieve the false and the impossible, the monstrous theories of politics, the stupendous horrors of theology, the current vagaries concerning God and man, religion and morality, is grand, is noble, is divine. For if it could be shown that the infidelity of the understanding, that which concerns itself with whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch, or Paul the Epistle to the Hebrews, and forty other just such things beside, was decimating our churches, was bringing Bible-reading and Church-going into disrepute, it would not follow that infidelity of this sort was so bad a thing. The frost which kills the harvest for a year may destroy the weevil for a century; nor is it so certain that the life of the Church must not come through some such death as this, and that it is not better for it to lose its right hand or its right eye rather than that its whole body should be cast into hell. For example, if the results of criticism concerning Scripture, and the results of science that conflict with it, are correct, they are a final good. Truth is excellent in itself, aside from any benefit that may accrue from its possession. If Moses did not write the Pentateuch, if Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes, if John did not write the Fourth Gospel, and if the Song of Songs is not a spiritual but a very carnal poem, we want to know it. It would be worth knowing, though here the matter stopped, without involving any conclusion on questions of infallibility and inspiration. It is very hard, no doubt, to give up one's cherished opinions; but alas for us, if it is any easier to give up the truth, though it upset every one of them. Yet men look back with envious |