to God, seems still to open the only true way to a life of happiness and peace. But it is not certain that, at this day of great religious freedom, when we are reaping so many of the benefits secured us by the conscientious fidelity of our fathers, we need stand so wide apart from our fellow worshippers, and attempt, by a severe moral code, to maintain our individuality, and prevent the contaminations of the world. The children of Israel, living in the midst of heathen idolaters, needed the rigid laws of their great leader to keep them to the worship of the one true God; but when Jesus came, preaching a new Dispensation, the old ritual was no longer necessary, and his true followers wanted no other bond than that of love to keep them to the pure spiritual worship, whose power was so sublimely felt in the grand contest between a few il iterate fishermen, armed with the power of truth, and the mighty and resplendent governments of the world.

The vices and immoralities of the times were sufficient reasons for George Fox to recommend to the thousands who were seeking to be fed with the spiritual manna which fell from the lips inspired of God with the word of life, to seek, for the precious fold he was gathering for the Lord, some protection. from the devouring wolves of wickedness and sin, whose temptations they must needs be free from if they would enjoy the fruits of the new birth in their souls; but if the results of the great sufferings and tribulations of our fathers are the adoption of their principles, not only by ourselves but by a great and ever increasing number in the Christian Church, may we not find that Quakerism, rather than declining, is steadily progressing; and as one by one the great evils we have combatted fall before our sublime ideas of human equality and brotherhood, accepted and carried on by powers greater than our own, shall we not see that the Society is only growing larger and increasing its means of usefulness, not falling to decay?

The religion of Jesus Christ calls for no outward observances, establishes no ritual or creed, but is entirely an operation of the Spirit; and so long as we live in spiritual freedom and love with all, we live Christian lives. This state is attainable by the faithful as well in other churches as in our own. And at this time, perhaps more than ever, a new Society of Friends is springing up among those who, rejecting the tyranny of tradition and creeds, think as we do upon the great essentials of religion, while rejecting our austerities. With a proper understanding of the history of the church and of society in the times of the early Friends, we can form some idea of the great work which Quakerism has accomplished for the world; and we are amazed at the power of truth, and the almost supernatural strength it gives to those who fearlessly adopt and defend it. Looking at the stupendous results of the labors. of a few weak men and women in overcoming the bigotry and oppression of religious tyranny, when allied to temporal power, we become lost in admiration of their divine trust and faith in the promises of the Lord, until their very weaknesses became sacred in our eyes, and unconsciously we find ourselves attributing to such trivial matters as dress, and speech, and names, an import

ance they deserve not to possess. The spiritually-minded will always keep to plainness of speech, behavior, and apparel, though they may not be called upon to follow one fashion in the cut of their clothes and most certainly, if assuming as we have, to adhere to pure grammatical expression, will not become vulgarly ungrammatical; nor in this age, when pagan worship is so completely a thing of the past that the words our language has borrowed from the heathen convey nothing of their ancient meaning, will they become horrified if a forgetful brother chance to call the First day-Sunday; and if, in the constantly-increasing liberal churches of the day we recognise workers. and thinkers who, shaking off the trammels of traditional belief, and freeing themselves from the errors of superstition, seek to elevate their fellow men above the narrowness of human creeds, and the prevalent belittling ideas of the Deity and his purposes, and, endowed with eloquence and power, speak to their hearers with a conviction which shows by its works of love that their inspiration is divine, let us hail them as co-workers in a broader field; and if some are ministers, and are paid in a currency which we all appreciate, when bread and meat is needed, to keep together the spiritual and physical, while in the flesh, let us not call them " hirelings," unless we are sure that not the glory of God and man's elevation, but Cæsar's image, is the object of their labors. A hireling priest is the most contemptible of men, when the great work of the gospel is made a cloak to hide his greed for the lusts of the flesh, or the applause of the world—and there are many such, though they are not less likely to stand in our plain meeting-houses, and, panoplied with the sanction of the elders, utter, as ordained ministers, unmeaning words, than in the pulpits of the churches, to uphold for lucre doctrines which the thinking soul abhors, and which only darken the minds of those who receive such teachings.

Quakerism has performed a glorious work, and while men enjoy its benefits it can never be forgotten. True spiritual worship was but little understood by the early reformers, and with superstitious reverence they sealed up in the lids of a printed book the beginning and the end of God's revealed word to man, and made Himself, in the person of the Christ, the only medium of atonement for a sinning world. Dark as were the mediæval times, until the strong hand of Luther tore away the clouds, to let in some ray of light upon that night of moral wretchedness, religion was again shrouded in mystery, until George Fox and his coadjutors revealed to the world the beauty and simplicity of pure Christianity. Superstition ceased to envelope the Scriptures with that cloud of reverence which would make God, in many of its pages, the author of deceit and crime such as we shudder at and loathe in the annals of our own day; and the Divine mercies, the Saving word, the Emanuel, were proclaimed to have been, from all time, and to all people. No propitiation, no outward sacrifice was necessary to appease a wrath which could never have had a place except in men's inventions; and the thirsting souls, turning unrefreshed from the human sources which professed to pour

out the waters of life, drank eagerly of the fountains of truth to which they were invited by the new apostles for theirs was the perennial spring of spiritual worship, whose direct source was God.

Looking down the years of these centuries, we behold a stream, small at first, but gradually widening into the brook, and then a river, bearing onward to the future a precious freight of spiritual blessings and happiness for man. Now we stand almost upon the shores of a wide sea, and the broad church floats upon its bosom, steadily swallowing up into its glorious oneness the cramped and narrow barks, which, though saving thousands from the dangers of the angry river-floods, are no longer needed in the calmer waters.

To this grand church we are tending, with the multitudes who have grown up with us to the height of its great principles; and if the distinctive marks of Quakerism are being lost, it is only because we are ceasing to be a distinct people in the world.

MARRIED.

VII.

C. N. A.

I

SUPPOSE it is not strictly an original remark to say that women are capricious. They are so from a fundamental law of their being. Not more surely do the tides acknowledge their mistress, and shift their rising and falling with every phase of her inconstancy, than does the soul of woman respond to the occultation and orientation of her physical forces.

The condition of man, from his maturity onward, is, in a general way, a uniform one but woman, as maid, wife and mother, answers to another law; and the changes of her lesser and her greater cycle fill her day with alternations of gloom and brightness, shade and sunshine, which are not the fickle fluctuations of a baseless sentiment, but the operations of a scientific law which she can no more evade than she can suspend gravitation; till at last, her sun gone down, the calm but glowing twilight of old age lingers around her, and then her work as

woman drawing to a close, she contemplates eternity with a steady eye, and is no longer capricious.

When Eloise had written and posted her letter she had been in a state of peculiar physical and moral exuberance. With all her forces attuned to harmony, her mental vision had been clear, and, seeing the abstract and absolute right, she had felt strong to order her life into line with it. But there came a change-not by any sudden revulsion, but by delicate shad. ings and gradations of feeling she settled down from that height of pure vision to a valley wherein she felt herself hedged about with conditions. That state of helplessness and dependency which women less gifted than she experience during a whole life-time seemed to compass her

about and to fetter her with its chains of precedent and conventionality. Her eye grew dim: truth and virtue seemed no longer to harmonize. She lcst sight of the grand horizon of life,

and felt only the limitations of the thing which Richard came to say could valley of humiliation.