" Very likely this same inner
light, (so dwelt upon by newer men, as by Fox and Barclay at the
beginning, and all Friends and deep thinkers since and now,) is
perhaps only another name for the religious conscience. In my opinion
they have all diagnos'd, like superior doctors, the real in-most
disease of our times, probably any times. Amid the huge inflammation
call'd society, and that other inflammation call'd politics, what is
there to-day of moral power and ethic sanity as antiseptic to them and
all? Though I think the essential elements of the moral nature exist
latent in the good average people of the United States of to-day,
and sometimes break out strongly, it is certain that any mark'd or
dominating National Morality (if I may use the phrase) has not only
not yet been develop'd, but that--at any rate when the point of view
is turn'd on business, politics, competition, practical life, and in
character and manners in our New World--there seems to be a hideous
depletion, almost absence, of such moral nature. Elias taught
throughout, as George Fox began it, or rather reiterated and verified
it, the Platonic doctrine that the ideals of character, of justice,
of religious action, whenever the highest is at stake, are to be
conform'd to no outside doctrine of creeds, Bibles, legislative
enactments, conventionalities, or even decorums, but are to follow the
inward Deity-planted law of the emotional soul. In this only the
true Quaker, or Friend, has faith; and it is from rigidly, perhaps
strainingly carrying it out, that both the Old and New England records
of Quakerdom show some unseemly and insane acts.
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