no doubt be forced to seek in other climes, or in the Islands of the Sea, a retreat, where they can enjoy, unmolested, their peculiar belief. Wherever they go they will learn that polygamy is not in accordance with the Divine command, since it brings in its train social evils, demoralizing and incurable, to be followed, as in the case of Turkey, with decay and death. The mistake made by our Government was that it did not nip in the bud what has now bloomed out into a noxious flower, sending far and wide its poisonous perfume, and defying the whole power of the Government to root up and destroy it. The difficulty has been in the pretence that polygamy was a part of the Mormon religion, and therefore not to be meddled with by Government. Suppose, however, the Mormons had adopted as part of their religion the old Spartan religion of theft, should we have been called on to give our countenance and protection to a gang of thieves and robbers? Throughout Christendom polygamy is as much a crime as stealing, and is punished as a crime in every State of the Union. How, then, can it be pretended in a Christian country that such a practice cannot be suppressed because it is a part of the religious belief of those who are engaged in it? The very statement of such a proposition seems sufficient to show the absurdity of it. QUAKERS. THE ranks of these messengers of peace are becoming rapidly thinned. The broad-brimmed hat and drab coat are getting to be but curious relics of a bygone age, reminding us, as at rare intervals they appear in our streets, that another of the innumerable religious sects, based on a literal and mistaken interpretation of Scriptural texts, is passing away, to be known only in history. No sect, whatever may be its peculiar religious tenets, can long survive, that affects singularity in dress, language, and departure from the world around it. A religious order may live long if it secludes itself, and, in obedience to its sacred profession, has no part or lot in the business and intercourse of life; but those who mix with society must conform to its rules of dress and deportment, or they must lose all influence and finally their existence as a peculiar sect. Whatever may be our belief, we find it necessary to conform externally to the custom of those with whom we live. This is a fundamental law of our nature, which the Quakers have violated, and the penalty is, that, as a sect, they are passing away, and will soon be known no more forever. Few sects have arisen which, with all their errors and extravagance, have not embodied some useful and valuable truth. The Quaker has an inner light to guide his steps. He communes in silence with his own conscience, and seeks counsel of that internal monitor whose teaching seldom leads us astray. External forms are not needed to help his devotion. He requires no music or painting, nor Gothic architecture with its "dim religious light," to kindle and keep alive his holy aspirations. He is confined to no stated services, to no times or seasons, but waits in silence the moving of the spirit, and then he prays or exhorts, as he is prompted by his ever-present monitor, the still small voice within. This beautiful idea of religion will live, let us hope, long after the last trim Quaker dress shall have faded from our sight, and the last Quaker meeting-house shall have crumbled into the dust; long after the last Quaker shall have joined in another world that long procession of the "shining ones" which has gone before him. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, is thus described by Lord Macaulay : "One of the precious truths which were divinely revealed to this new apostle was, that it was falsehood and adulation to use the second person plural instead of the second person singular. Another was, that to talk of the month of March was to worship the bloodthirsty god Mars, and that to talk of Monday was to pay idolatrous homage to the moon. To say Good morning or Good evening was highly reprehensible, for those phrases evidently imported that God had made bad days and bad nights. A Christian was bound to face death itself rather than touch his hat to the greatest of mankind. When Fox was challenged to produce any Scriptural authority for this dogma, he cited the passage in which it is written that Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace with their hats on; and, if his own narrative may be trusted, the Chief Justice of England was altogether unable to answer this argument except by crying out, 'Take him away, gaoler.' Fox insisted much on the not less weighty argument that the Turks never show their bare heads to their superiors; and he asked, with great animation, whether those who bore the noble name of Christians ought not to surpass Turks in virtue. Bowing he strictly prohibited, and, indeed, seemed to consider it as the effect of Satanical influence; for, as he observed, the woman in the gospel, while she had the spirit of infirmity, was bowed together, and ceased to bow as soon as Divine power had liberated her from the tyranny of the evil one. His expositions of the sacred writings were of a very peculiar kind. Passages, which had been, in the apprehension of all the readers of the gospels during sixteen centuries, figurative, he construed literally. Passages, which no human being before him had ever understood in any other than a literal sense, he construed figuratively. Thus, from those rhetorical expressions in which the duty of patience under injuries is enjoined, he deduced the doctrine that self-defence against pirates and assassins is unlawful. On the other hand, the plain commands to baptize with water, and to partake of bread and wine in commemoration of the redemption of mankind, he pronounced to be allegorical. He long wandered from place to place, teaching this strange theology, shaking like an aspen leaf in his paroxysms of fanatical excitement, forcing his way into churches, which he nicknamed steeple-houses, interrupting prayers and sermons with clamor and scurrility, and pestering rectors and justices with epistles much resembling burlesques of those sublime odes in which the Hebrew prophets foretold the calamities of Babylon and Tyre. He soon acquired great notoriety by these feats. His strange face, his strange chant, his immovable hat and his leather breeches, were known all over the country; and he boasts that, as soon as the rumor was heard, The Man in Leather Breeches is coming,' terror seized hypocritical professors, and hireling priests made haste to get out of his way. He was repeatedly imprisoned and set in the stocks, sometimes justly, for disturbing the public worship of congregations, and sometimes unjustly, for merely talking nonsense. He soon gathered round him a 6 |