A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers

asonably say, should be saved: for they were not so careful to be safe from persecution, as to be faithful and inoffensive under it: being more concerned to spread the truth by their faith and patience in tribulation, than to get the worldly power out of their hands that inflicted those sufferings upon them: and it will be well if the Lord suffer them not to fall, by the very same way they took to stand.

In doctrine they were in some things short; in other things, to avoid one extreme, they ran into another: and for worship, there was, for the generality, more of man in it than of God. They owned the spirit, inspiration, and revelation, indeed, and grounded their separation and reformation upon the sense and understanding they received from it, in the reading of the scriptures of truth. And this was their plea; the scripture is the text, the spirit the interpreter, and that to every one for himself. But yet there was too much of human invention, tradition, and art, that remained both in praying and pre