"Spiritual growth, which they considered at variance with
intellectual culture, is now wedded to it, and man's whole nature is
advanced. The intellectual had so lorded it over the moral, that
much onesided cultivation was requisite to make things even. I
remember when your intellect was all in all, and the growth of the
moral sense came after. It has now taken its proper place in your
mind, and the intellect appears for a time prostrate, but in due
season both will go on harmoniously, and you will be a perfect man.
If you suffer more than many before coming into the light, it is
because your character is deeper and your happy enlargement will be
proportioned to it."
The identity, which the writer of this letter finds between the
speculative opinions of serious persons at the present moment, and
those entertained by the first Quakers, is indeed so striking as to
have drawn a very general attention of late years to the history of
that sect. Of course, in proportion to the depth of the experience,
will be its independence on time and circumstances, yet one can
hardly read George Fox's Journal, or Sewel's History of the Quakers,
without many a rising of joyful surprise at the correspondence of
facts and expressions to states of thought and feeling, with which we
are very familiar.
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