A QUAKERS' MEETING. Still-born Silence !-thou that art Offspring of a heavenly kind, Frost o' the mouth, and thaw o' the mind, Secrecy's confidant, and he Who makes religion mystery, Admiration's speaking'st tongue,— Leave, thy desert shades among, Reverend hermits' hallow'd cells, Seize our tongues, and strike us dumb !1 Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet mean; would'st thou find a refuge from the noises and clamours of the multitude; would'st thou enjoy at once solitude and society; would'st thou possess the depth of thine own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; would'st thou be alone and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite: come with me. into a Quakers' Meeting. Dost thou love silence deep as that "before the winds were made?" go not out into the wilderness, descend not into the profundities of the earth; shut 1 From "Poems of all Sorts," by Richard Fleckno, 1653. not up thy casements; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, with little-faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses. Retire with me into a Quakers' Meeting. For a man to refrain even from good words, and to hold his peace, it is commendable; but for a multitude it is great mastery. What is the stillness of the desert compared with this place? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes? Here the goddess reigns and revels. "Boreas, and Cesias, and Argestes loud," do not with their interconfounding uproars more augment the brawlnor the waves of the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds-than their opposite (Silence her sacred self) is multiplied and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation itself hath a positive more and less; and closed eyes would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot heal. By " imperfect " I mean that which a man enjoyeth by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a Quakers' Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly understand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian solitudes, not singly but in shoals, to enjoy one another's want of conversation. The Carthusian is bound to his brethren by his agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. On secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading a book through a long Winter evening, with a friend sitting by-say, a wife-he, or she, too, (if that be probable,) reading another, without interruption, or oral communication ? can there be no sympathy without the gabble of words?) Away with this inhuman, shy, single, shade-and-cavern-haunting solitariness! Give me, Master Zimmermann, a sympathetic solitude. To pace alone in the cloisters or side-aisles of some cathedral, time-stricken; Or under hanging mountains, Or by the fall of fountains; is but a vulgar luxury compared with that which those enjoy who come together for the purposes of more complete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be felt." The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no inscriptions, Sands, ignoble things, Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings— but here is something which throws Antiquity herself into the foreground-SILENCE-eldest of thingslanguage of old Night-primitive Discourser-to which the insolent decays of mouldering grandeur have but arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural progression. How reverend is the view of these hush'd heads, Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous synod! convocation without intrigue! parliament without debate! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to consistory! If my pen treat of you lightly, (as haply it will wander,) yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wisdom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest peace, which some out-welling tears would rather confirm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your beginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewesbury. I have witnessed that which brought before my eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican or royalist, sent to molest you-for ye sat betwixt the fires of two persecutions, the outcast and off-scouring of Church and Presbytery. I have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, who had wandered into your receptacle with the avowed intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and presently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I remember Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and "the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his feet." Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would recommend to you, above all Church narratives, to read Sewell's History of the Quakers. It is in folio, and is the abstract of the journals of Fox and the primitive Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than any thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg of the worldly or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath been a by-word in your mouth)-James Nayler what dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured, even to the boring through of his tongue with red-hot irons, without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigmatized as blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautifullest humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker still!-so different from the practice of your common converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize, apostatize all, and think they can never get far enough from the society of their former errors, even to the renunciation of some saving truths, with which they had been mingled, not implicated. Get the writings of John Woolman' by heart; and love the early Quakers. How far the followers of these good men in our days have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assemblies upon which the dove sate visibly brooding. Others, again, I have watched, when my thoughts should have been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, and the disposition to unanimity, and the absence of the fierce controversial workings. If the spiritual pretensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they make few pretences. Hypocrites they certainly are not, in their preaching. It is seldom, indeed, that you shall see one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and then a trembling, female, generally ancient, voice is heard, (you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it proceeds,) with a low buzzing, musical sound, laying out a few words which "she thought might suit the condition of some present," with a quaking diffidence, which leaves no possibility of supposing that any thing of female vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The works of Woolman, the Quaker, were printed, with his Journal, in 1794.-H. |