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PREFACE.

ALTHOUGH Friends have many ably written Records of the rise and progress of their Society, yet they are, as is well known, in a great measure unadapted to general reading, either from their quaintness, or their verbosity of style. This readily accounts for the acknowledged ignorance of the Society, as to its history, and especially the youth, who deem it a severe task, instead of a pleasure, to ponder over its pages, where they might with advantage reflect on the character and lives of those men, who, though they did not dazzle the eyes of mankind with any brilliant schemes of worldly ambition, ennobled themselves and the human family, by raising and supporting the standard of Christ within, as the bulwark of pure religion.

After some reflection, I have been induced to suppose that vast benefit would accrue to the Society, if a compendious and modern history of it were published; incited by this consideration, I was not discouraged by the prospect of the laborious undertaking, from engaging, during the hours of relaxation from an arduous profession, in the task of collecting and digesting the materials necessary for such a work.

The authorities and works from which I have selected the matter for this Book, are those of the standard historians and primitive members of the Society.

If I have succeeded in my endeavors, and judiciously availed myself of the materials within my reach; if the work answers the expectations of my friends, and causes satisfaction and profitable reflection to my readers in general, my design in undertaking it will not be altogether unanswered. It will be noticed that this Book is entirely devoted to transactions on the other side of the Atlantic, it being my design, at some period not very far distant, should my life and health be spared me, to produce another Work similar, and being Part II. of this, 'containing a full account of the trials and privations to which the Society were subjected in this Western World. W. R. W.

NEW YORK, 2d Mo., 1845.

INTRODUCTION.

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH PRIOR TO GEORGE FOX.

THE history of the Christian Church, presents the record of a conflict, which, for eighteen centuries, has been waged within her bosom, between two opposing principles.-These antagonistic principles are Spirituality and Formalism; the one, divine in its origin, and addressing itself to the highest part of our nature; the other, earthly in its source, and finding an ally and a slave in the gross and sensual propensities of the human soul.

Heathenism presents a melancholy instance of the workings of the formal principle, when the divine and life-giving spirit has become extinct. Those noble religious truths which occasionally shine forth in the writings of some of the early Heathen, are the fragments of a primitive revelation from the Divine Spirit to the souls of those holy men, who lived in the first ages of the world. But their posterity, while they maintained the forms of worship, ceased to abide in its spirit; the divine life died within them, and their communication with heaven was soon cut off; and the dim twilight of traditionary knowledge gradually deepening into a profound and starless midnight, they finally sank into all the stupid and debasing practices of an idolatrous superstition. Then came to pass that saying of Paul, "Because when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, but became vain in their imagina

its

tions, therefore their foolish hearts were darkened; professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts and creeping things." This view is supported by the fact that the golden age of heathenism is in the distant past, progress is a downward one, it waxes worse and worse as we come down from the morning of time; it is like a body in which the vital principle is extinct, and in which there is nothing to arrest its tendency to corruption and decay. In the moral degradation of heathen lands, we can therefore behold a sad exhibition of the complete triumph of dead form over spiritual life.

In the Christian Church, all the changes which have transpired since the days of its founder, may be referred to the temporary predominance of one of these principles over its antagonist; but as we recede from this day, formalism is seen gradually to triumph, until, at length, the spiritual seed are almost extinct, and the formal principle, personified in the Roman Pontiff, lords it over the debased nations in all the plenitude of priestly despotism.

A view of some of the principal phases of this conflict will form an appropriate introduction to the history of that people, whom God has raised up in these latter days as witnesses for the truth. Such a sketch must of course be very general and imperfect. Indeed, its object is not so much to inform as to remind; it simply proposes to conduct the reader through scenes with which he is presumed to be already familiar, and it therefore merely notices some of the more prominent objects, leaving the minuter details associated with them to be called up for their illustration by the reader's memory.

Before we speak of the Great Author of the new dispensation, or follow its first preachers in their widely extended labors, it will be well to glance briefly at some circumstances in the state of the world at that time, highly favorable to the spread of Christianity, and its general reception. All previ ous events had doubtless a preparative bearing upon the set

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