Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE QUAKER REFORMATION. At all times, a man who would do faithfully, must believe firmly. ?Caklyle. The quantity of inwardness, faithfulness, and power, which had been manifest, could not pass away, without helping towards some great Revolution. ?Steeling. The grand distinguishing tenet of the Society of Friends is this: the Light of Christ in Man, as a continuous Divine revelation. This idea underlies the whole structure of the Society’s Christian profession; giving the tone to its theology, the shape to its organization, the direction to its practice. ?Dr. Boakdman. It would be a mistake to suppose that the Primitive Church?whose condition, polity and teaching we have sought briefly to describe?was a community of perfect. men, or that it saw every truth fully. It had in fact its own special troubles and shortcomings. People who had been familiar with the immoralities of heathenism, and who had perhaps been saturated with the hopeless Atheism that prevailed, did not at once? on being reached by the spirit of the Gospel?rise above every degrading tendency. The Apostles’ frequent reminders of the plainest spiritual realities?of the simplest requirements of Christian morality?give some indication of what was at times seen to be lacking. And yet the Primitive Church as a whole was remarkable for the simplicity and purity of its teaching ?for the godly lives of its members, and for the faithful courage with which it sought to do ite work. We see something of what it had done from a statement in Pliny’s letter?written about A. D. 103?(soon after the death of the Apostle John)?to the effect that the Heathen Temples in one of the most populous provinces in Asia Minor were almost deserted. Its character for genuineness and simplicity was doubtless largely as…