The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceof respect by persons one to another, who bear no real respect oneto another; and besides this, being a type and a proper emblem ofthat divine honor which all ought to pay to Almighty God, andwhich all of all sorts, who take upon them the Christian name,appear in when they offer their prayers to him, and therefore shouldnot be given to men;—I found this to be one of those evils which Ihad been too long doing; therefore I was now required to put itaway and cease from it.“Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the pluralnumber to a single person, you to one, instead of thou, contrary tothe pure, plain, and single language of truth, thou to one, and you tomore than one, which had always been used by God to men, andmen to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record oftime till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times,to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, broughtin that false and senseless way of speaking you to one, which hassince corrupted the modern languages, and hath greatly debasedthe spirits and depraved the manners of men;—this evil custom Ihad been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out ofand required to cease from.“These and many more evil customs which had sprung up in thenight of darkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religionwere now, by the inshining of this pure ray of divine light inmy conscience, gradually discovered to me to be what I ought tocease from, shun, and stand a witness against.”176These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistencybetween profession and deed jarred some of them to activeprotest. John Woolman writes in his diary:—“In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed;and have at sundry times walked over ground where much of theirdyestuffs has drained away. This hath produced a longing in my mindthat people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of person,and cleanness about their houses and garments. Dyes being inventedpartly to please the eye, and partly to hide dirt, I have felt in this weak176 The History of Thomas Elwood, written by Himself, London, 1885,pp. 32-34.266