LETTER IV.

ON UNIVERSAL INWARD LIGHT.

RESPECTED FRIENDS,

WHEN I first thought of addressing these letters to you, my impression was, that I should not experience any great difficulty on such points of the controversy between you and other bodies of professing Christians, as it was my design to take up. I never found myself more mistaken. But observe wherein the difficulty has lain. I fancied, that, at each step of the controversy, I should have something definite with which to grapple. It is here I have been disappointed. Those views which have been considered as distinctive of the Friends, I have found assuming so great a variety of aspects and modifications among their own writers; the phraseology used, with apparent explicitness, by one, employed by another in a sense, however analogous, yet so materially different; that I have been greatly at a loss, and have at times been about to relinquish my purpose, in fretfulness and disgust. For after having, in my own mind, and to my own satisfaction, met

and refuted a particular statement of doctrine, I have found it starting up in a new or greatly altered form, to which the previous answers were, in some points, not at all suitable. If this has been the case with regard to the subject of my former letters, it has been still more so on that of the present. Never was there a more perfect Proteus than your inward light. Like every thing mystical, it is undefined, and as variable as the mountain mists of the morning. There is no catching, no fixing, no analysing it. When you think you have got it in something of a tangible shape; when you have put it into your crucible, and exposed it to the furnace of criticism, and have evaporated it till you have left no residuum, no substance of thought;-lo! in the bottom of your vessel, it reappears in a different form, for which you must vary the process of trial;—and, when this has been done, with the same result, you have only to begin again.

Nothing could be easier than, by patching together the varied phraseology in which different, or even the same writers, have clothed this inward light, to invest the whole system with the grotesque and piebald garment of ludicrous incongruity. I am aware, however, that ridicule is not the test of truth; and such a mode of treatment of one of your fundamental articles, would ill comport with the avowed kindly feeling and friendly design of these letters. That I

may not, therefore, either, on the one hand, do injustice to your principles, or, on the other, make one writer responsible for the sentiments of another, it is my intention, on the present subject, to take up, in the first instance, the view of it which is presented by your most highly and justly esteemed living writer, Joseph John Gurney,-to take that view by itself, independently altogether of the sentiments and language of the more primitive and thorough-going Quakers. Many among you, I have reason to think, complain of Mr Gurney, as having, on some points, laid himself open to the charge of compromising and betraying the cause of true primitive Quakerism. And assuredly, if such writers as the author of "Truth Vindicated" are to be considered as fair expounders of your original system, there is ground for the imputation; for between the ancient Quakerism of Fox, and Penn, and even of Barclay, and the modern Quakerism of Mr Gurney, there are differences of no trivial amount.—I am desirous, however, to do justice to Mr Gurney; and shall therefore, in the first instance, take up his views of the "universal light," contained in the "Addendum to Chapter I.," in the seventh edition of his "Observations on the distinguishing views and practices of the Society of Friends." The Addendum bears date "A. D. 1834."

I find little that appears objectionable in the gen

eral principles laid down by Mr Gurney on the subject of human accountableness. This accountableness may be regarded in relation to two points,knowledge and obedience; and these correspond to their respective objects, the former to truth, the latter to duty.-In order to accountableness, in the form of culpability, for the want of the knowledge of truth, two things are self-evidently necessary; sufficient means of discovery, and sufficient capacity of understanding. To these, indeed, in some cases, a third might be added, unless it be regarded as included in the first-sufficient evidence. These three things clearly exhaust all that is requisite to constitute a ground of responsibility,—means, capacity, and evidence. I have mentioned the third distinctly from the first, merely because the two seem to be so distinguished by our Lord, when he says of the Jews," If I had not come and spoken to them, they had not had sin :"-" If I had not done among them the works which no other man did, they had not had sin:" the former sentence relating to information, the latter to evidence.-To speak as if, in any case, the actual possession of knowledge were necessary to accountableness for the absence of it, is obviously to speak in terms of self-contradiction. If, in any case, the knowledge to be attained requires, in order to its attainment, the previous knowledge of something else, then the possession of this previous

knowledge must be reckoned as a part of the first particular-sufficient means. But nothing can be more self-evident than that the possession of knowledge can in no wise be necessary to accountableness for the absence of itself! How far Mr Gurney does not lay himself open to the charge of maintaining something very like this self-contradictory proposition, may by and by appear.

With regard to responsibility in the department of moral duty, there must be a law, and there must be the means of knowing that law. The responsi bility of the Gentiles, or heathen, therefore, implies their having a law; for "where no law is, there is no transgression." If from their not having the written law, it followed that they had no law, it would have followed also, that they had no responsibility. But they have a law,—the law of nature and of conscience-a law, of whose dictates the clearness and fulness have, by moral causes existing in the depravity of man's fallen nature, been very sadly impaired. For this deficiency, as springing from such causes, he is accountable and culpable; and, the deficiency itself thus involving blame, it does not, in any degree, diminish his responsibility.-Neither in regard to the knowledge of God himself, nor in regard to the knowledge of God's will, is there any thing farther necessary to constitute men "without excuse" for their ignorance and for all its results, than the three things