THE MENTAL ABILITY OF THE QUAKERS 655 



beliefs that they held in common with other Christian sects, they held certain 

 accessory beliefs, which profoundly influenced their daily life and which were 

 based on reasoning so imperfect and short-sighted as almost to deserve the 

 name of irrational. Macaulay says of George Fox : " One of the precious 

 truths which were divinely revealed to this new apostle was, that it was 

 falsehood and adulation to use the second person plural instead of the second 

 person singular. Another was, that to talk of the month of March was to 

 worship the blood-thirsty god Mars, and that to talk of Monday was to pay 

 idolatrous homage to the moon. To say Good morning or Good evening was 

 highly reprehensible ; for such phrases evidently imported that God had made 

 bad days and bad nights. A Christian was bound to face death itself rather 

 than touch his hat to the greatest of mankind. When Fox was challenged 

 to produce any scriptural authority for this dogma, he cited the passage in 

 which it is written that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego were thrown into 

 the fiery furnace with their hats on ; and if his own narrative may be trusted, 

 the Chief Justice of England was altogether unable to answer this argument 

 except by crying out, ' Take him away, Gaoler.' Fox insisted much on the 

 not less weighty argument that the Turks never show their bare heads to their 

 superiors ; and he asked, with great animation, whether those who bore the 

 noble name of Christians ought not to surpass Turks in virtue. Bowing he 

 strictly prohibited, and, indeed, seemed to consider it as the effect of Satanical 

 influence ; for he observed, the woman in the Gospel, while she had a spirit of 

 infirmity, was bowed together, and ceased to bow as soon as the Divine power 

 had liberated her from the tyranny of the evil one . . . from these rhetorical 

 expressions [in the Bible] in which the duty of patience under injuries is en- 

 joined he deduced the doctrine that self-defence against pirates and assassins 

 is unlawful." ^ 



In their use of the words " thee " and " thou " — the so-called " plain 

 language " — in their habit of designating the days of the week and the months 

 by number, in their refusal to use the ordinary salutations demanded by social 

 custom, in their objection to self-defence, and in their peculiar dress, the 

 Quakers held a set of tenets whose incompatibility with profane reason must 

 have been a matter of daily experience. Those who joined the sect must have 

 been persons whose minds were so constituted that they could easily disregard 

 the results of sensible reasoning. 



They also habitually showed an unwillingness to rely on reasoning, which 

 sometimes led to singular consequences. A ship belonging to a Quaker once 

 started on a voyage to America carrying a number of Quaker missionaries. 

 Observations of latitude and longitude would have involved an unwelcome 

 reliance on profane reason. So, instead of making such observations, they 

 " daily waited on the Lord," and with guidance thus obtained, reached 

 their destination after a rather lengthy voyage of two months. A Quaker 

 assembly once issued orders that fish were not to be caught in their breeding 

 season. Instead of giving a rational sanction for this ordinance, they preferred 

 to give a religious one ; they said that catching fish in the breeding season was 

 in some measure " a violation of the command of God in the beginning, when 

 He blessed them and commanded them to increase and multiply." 



Even in their religious services Quakers showed reluctance to rely on 

 conscious reasoning. Instead of a fixed form of service led by an appointed 

 minister, the Quakers, at their meetings, would sit in solemn silence until one 

 of them, impelled by an impulse from the subconscious mind, would begin a 

 prayer or an extempore sermon. Music was banned both from their religious 

 services and from their schools. They considered that in education it led to 

 " self- gratification and little improvement of the mind." 



In meetings for secular afiairs they objected to anything so rational as 



1 History of England, chapter xvii. 



