Digital Paxton: Digital Collection, Critical Edition, and Teaching Platform

The Quaker Vindicated - 10

in judgment, rather than a design in the Quakers to have our bleeding Borders infested with the cruel Barbarians of the Wilderness? Indeed our Frontier-Inhabitants have been strangely deluded and abused concerning the character, that has been handed to them, of this People. "They do sympathize" (most sincerely) "with them", and unfeignedly "pity their distresses". But they have Enemies in Philadelphia, that are determined, if it lays in their power, to make the Frontier-Inhabitants everlastingly hate them. —The rest of this paragraph contains some low invectives, quite foreign to PLAIN TRUTH, and are too mean to deserve any further notice.

"Let us next consider Quakers with respect to Government"; says the Unmasker, "Can it be consistent that a Person who declares that his conscience forbids him to take up Arms, should be a Representative for a warlike People? By no means: Neither is it an "inexpressible absurdity" that a man who communes with the Quakers may not make a good Representative even "in time of war". You stare at this, Sir, as militating against itself; but let us examine, look into any Set of Christians, and you may find some of its Members that don't agree in every Article of its Believe, and yet commune with that Society which they have been educated among. Nor is this, I conceive, at all preposterous or hypocritical. The Father instructs his Son in what he thinks is truth, and during the son's minority the father endeavours to implant his own opinions into the bosom of his child, but when the son arrives to years of understanding, it is his peculiar privilege to judge for himself; (and he is accountable to GOD only, the Author of his being, for his thoughts) and then, as men vary so much in their sentiments, how common is it for people to recede from their primary instructions in some particulars, and yet hold in the main with the Christian System in which they have been educated? nor was this ever thought duplicity, or counted a dissembling part, by sensible

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