The ministry was to be as the spirit moved; all equally might speak or be silent, poor as well as rich, unlearned as well as learned, women as well as men; if special teachers did spring up amongst them, it should not be professionally, or to earn a salary.

Yet, with all this liberty among themselves, what unanimity in the moral purport of their teachings! Their restless dissatisfaction with the Established Church and with all known varieties of Dissent, their passion for a full reception of Christ at the fountain-head, their searchings of the Scriptures, their private raptures and meditations, their prayers and consultations in public, had resulted in a simple re-issue of the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount.

Quakerism, in its kernel, was but the revived Christian morality of meekness, piety, benevolence, purity, truthfulness, peacefulness, and passivity.

There were to be no oaths: Yea or Nay was to be enough.

There were to be no ceremonies of honour or courtesy-titles among men: the hat was to be taken off to no one, and all were to be addressed in the singular, as _Thou_ and _Thee_.