The Same Simplicity
Attends The Worship They Pay To The Divinity; Their Elders Are The
Only Teachers Of Their Congregations, The Instructors Of Their
Youth, And Often The Example Of Their Flock.
They visit and comfort
the sick; after death, the society bury them with their fathers,
without pomp, prayers, or ceremonies; not a stone or monument is
erected, to tell where any person was buried; their memory is
preserved by tradition.
The only essential memorial that is left of
them, is their former industry, their kindness, their charity, or
else their most conspicuous faults.
The Presbyterians live in great charity with them, and with one
another; their minister as a true pastor of the gospel, inculcates
to them the doctrines it contains, the rewards it promises, the
punishments it holds out to those who shall commit injustice.
Nothing can be more disencumbered likewise from useless ceremonies
and trifling forms than their mode of worship; it might with great
propriety have been called a truly primitive one, had that of the
Quakers never appeared. As fellow Christians, obeying the same
legislator, they love and mutually assist each other in all their
wants; as fellow labourers they unite with cordiality and without
the least rancour in all their temporal schemes: no other emulation
appears among them but in their sea excursions, in the art of
fitting out their vessels; in that of sailing, in harpooning the
whale, and in bringing home the greatest harvest. As fellow subjects
they cheerfully obey the same laws, and pay the same duties: but let
me not forget another peculiar characteristic of this community:
there is not a slave I believe on the whole island, at least among
the Friends; whilst slavery prevails all around them, this society
alone, lamenting that shocking insult offered to humanity, have
given the world a singular example of moderation, disinterestedness,
and Christian charity, in emancipating their negroes. I shall
explain to you farther, the singular virtue and merit to which it is
so justly entitled by having set before the rest of their fellow-
subjects, so pleasing, so edifying a reformation. Happy the people
who are subject to so mild a government; happy the government which
has to rule over such harmless, and such industrious subjects!
While we are clearing forests, making the face of nature smile,
draining marshes, cultivating wheat, and converting it into flour;
they yearly skim from the surface of the sea riches equally
necessary. Thus, had I leisure and abilities to lead you through
this continent, I could show you an astonishing prospect very little
known in Europe; one diffusive scene of happiness reaching from the
sea-shores to the last settlements on the borders of the wilderness:
an happiness, interrupted only by the folly of individuals, by our
spirit of litigiousness, and by those unforeseen calamities, from
which no human society can possibly be exempted. May the citizens of
Nantucket dwell long here in uninterrupted peace, undisturbed either
by the waves of the surrounding element, or the political commotions
which sometimes agitate our continent.
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