Note Return to text — PART II

But I do this in no narrow sectarian spirit. It may be that the following recollection of a Quaker boyhood represents to some extent the attitude which many of us have held at one time in our lives. “I said ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ to everybody, and I would fully as soon have used profane words as have said ‘you’ or ‘yours’ to any person. I thought only ‘Friends’ went to heaven, and so I supposed that the use of ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ was one of the main things that determined whether one would be let in or not. Nobody ever told me anything like this and if I had asked anybody at home about it, I should have had my views corrected. But for a number of years this was my settled faith. I pitied the poor neighbors who would never be let in, and I wondered why everybody did not ‘join the Meeting’ and learn to say ‘thee’ and ‘thy.’ I had one little Gentile friend whom I could not bear to have ‘lost,’ and I went faithfully to work and taught him ‘the language,’ which he always used with me till he was ten or twelve years old, when the strain of the world got too heavy upon the little fellow! I am quite sure no Israelite, in the days of Israel’s prosperity, ever had a more certain conviction that he belonged to a peculiar people whom the Lord had chosen as His own than I had. There was for me an absolute break between ‘us’ and anybody else. This Phariseeism was never taught me nor encouraged directly by anybody; but I none the less had it. If I had anything in the world to glory over, it was that I was a Quaker.”[Footnote 5]