William Wordsworth, in his instructive poems, has described this teaching by external objects in consequence of impressions from a higher power, as differing from any teaching by books or the human understanding, and as arising without any motion of the will of man, in so beautiful and simple a manner, that I cannot do otherwise than make an extract from them in this place.  Lively as the poem is, to which I allude, I conceive it will not lower the dignity of the subject.  It is called Expostulation and Reply, and is as follows:[25]

     Why, William, on that old gray stone,
     Thus for the length of half a day,
     Why, William, sit you thus alone,
     And dream your time away?

     Where are your books? that light bequeath’d
     To beings, else forlorn and blind,
     Up!  Up! and drink the spirit breath’d
     From dead men to their kind.

     You look round on your mother earth,
     As if she for no purpose bore you,
     As if you were her first-born birth,
     And none had liv’d before you!

     One morning thus by Esthwaite lake,
     When life was sweet, I knew not why,
     To me my good friend Matthew spake,
     And that I made reply: 

     The eye it cannot choose but see. 
     We cannot bid the ear be still;
     Our bodies feel where’er they be,
     Against or with our will.

     Nor less I deem that there are powers,
     Which of themselves our minds impress,
     That we can feed this mind of ours
     In a wise passiveness.

     Think you,’mid all this mighty sum
     Of things for ever speaking,
     That nothing of itself will come,
     But we must still be seeking?

     Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
     Conversing as I may,
     I sit upon this old gray stone,
     And dream my time away?

[Footnote 25:  See Lyrical Ballads, Vol. 1. p. 1.]

CHAP.  V

This spirit was not only given to man as a teacher, but as a primary and infallible guide—­Hence the Scriptures are a subordinate or secondary guide—­Quakers, however, do not undervalue them on this account—­Their opinion concerning them.

The spirit of God, which we have seen to be thus given to men as a spiritual teacher, and to act in the ways described, the Quakers usually distinguish by the epithets of primary and infallible.  But they have made another distinction with respect to the character of this spirit; for they have pronounced it to be the only infallible guide to men in their spiritual concerns.  From this latter declaration the reader will naturally conclude, that the scriptures, which are the outward teachers of men, must be viewed by the Quakers in a secondary light.  This conclusion has indeed been adopted as a proposition in the Quaker theology; or, in other words, it is a doctrine of the society, that the spirit of God is the primary and only infallible, and the scriptures but a subordinate or secondary guide.