or less infects the air of all closely settled towns," he feels distress both in body and mind with that which is impure, and a longing "that people might come in to cleanness of spirit, cleanness of person, and cleanness about their houses and garments:" noting at the same time, with his accustomed sagacity, that "some who are great carry delicacy to a great height themselves, and yet real cleanliness is not generally promoted." So continues his travail of soul, recorded in these pathetic and illumined pages, and before long the fatal disorder, small-pox, seizes upon him. He dies among strangers after lying patiently through his illness in the spirit of prayer, still saying characteristically to the young apothecary Friend with whom he had "found a freedom to confer," "that if anything should be proposed as to medicine that did not come through defiled channels or oppressive hands, he should be willing to consider and take it so far as he found freedom." Almost his last words, when already he could hardly be understood, are charged with his steady social compunction.

Dear John Woolman! Pure and high spirit, incapable of evasion, noteworthy no less for restraint and gentleness than for the resolute determination to translate the undimmed vision of the Perfect Right into terms of our daily existence! Whither would his "concerns" have carried him, had not the Angel of Small-Pox ended his wistful and unrelenting quest? He died in 1772, having lived his life before the industrial revolution, in days which we are wont to envy as simpler and less beset by social problems than our own. Certainly they were days in which the network of human relations was far less intricate than now. Yet the process in which he was engaged reached out to limits beyond our power to scan, and his experience is in one point of view an heroic reductio ad absurdum. No more instructive attempt was ever made to attain personal purity while neither withdrawing from the world nor transforming it. To-day the number is on the increase of persons who suffer under the sense of social guilt. All who know such suffering and are inclined to think the conversion of individuals adequate as an ultimate remedy, will do well to ponder these pages. For the conclusion is forced on us that Woolman was in an impasse: and while we love and reverence the heavenly sturdiness of soul possessed by this eighteenth-century saint, we must recognise with amusement touched by tenderness the hopelessness of his efforts to attain personal purity, the ridiculous extremes of isolation into which such a conscientious effort, if logically carried out, would lead us. The definite inference from Woolman's life and thought will be for most modern people the conviction of the hopelessness of the attempt to achieve, by individual means and private effort, a satisfying social righteousness in an unchanged world.

After all, Woolman's trouble and sorrow and tumult of spirit, so suggestive, so helpful to modern souls, were transitory. At the heart of his "endless agitation" subsisted a "central peace." His was the grace to know that "deep humility is a strong bulwark," and to "look less at the effects of the labour than at the pure motion and reality of the concern." The gentleness with which he delivered his fiery message was more than a manner due to Quaker training, or even than a result of resolute self-discipline: it was the index of an inward stillness in which his soul dwelt undisturbed. Let us hope that the days may come when the "concern" about profiting by the painful or degrading labour of others will have an interest as exclusively historic as the "concern" about holding slaves has already attained. Tremulously it may be, yet soberly and joyously, many clear-minded and practical people are beginning to hope for such a day. When it comes, the immediate message of Woolman will be less cogent, but he will still continue to be read by those who care for the revelations of a beautiful soul. These pages offer more than light on the path of social duty; they offer fellowship with a spirit that "dwelt deep," and attained an abiding loveliness because responsive through all turmoil of spirit and all outward suffering, to the "gentle movings of Uncreated Purity." "That purity of life," wrote he, "which proceeds from faithfulness in following the Spirit of Truth, this habitation has often been opened before me as a place of retirement for the children of the light, where we may stand separated from that which disordereth and confuseth the affairs of society." Such a "place of retirement for the Children of the Light," this book affords.

VIDA D. SCUDDER.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, recommended to the Professors of Christianity of every Denomination, Part I., 1754; Part II., 1762; many later issues of both parts; Considerations on Pure Wisdom and Human Policy, on Labour, Schools, and the Right Use of the Lord's Outward Gifts, 1768, and numerous later reprints; Considerations on the True Harmony of Mankind, and how it is to be Maintained, 1770, and later reprints; an Epistle to the Quarterly and Monthly Meetings of Friends, 1772; Remarks on Sundry Subjects, 1773, and later reprints; Serious Considerations on Various Subjects of Importance (containing the four above works, and some expressions of John Woolman in his last illness), 1773; A First Book for Children, 1774 (?); A Journal of the Life, Gospel, Labours, and Christian Experiences of John Woolman, 1774, and many later editions; with Introduction by John Greenleaf Whittier, 1871; with Introduction by A. Smellie, and Appreciation by J. G. Whittier (Books of the Heart), 1898; new century edition, with bibliography, etc., 1900; with foreword by Rev. R. J. Campbell, 1903; A Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich, 1793; later editions, published by Fabian Society, 1898, 1908.

Letters: Edited by J. Kendall (Letters on Religious Subjects, vol. ii.), 1820; by J. and I. Comly (Friends' Miscellany, vol. i.), 1834; in Journal, and in Friends' Review, vols. v.-xxviii.

Works: 1774; 5th edition, 1818.

Life: Saint John Woolman (Eclectic Review), 1861; David Duncan, paper read at Manchester Friends' Institute, 1871; Dora Greenwell, 1871; W. Garrett Horder, A Quaker Saint (The Young Man), 1874; reprinted in Quaker Worthies, 1896; T. Green, 1885, with Introduction by H. C. G. Moule, 1897; Sketch of the Life of John Woolman (Booklet Series, No. 6), 1896; in Present Day Papers, vol. iii., 1900; a poem by Bernard Barton, "A Tribute to the Memory of John Woolman," appeared in vol. iii. of The Friend, and references to Woolman are found in Lamb, and in H. Crabb Robinson's Diary.

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