To which it may be added, that the large and rapid profits frequently
made in trade, compared with the generally small and slow returns from
agricultural concerns, may probably have operated with many, as an
inducement to such a change.

But whatever reasons may have induced them to quit the country, and to
settle in the towns, no temporal advantages can make up to them, as a
society, the measure of their loss. For when we consider that the
Quakers never partake of the amusements of the world; that their worldly
pleasures are chiefly of a domestic nature; that calmness, and quietude,
and abstraction from worldly thoughts, to which rural retirement is
peculiarly favourable, is the state of mind which they themselves
acknowledge to be required by their religion, it would seem that the
country was peculiarly the place for their habitations.

It would seem, also as if, by this forsaking of the country, they had
deprived themselves of many opportunities of the highest enjoyment of
which they are capable as Quakers. The objects in the country are
peculiarly favourable to the improvement of morality in the exercise of
the spiritual feelings. The bud and the blossom, the rising and the
falling leaf, the blade of corn and the ear, the seed time and the
harvest, the sun that warms and ripens, the cloud that cools and emits
the fruitful shower; these, and an hundred objects, afford daily food
for the religious growth of the mind. Even the natural man is pleased
with these. They excite in him natural ideas, and produce in him a
natural kind of pleasure. But the spiritual man experiences a sublimer
joy. He sees none of these without feeling both spiritual improvement
and delight. It is here that he converses with the Deity in his works:
It is here that he finds himself grateful for his goodness--that he
acknowledges his wisdom--that he expresses his admiration of his power.