living "the way of truth," as the early Quakers quaintly called their
religious faith.

But the Quakers have never been champions of the negative. They do not
take kindly to the rôle of being "antis." Their negations grow out of
their insistent affirmations. If they are _against_ an established
institution or custom it is because they are _for_ some other way of
life which seems to them divinely right, and their first obligation is
to incarnate that way of life. They cannot, therefore, stand apart in
monastic seclusion and safely watch the swirl of forces which they
silently disapprove. If in war-time they do not fight, they _do_
something else. They accept and face the dangers incident to their way
of life. They feel a compulsion to take up and in some measure to bear
the burden of the world's suffering. They endeavour to exhibit, humbly
and modestly, the power of sacrificial love, freely, joyously given, and
they venture all that the brave can venture to carry their faith into
life and action. In the American civil war, in the Franco-Prussian, the
South African, the Balkan, the Russo-Japanese, small bands of Quakers
revealed the same spirit of service and the same obliviousness to danger
which have marked the larger groups that have manned the ambulance units
and the war-victims' relief and reconstruction work of this world war.
In this present crisis they have gone wherever they could go,--to
Belgium, to France, to Russia, to Italy, to Serbia and Greece and Syria
and Mesopotamia,--to carry into operation the forces of restoration and
of reconstruction. They have not stood aloof as spectators of the
world's tragedy. They have entered into it and shared it, and they have
counted neither money nor life dear to themselves in their desire to
reveal the power of redeeming and transforming love.

Slowly the sincerity of the Quaker conviction about war has made itself