When first it was in my heart to address you, I did not at all suppose that it would be in the form of a lecture. I thought it possible, if God so ordered it, that I might have spoken to you for about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, upon a spiritual subject which for two or three years has pressed very heavily upon my mind. It seemed to me that you, esteemed Friends, were a picked body of men, peculiarly set apart to be the advocates of spiritual religion, that you had suffered long for it, that your history had been highly honorable to yourselves in years past, that you still loved the spirituality of godliness, and were not to be bewitched by the formalism of this age; but I thought that your testimony was hardly loud enough, that though it was clear as a bell, it was not shrill as a clarion; and I hoped also that if God should put it into your hearts to permit me to say a few earnest words to you, there might be young men amongst you who might be stirred up to lift up their voice like a trumpet, to cry aloud and spare not, and to tell to this age its sins and iniquities.
