I have beheld how the
desire to provide wealth and to uphold a delicate life has grievously
entangled many, and has been like a snare to their offspring, and though
some have been affected with a sense of their difficulties, and have
appeared desirous at times to be helped out of them, yet for want of
abiding under the humbling power of truth, they have continued in these
entanglements; expensive living in parents and children hath called for
a large supply, and in answering this call, the faces of the poor have
been ground away, and made thin through hard dealing....
... In the uneasiness of body which I have many times felt by too much
labor, not as a forced but a voluntary oppression, I have often been
excited to think on the original cause of that oppression which is
imposed on many in the world. The latter part of the time wherein I
labored on our plantation, my heart, through the fresh visitations of
heavenly love, being often tender, and my leisure time being frequently
spent in reading the life and doctrines of our blessed Redeemer, the
account of the sufferings of martyrs, and the history of the first rise
of our Society, a belief was gradually settled in my mind, that if such
as had great estates, generally lived in that humility and plainness
which belong to a Christian life, and laid much easier rents and
interests on their lands and moneys, and thus led the way to a right use
of things, so great a number of people might be employed in things
useful, that labor both for men and other creatures would need to be no
more than an agreeable employ, and divers branches of business, which
serve chiefly to please the natural inclinations of our minds, and which
at present seem necessary to circulate that wealth which some gather,
might, in this way of pure wisdom, be discontinued.
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