Let none be offended
At what we here say;
We candidly ask you,
Is that the best way?
If not--lay such customs
And fashions aside,
And take this Monitor
Henceforth for your guide.
[VISITORS' EATING-ROOM, SHAKER VILLAGE.]
Since these chapters were written, Hervey Elkins's pamphlet, "Fifteen
Years in the Senior Order of the Shakers," printed at Hanover, New
Hampshire, in 1853, has come into my hands. Elkins gives some details
out of his own experience of Shaker life which I believe to be generally
correct, and which I quote here, as filling up some parts of the picture
I have tried to give of the Shaker polity and life:
"The spiritual orders, laws, and statutes, never to be revoked, are in
substance as follows: None are admitted within the walls of Zion, as
they denominate their religious sphere, but by a confession to one or
more incarnate witnesses of every debasing and immoral act perpetrated
by the confessor within his remembrance; also every act which, though
the laws of men may sanction, may be deemed sinful in the view of that
new and sublimer divinity which he has adopted. The time, the place, the
motive which produced and pervaded the act, the circumstances which
aggravated the case, are all to be disclosed.
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