--And as expulsion from membership
with the church was to be considered as the heaviest punishment, which
the Quakers, as a religious body, could inflict, he gave the offender an
opportunity of appealing to meetings, different from those in which the
sentence had been pronounced against him, and where the decisive voices
were again to be collected from the preponderant weight of religious
character.
He introduced also into his system of dicipline privileges in favour of
women, which marked his sense of justice, and the strength and
liberality of his mind. The men he considered undoubtedly as the heads
of the church, and from whom all laws concerning it ought to issue. But
he did not deny women on that account any power, which he thought it
would be proper for them to hold. He believed them to be capable of
great usefulness, and therefore admitted them to the honour of being, in
his own society, of nearly equal importance with the men.--In the
general duty, imposed upon members, of watching over one another, he
laid it upon the women, to be particularly careful in observing the
morals of those of then own sex. He gave them also meetings for
dicipline of their own, with the power, of recording their own
transactions, so that women were to act among courts or meetings of
women, as men among those of men.
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