The rest of this week I spent principally in attending our quarterly meeting, held at this time in New-York. It was for the most part a favoured season, but would have been more so, had not some in the ministry quite exceeded the mark by unnecessary communication. For very great care ought to rest on the minds of ministers, lest they become burthensome, and take away the life from the meeting, and bring over it a gloom of death and darkness, that may be sensibly felt.
First day, the 28th. A silent meeting to-day.
Second day. In the afternoon of this day I accompanied a friend to a meeting he had appointed at Jerusalem. There was a considerable collection; but the meeting proved trying, not only in the silent part, but when our friend was communicating, there seemed to be a great weight of death over the meeting, and the people appeared generally very dull and lifeless. I was very much borne down under a feeling sense of it, so that I had not the least prospect that I should have any thing to communicate, as I felt nothing in myself to offer, nor did there appear any disposition or fitness in the people to receive; but just before the close, some time after the Friend had sat down, there was a small presentation opened on my mind, attended with a degree of life, which, as I yielded thereto, it spread a comfortable calm over the meeting generally, insomuch that I thought that the fragments which were left, after each had had their portion, were more than the whole stock in the beginning, like the fragments of the loaves and fishes, when the multitude were fed formerly.
I accompanied the aforesaid Friend on fourth day to Bethpage, but sat the meeting in silence. He appeared in a pretty long testimony, but it was rather a dull heavy season, and but little life to be felt, so true is that saying, that, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” He returned with me and attended our meeting the next day, and had a pretty favoured time in the meeting, and was led to open divers passages of scripture in a pretty clear manner, which rendered the season instructive and satisfactory.
Sixth and seventh days. Passed without any thing transpiring worthy of remark.