Martha Aldrich
Abigail Hicks
Elizabeth Hicks
CHILDREN OF ELIAS HICKS
Every exhortation touching labor he religiously followed himself. He records that at the age of sixty he labored hard in his harvest field, and remarks with evident pride and satisfaction as follows:
"I found I could wield the scythe nearly as in the days of my youth. It was a day of thankful and delightful contemplation. My heart was filled with thankfulness and gratitude to the blessed Author of my existence, in a consideration of his providential care over me, in preserving me in health, and in the possession of my bodily powers, the exercise of which were still affording me both profit and delight; and I was doubly thankful for the continued exercise of my mental faculties, not only in instructing me how to exert and rightly employ my bodily powers, in the most useful and advantageous manner, but also in contemplating the works of nature and Providence, in the blessings and beauties of the field—a volume containing more delightful and profitable instruction than all the volumes of mere learning and science in the world.
"What a vast portion of the joys and comforts of life do the idle and slothful deprive themselves of, by running into cities and towns, to avoid labouring in the field; not considering that this is one of the principal sources that the gracious Creator of the universe has appointed to his creature, man, from whence he may derive great temporal happiness and delight. It also opens the largest and best field of exercise to the contemplative mind, by which it may be prepared to meet, when this mortal puts on immortality, those immortal joys that will ever be the lot of the faithful and industrious."[70]
[70] Journal of Elias Hicks, p. 185.