The sprightly and smiling looks of children, their shrill, lively, and cheerful voices, their varied and exhilarating sports, all these are interwoven with the other objects of our senses, and have an imperceptible, though an undoubted influence, in adding to the cheerfulness of our minds.

Take away the beautiful choristers from the woods, and those, who live in the country, would but half enjoy the spring.

So, if by means of any unparalleled pestilence, the children of a certain growth were to be swept away, and we were to lose this infantile link in the chain of age, those, who were left behind, would find the creation dull, or experience an interruption in the cheerfulness of their feelings, till the former were successively restored.
The bodies, as well as the minds of children, require exercise for their growth: and as their disposition is thus lively and sportive, such exercises, as are amusing, are necessary, and such amusements, on account of the length of the spring which they enjoy, must be expected to be long.
The Quakers, though they are esteemed an austere people, are sensible of these wants or necessities of youth.

They allow their children most of the sports or exercises of the body, and most of the amusements or exercises of the mind, which other children of the island enjoy; but as children are to become _men_, and men are to become _moral characters_, they believe that bounds should be drawn, or that an unlimited permission to follow every recreation would be hurtful.
The Quakers therefore have thought it proper to interfere on this subject, and to draw the line between those amusements, which they consider to be salutary, and those, which they consider to be hurtful.
They have accordingly struck out of the general list of these such, and such only, as, by being likely to endanger their morality, would be likely to interrupt the usefulness, and the happiness, of their lives.
Among the bodily exercises, _dancing_, and the _diversions of the field_, have been proscribed; among the mental, _music_, _novels_, the _theatre_, and all games of _chance_, of every description, have been forbidden.

These are the principal prohibitions, which the Quakers have made on the subject of their moral education.