freeholders had legislative power as well as freedom; and the tribunals were subjected to popular influence by the institution of a jury. The majority of her laborers were serfs; many husbandmen were bondmen, as the name implies; but the established liberties of freeholders quickened, in every part of England, the instinct for popular advancement. The Norman invasion could not uproot the ancient institutions; they lived in the heart of the nation, and rose superior to the conquest. The history of England is therefore marked by an original, constant and increasing political activity of the people. In the fourteenth century, the peasantry, conducted by tillers, and carters, and ploughmen, demanded of their young king, a deliverance from the bondage and burdens of feudal oppression; in the fifteenth century, the last traces of villenage were wiped away; in the sixteenth, the noblest ideas of human destiny, awakening in the common mind, became the central point, round which plebian sects were gathered; in the seventeenth century, the enfranchised yeomanry began to feel an instinct for dominion; and its kindling ambition, quickly fanned to a flame, would not rest till it had attempted a democratic revolution. The best soldiers of the Long Parliament were country people; the men that turned the battle on Marston Moor were farmers and farmer's sons, fighting as they believed, for their own cause. The progress from the rout of Wat Tyler to the victories of Naseby and Worcester, and Dunbar, was made in less than three centuries. So rapid was the diffusion of ideas of freedom, so palpable was the advancement of popular intelligence, energy and happiness, that to whole classes of enthusiasts the day of perfect enfranchisement seemed to have dawned; legislation, ceasing to be partial, was to be reformed and renewed on general principles, and the reign of justice and reason was about to begin. In the language of that age, Christ's kingdom on earth, his second coming was at hand. Under the excitement of hopes, created by the rapid progress of liberty, which, to the common mind was an inexplicable mystery, the blissful centuries of the millennium promised to open upon a favored world.

Political enfranchisements had been followed by the emancipation of knowledge. The powers of nature were freely examined; the merchants always tolerated or favored the pursuits of science. Galileo had been safe at Venice, and honored at Amsterdam or London. The method of free inquiry, applied to chemistry, had invented gunpowder, and changed the manners of the feudal aristocracy; applied to geography, had discovered a hemisphere, and circumnavigated the globe, made

the theatre of commerce wide as the world; applied to the mechanical process of multiplying books, had brought the New Testament, in the vulgar tongue, within the reach of every class; applied to the rights of persons and property, had, for the English, built up a system of common law, and given securities to liberty in the interpretation of contracts. Under the guidance of Bacon, the inductive method, in its freedom, was about to investigate the laws of the outward world, and reveal the wonders of divine Providence, as displayed in the visible universe.

On the continent of Europe, Descartes had already applied the method of observation and free inquiry to the study of morals and the mind. In England, Bacon hardly proceeded beyond the province of natural philosophy. He compared the subtile visions, in which the contemplative soul indulges, to the spider's web, and sneered at them as frivolous and empty; but the spider's web is essential to the spider's well being, and for his neglect of the inner voice, Bacon paid the terrible penalty of a life disgraced by flattery, selfishness, and mean compliance. Freedom, as applied to morals, was cherished in England among the people, and therefore had its developement in religion. The Anglo-Saxons were a religious people. Henry II. had as little regard for the Roman See as Henry VIII.; but the oppressed Anglo-Saxons looked for shelter to the church, and invoked the enthusiasm of Thomas a Becket to fetter the Norman tyrant, and bind the Norman aristocracy in iron shackles. The enthusiast fell a victim to the church and to Anglo-Saxon liberty. If, from the day of his death, the hierarchy abandoned the cause of the people, that cause always found advocates in the inferior clergy; and Wickliffe did not fear to deny dominion to vice, and to claim it for justice. The reformation appeared, and the inferior clergy, rising against Rome and against domestic tyranny, had a common faith, and common political cause with the people. A body of the yeomanry, becoming independents, planted Plymouth colony. The inferior gentry espoused Calvinism, and fled to Massachusetts. The popular movement of intellectual liberty is measured by advances towards the liberty of prophecying, and the liberty of conscience.

The moment was arrived when the plebeian mind should make its boldest efforts to escape from hereditary prejudices; when the freedom of Bacon, the enthusiasm of Wickliffe, and the politics of Wat Tyler, were to gain the highest unity in a sect; when a popular, and, therefore, in that age, a religious party, building upon a divine principle, should demand free

dom of mind, purity of morals, and universal enfranchisement. The sect had its birth in a period of intense public activity— when the heart of England was swelling with passions, and the public mind turbulent with factious leaders; when zeal for reform was invading the church, subverting the throne, and repealing the privileges of feudalism; when Presbyterians in every village were quarreling with Anabaptists and Independents, and all with the Roman Catholics and the English church.

The sect could arise only among the common people, who had every thing to gain by its success, and the least to hazard by its failure. The privileged classes had no motive to develope a principle before which their privileges would crumble. "Poor mechanics," said William Penn, "are wont to be God's great ambassaders to mankind." "He hath raised up a few despicable and illiterate men," said the accomplished Barclay, "to dispense the more full glad tidings reserved for our age." It was the comfort of the Quakers that they received the truth from a simple sort of people, unmixed with the learning of schools; and almost for the first time in the history of the world, a plebeian sect proceeded to the complete enfranchisement of mind, teaching the English yeomanry the same method of free enquiry, which Socrates had explained to the young men of Athens.

The simplicity of truth was restored by humble instruments, and its first messenger was of low degree. George Fox, the son of "righteous Christopher," a Lancashire weaver, by his mother descended from the stock of the martyrs, distinguished even in boyhood by frank inflexibility and deep religious feeling, became in early life an apprentice to a Nottingham shoemaker, who was also a landholder, and, like David, and Tamerlane, and Sixtus V., was set by his employer to watch sheep. The occupation was grateful to his mind, for its freedom, innocency, and solitude; and the years of earliest youth passed away in prayer and reading the Bible, frequent fasts, and reveries of contemplative devotion. His boyish spirit yearned after excellence; he was haunted by a vague desire of an unknown, illimitable good. In the most stormy period of the English democratic revolution, just as the Independents were beginning to make head successfully against the Presbyterians, when the impending ruin of royalty and the hierarchy made republicanism the doctrine of a party, and inspiration the faith of fanatics, the mind of Fox, as it revolved the question of human destiny, was agitated even to despair. The melancholy natural to youth heightened his anguish; abandoning

his flocks and his shoemaker's bench, he nourished his inexplicable grief by retired meditations, and often walking solitary in the chase, sought in the gloom of the forest for a vision of God.

He questioned his life; but his blameless life was ignorant of remorse. He went to many "priests" for comfort, but found no comfort from them. His misery urged him to visit London; and there the religious feuds convinced him that the great professors were dark. He returned to the country, where some advised him to marry, others to join Cromwell's army; but his excited mind continued its conflicts; and, as other young men have done from love, his restless spirit drove him into the fields, where he walked many nights long by himself, in misery too great to be declared. Yet at times a ray of heavenly joy beamed upon his soul, and he reposed, as it were, serenely on Abraham's bosom.

He had been bred in the church of England. One day, the thought rose in his mind, that a man might be bred at Oxford or Cambridge, and yet be unable to explain the great problem of existence. Again he reflected, that God lives not in temples of brick and stone, but in the hearts of the living; and from the parish priest and the parish church, he turned to the dissenters. But among them he found the most experienced unable to reach his condition.

Neither could the pursuit of wealth detain his mind from its struggle for fixed truth. His desires were those which wealth could not satisfy. A king's diet, palace, and attendance, had been to him as nothing. Rejecting "the changeable ways of religious" sects, the "brittle notions" and airy theories of philosophy, he longed for "unchangeable truth," a firm foundation of morals in the soul. His inquiring mind was gently led along to principles of endless and eternal love; light dawned within him; and though the world was rocked by tempests of opinion, his secret and as yet unconscious belief was firmly stayed by the anchor of hope.

The strong mind of George Fox had already risen above the prejudices of sects. The greatest danger remained. Liberty may be pushed to dissoluteness, and freedom is the fork in the road where the by-path leads to infidelity. One morning, as Fox sat silently by the fire, a cloud came over his mind; a baser instinct seemed to say, "All things come by nature;" and the elements and the stars oppressed his imagination with a vision of pantheism. But as he continued musing, a true voice arose within him, and said, "There is a living God." At once the clouds of scepticism rolled away;

mind triumphed over matter, and the depths of conscience were cheered and irradiated by light from heaven. His soul enjoyed the sweetness of repose, and he came up in spirit from the agony of doubt into the paradise of contemplation.

Having listened to the revelation which had been made to his soul, he thirsted for a reform in every branch of learning. The physician should quit the strife of words, and solve the appearances of nature by an intimate study of the higher laws of being. The priests, rejecting authority and giving up the trade in knowledge, should seek oracles of truth in the purity of conscience. The lawyers, abandoning their chicanery, should tell their clients plainly, that he who wrongs his neighbor does a wrong to himself. The heavenly-minded man was become a divine and a naturalist, and all of God Almighty's making.

Thus did the mind of George Fox arrive at the conclusion, that truth is to be sought by listening to the voice of God in the soul. Not the learning of the universities, not the Roman See, not the English church, not dissenters, not the whole outward world, can lead to a fixed rule of morality. The law in the heart must be received without prejudice, cherished without mixture, and obeyed without fear.

Such was the spontaneous wisdom by which he was guided. It was the clear light of reason, dawning as through a cloud. Confident that his name was written in the Lamb's book of life, he was borne, by an irrepressible impulse, to go forth into the briery and brambly world, and publish the glorious principles which had rescued him from despair and infidelity, and given him a clear perception of the immutable distinctions between right and wrong. At the very crisis when the house of commons was abolishing monarchy and the peerage, about two years and a half from the day when Cromwell went on his knees to kiss the hand of the young boy who was duke of York, the Lord, who sent George Fox into the world, forbade himto put off his hat to any, high or low; and he was required to thee and thou all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, to great or small. The sound of the church bell in Nottingham, the home of his boyhood, struck to his heart; like Milton and Roger Williams, his soul abhorred the hireling ministry of divines for money; and on the morning of a firstday, he was moved to go to the great steeple house, and cry against the idol. "When I came there," says Fox, "the people looked like fallow ground, and the priest, like a great lump of earth, stood in the pulpit above. He took for his text these words of Peter-'We have also a more sure word of prophecy;'