He questioned his life; but his blameless life offered nothing for remorse. He went to many "priests" for comfort, but found no comfort from them. His wretchedness 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 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.

He had been bred in the church of England. One day, in 1646, the thought arose 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 boundless and eternal love, till light dawned within him; and, though the world was rocked by tempests of opinion, his secret and as yet unconscious belief was stayed by the anchor of hope.

George Fox had already risen above the prejudices of sects. The greatest danger remained. Liberty may be pushed to lawlessness, and freedom is the fork in the road where the by-way leads to infidelity. One morning, in 1648, as Fox sat silently by the fire, a cloud came over him; 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 his soul enjoyed the sweetness of repose; and he came

up in spirit from the agony of doubt into the presence of truth. 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 neigh bor does a wrong to himself. The heavenly minded man was become a divine and a naturalist, and all of God Almighty's making.

In this way did George Fox arrive at the conclusion that not 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.

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 him to 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, offended his heart; like Milton and Roger Williams, his soul abhorred the hireling ministry of diviners for money; and, on the morning of a first-day, 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;' and told the people this was

the scriptures. Now, the Lord's power was so mighty upon me, and so strong in me, that I could not hold; but was made to cry out: 'Oh, no! it is not the scriptures, it is the Spirit.''

The principle contained a moral revolution. If it flattered self-love and fed enthusiasm, it established absolute freedom of mind, trod every idolatry under foot, and entered the strongest protest against the forms of a hierarchy. It was the principle for which Socrates died and Plato suffered; and, now that Fox went forth to proclaim it among the people, he was everywhere resisted with angry vehemence, and priests and professors, magistrates and people, swelled like the raging waves of the sea. At the Lancaster sessions, forty priests appeared against him at once. To the ambitious Presbyterians, it seemed as if hell were broke loose; and Fox, imprisoned and threatened with the gallows, still rebuked their bitterness as "exceeding rude and devilish," resisting and overcoming pride with unbending stubbornness. Possessed of great ideas which he could not trace to their origin, a mystery to himself, he believed himself the ward of Providence, and his doctrine the spontaneous expression of irresistible, intuitive truth. Nothing could daunt his enthusiasm. Cast into jail among felons, he claimed of the public tribunals a release only to continue his exertions; and, as he rode about the country, the seed of God sparkled about him like innumerable sparks of fire. If cruelly beaten, or set in the stocks, or ridiculed as mad, he none the less proclaimed the oracles of the voice within him, and rapidly gained adherents among the country people. Driven from the church, he spoke in the open air; forced from the humble ale-house, he slept without fear under a haystack, or watched among the furze. Crowds gathered, like flocks of pigeons, to hear him. His frame in prayer is described as the most awful, living, and reverent ever felt or seen; and his vigorous understanding, disciplined by clear convictions to natural dialectics, made him powerful in the public discussions to which he defied the world. A true witness, writing from knowledge and not report, declares that, by night and by day, by sea and by land, in every emergency he was always in his place, and always a match for every service and occasion. By degrees

"the hypocrites" feared to dispute with him; and the priests trembled and "scud" as he drew near; "so that it was a dreadful thing to them, when it was told them: 'The man in leathern breeches is come." "

The converts to his doctrine were chiefly among the yeomanry; and Quakers were compared to the butterflies that live in fells. It is the boast of Barclay that the simplicity of truth was restored by weak instruments, and Penn exults that the message came without suspicion of human wisdom. The strong perception of speculative truth imparted to illiterate mechanics energy and unity of mind and character; with unconscious sagacity they spontaneously developed the system of moral truth, which, as they believed, exists as an incorruptible seed in every soul.

Every human being was embraced within the sphere of their benevolence. George Fox did not fail, by letter, to catechise Innocent XI. Ploughmen and milkmaids, becoming itinerant preachers, sounded the alarm to the consciences of Puritans and Cavaliers, of the Pope and the Grand Turk, of the negro and the savage. The plans of the Quakers designed no less than the establishment of a universal religion; their apostles made their way to Rome and Jerusalem, to New England and Egypt; and some were even moved to go toward China and Japan, and in search of the unknown realms of Prester John.

The rise of the people called Quakers marks the moment when intellectual freedom was claimed unconditionally by the people as an inalienable birthright. To the masses in that age all reflection on politics and morals presented itself under a theological form. The Quaker doctrine is philosophy, summoned from the cloister, the college, and the saloon, and planted among the most despised of the people.

As poetry is older than critics, so philosophy is older than metaphysicians. The mysterious question of the purpose of our being is always before us and within us; and the child, as it begins to prattle, makes inquiries which learning cannot solve. The method of the solution adopted by the Quakers was the natural consequence of their origin. The mind of George Fox had the highest systematic sagacity; and his

doctrine, developed and rendered illustrious by Barclay and Penn, was distinguished by its simplicity and unity. The Quaker has but one word, THE INNER LIGHT, the voice of God in the soul. That light is a reality, and therefore in its freedom the highest revelation of truth; it is kindred with the Spirit of God, and therefore in its purity should be listened to as the guide to virtue; it shines in every man's breast, and therefore joins the whole human race in the unity of equal rights. Intellectual freedom, the supremacy of mind, universal enfranchisement - these three points include the whole of Quakerism, as far as it belongs to civil history.

Quakerism rests on the reality of the Inner Light. The revelation of truth is immediate. It springs neither from tradition nor from the senses, but from the mind. No man comes to the knowledge of God but by the Spirit. "Each person," says Penn, "knows God from an infallible demonstration in himself, and not on the slender grounds of men's lo here interpretations, or lo there." "The instinct of a Deity is so natural to man that he can no more be without it, and be, than he can be without the most essential part of himself." As the eye opens, light enters; and the mind, as it looks in upon itself, receives moral truth by intuition. Others have sought wisdom by consulting the outward world, and, confounding consciousness with reflection, have trusted solely to the senses for the materials of thought; the Quaker, placing no dependence on the world of senses, calls the soul home from its wanderings through the mazes of tradition and the wonders of the visible universe, bidding the vagrant sit down by its own fires to read the divine inscription on the heart. "Some seek truth in books, some in learned men, but what they seek for is in themselves." "Man is an epitome of the world, and, to be learned in it, we have only to read ourselves well." Tradition cannot enjoin a ceremony, still less establish a doctrine; historical faith is as the old heavens that are to be wrapped up like a scroll.

The constant standard of truth and goodness, says William Penn, is God in the conscience; and to restrain liberty of conscience is therefore an invasion of the divine prerogative. It robs man of the use of the instinct of a Deity, and prevents