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 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 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 excited mind continued its conflicts; and, as it has happened to young men 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.

1646.

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 1647. 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, 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.

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-way leads to infidelity.

One morning, as Fox sat silently by the fire, a cloud 1648. 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 skepticism rolled away; mind triumphed over matter, and the depths of conscience were irradiated and cheered 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 preju lice, cherished without mixture, and obeyed without fear.

1648. 1649.

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 irre pressible 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, struck to 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 steeplehouse 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 also 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, like Cromwell and so many others who have exercised vast influence on society, he believed himself the special ward of a favoring 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. If driven from the church, he spoke in the open air; forced from the shelter of the humble alehouse, he slept without fear under a haystack, or watched among the furze. His fame increased; 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 of the nearest and most exercising nature, 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 simplicity of his principle found such ready entrance among the people that 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.'"

6

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 sim

plicity of truth was restored by weak instruments, and Penn exults that the message came without suspicion of human wisdom. It was wonderful to witness the energy and the unity of mind and character which the strong perception of speculative truth imparted to illiterate mechanics; they delivered the oracles of conscience with fearless freedom and natural eloquence; and, with happy and unconscious sagacity, spontaneously developed the system of moral truth, which, as they believed, exists as an incor ruptible 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 throughout the world, and appealed 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 towards China and Japan, and in search of the unknown realms of Prester John.

The rise of the people called Quakers is one of the memorable events in the history of man. It 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 the pride of learning cannot solve. The method of the solution adopted by the Quakers was the natural consequence of the origin of their sect. The mind of George Fox had the highest systematic sagacity; and his doctrine, developed