332 XVI. EDUCATION OF GEORGE FOX. CHAP. 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. 1646. He had been bred in the church of England. One day, the thought rose in his mind, that a man might be Fox, 58. 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, Ib. 59. 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 expeIb. 60. rienced unable to reach his condition. 1647. 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, Fox, 61. 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 Ib. 62. 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 EDUCATION OF GEORGE FOX. 333 XVI. remained. Liberty may be pushed to dissoluteness, and CHAP. freedom is the fork in the road where the by-way leads to infidelity. One morning, as Fox sat silently by the 1648. 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 skepticism rolled away; mind triumphed over matter, and the depths of conscience were cheered and irradiated by light from Fox, 68. 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. Fox, 69, 70. Ibid. Preface, xxix. 334 CHAP. 1649. James II. i. 29. Fox, 74. GEORGE FOX THE QUAKER PREACHER. Such was the spontaneous wisdom by which he was XVI. guided. It was the clear light of reason, dawning as 1648, 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 Life of 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 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;' and told the people, this was the Scriptures. Now, the Lord's power was so mighty upon me, and so strong in 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 Fox. 76. me, GEORGE FOX THE QUAKER PREACHER. 335 XVI. 146 under foot, and entered the strongest protest against CHAP. 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 every where resisted with angry vehemence, and priests and professors, magistrates and people, swelled Fox, 73. 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 16. 145, pride with unbending stubbornness. Possessed of vast 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 Ib. 290, about him like innumerable sparks of fire. If cruelly beaten, or set in the stocks, or ridiculed as mad, he still 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, soon disciplined by clear convictions to natural dialectics, made 291. 336 XVI. QUAKERISM DESIGNED AS A UNIVERSAL RELIGION. CHAP. 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 Fox 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.'" 100, 107, 103. Fox,296. 301. xxvií. The converts to his doctrine were chiefly among the yeomanry; and Quakers were compared to the butterflies Barclay, that live in fells. It is the boast of Barclay, that the simplicity of truth was restored by weak instruments, Fox, 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 the most 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, existed as an incorruptible seed in every soul. Ib. xx. Sewel, Every human being was einbraced within the sphere of their benevolence. George Fox did not fail, by 570. letter, to catechize 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 |