Leicestershire, was a shoemaker by trade. He was of a thoughtful and devout turn of mind; and he had begun, while yet a youth, to revolve anxiously some of the great problems of religion. He sought advice from his relations and from the ministers, but obtained none that would meet his case. One recommended to him to enlist in the army; another, to try bleeding; and another, to "take tobacco, and sing psalms." The formalism of religious institutions and worship caused him vehement displeasure; and the prevailing habit of appealing to Scripture as the absolute arbiter of religious truth, appeared to him an unworthy disparagement of that light within the soul, which "lighteth every man that cometh into the world." He took to solitude, sometimes living in a town, where he shunned companions, sometimes wandering among the Derbyshire hills, absorbed in contemplation and in the study of his Bible. At length, when he was twenty-two years old, 1646. he considered himself to have received some distinct revelations of truth. "As he was walking in a field on a first-day morning, it was discovered unto his understanding, that to be bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to make a man to be a minister of Christ;" and, "some time after, it was opened in him that God, who made the world, did not dwell in temples made with hands." "He had great openings now concerning the things written in the Revelations." "He fasted much, and walked often abroad in solitary places, taking his Bible with him, and then sat in hollow trees and lonely places till night came on; and frequently in the night he walked mournfully about, being surrounded with many sorrows." "He was clothed with leather,. . . . . partly for the simplicity of that dress, and also because such a clothing was strong, and needed but little mending or repairing, which was commodious for him, who had no steady dwelling-place, and everywhere, in his travelling about, sought to live in a lonely state."1 It would not have been safe to predict the effect of such a regimen on an ignorant, imaginative, and fervent mind. Fox's "understanding came more and more to be opened; nevertheless his temptations continued, so that he began to question whether he might have sinned against the Holy Ghost." In a quiet way he made some proselytes to his still unshaped doctrine, 1647. 1648. the first of whom was a woman named Elizabeth Hoolton. "Several persons, seeking the Lord, were become fellow-believers, and entered into society" with him. "The virtues of the creatures were also opened to him; so that he began to deliberate whether he should practise physic for the good of mankind; but God had another service for him, and it was showed him that he was to enter into a spiritual labor." "He found also that the Lord forbade him to put off his hat to any man, high or low; and he was required to Thou and Thee every man and woman without distinction, and not to bid people Good morrow or Good evening; neither might he bow or scrape with his leg to any Perseverance in his track of thought, success in proselyting, and the sympathy of proselytes, naturally oper ated on Fox's bold nature to make him more aggressive. "He went to the courts, crying for justice, and exhorting the judges and justices to do justice." "Very burdensome it was to him, when he heard the bell ring to call people together to the steeple-house; for it seemed to him just like a market-bell, to gather the people, that the priest might set forth his ware to sale. 1 Sewel, History of the Quakers, 10 -12. "It was a dreadful thing to them, when it was told them, 'The man in leathern breeches is come.' At the hearing thereof, the priests in many Going on a first 1649. 66 day of the week, in the morning, with some of his friends, to Nottingham, to have a meeting there, and having seen from the top of a hill the great steeple-house of the town, he felt it required of him to cry against that idol-temple, and the worshippers therein." He went away to the steeple-house," and cried accordingly; whereupon "the officers came and took him, and put him into a nasty, stinking prison.” “Having been kept in prison a pretty long time," he "was at length set at liberty, and then travelled as before in the work of the Lord." On his release, he cured with his word "a distracted woman," when "the doctor, being about to let her blood, could get no blood from her,” and then "was moved to go to the steeple-house, and declare there the truth to the priest and the people; which doing, the people fell upon him, and struck him down, almost smothering him, for he was cruelly beaten and bruised with their hands, Bibles, and sticks; then they haled him out, though hardly able to stand, and put him into the stocks, where he sat some hours."1 - At twenty-five years of age, poor and unlearned, contemplative and ambitious, with a sturdy frame and an inflexible will, Fox was now fairly engaged. His tongue was against every man, and — as might naturally follow, even in less agitated times than that in which he lived-every man's hand was against him. With all the rhetoric of invective supplied by his good knowledge of colloquial English, a dialect not deficient in resources for that use, he berated the priests of all descriptions and their followers, choosing the steeple-houses and the hours of service for the places and times of his remonstrances. To his "friends," the "priests," he wrote, that "as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so did they resist the truth, being men of corrupt minds;" and he advised his "friends," the magistrates, to "weep and howl 1 Sewel, History, &c., 19 - 21. for their misery that should come." While a justice of the peace was signing a mittimus for his deten- 1650. tion after one of these exercises, "Fox bade him and those about him 'tremble at the word of the Lord." The magistrate "took hold of this weighty saying with such an airy mind, that from thence he took occasion to call him and his friends scornfully Quakers. This new and unusual denomination was taken up so eagerly, and spread so among the people, that not only the priests there from that time gave no other name to the Professors of the Light, but sounded it so gladly abroad that it soon ran over all England."1 temper of the times If his doctrine was 1651. Such a temper as Fox's suited the in which he began his movement. somewhat misty and unsatisfying, his stout English courage admitted of no question. Just as one of his terms of imprisonment was about to expire, the arrangements were making for Cromwell's second campaign against the Scots; and, "there being many new soldiers raised, the commissioners would have had George Fox captain over them, and the soldiers cried they would have none but him;" but he told them "that he lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars." His enterprise had a mighty fascination for men who, after their successful practice with the chivalry of England, found in themselves a reserve of still unused love of conflict. One of his early converts was "Lieutenant-Colonel John Lilburn, Fox's milian extraordinary bold man, very stiff and inflex- tary conible." After being whipped and set in the pillory for a libel upon the bishops, Lilburn had become one of the best officers of the civil war. Having helped to beat verts. was rather the fabric of his successors, Penn and Barclay. 3 Ibid., 37, 38, 119; comp. Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell, I. 200, 240. 1649. Oct. 24. 1652. 1653. July 13. the King, he turned upon the Parliament, who had him arraigned for treason. He was acquitted, but was banished by a Parliamentary Ordinance, which Jan. 20. threatened him with death, if he should return. He returned, was tried for this offence, and was again acquitted, greatly to the disgust of Cromwell, who then confined him in Dover Castle.1 There he fell in with a disciple of Fox, who converted him; and he passed his last years as a Quaker preacher, though it was some time before he was "fully convinced that to refrain the use of the carnal sword was the duty of a true Christian." Of others who became eminent Quaker apostles, Richard Hubberthorn and William Ames had been officers in the Parliament's army; and Ames had been so benighted, "that, when any soldier under his colors had been guilty of any immorality on a first day of the week, he presently had him bound neck and heels." James Naylor, "a man of excellent natural parts, so that many came to receive the truth by his ministry," had been "Quarter-Master in MajorGeneral Lambert's troop in Scotland."2 Spread of the sect. 1652. 1654. In the fourth year of the Commonwealth there were twenty-five preachers of Fox's doctrine. Two years later, the number had increased to sixty. The messengers of the new dispensation now looked abroad for a larger sphere of labor. Evangelists went first to Scotland, and in the next year to Ireland; and that course of operations was energetically entered upon, which soon carried the proclamation of this eccentric faith to the northern, eastern, and western regions of Continental Europe, to the Vati 1 During the time of Cromwell's ascendency, no agitator gave him more trouble than Lilburn. The two trials in which he was acquitted are among the most memorable instances of the courage of juries, to be found in the history of English jurisprudence. (State Trials, II. 19 et seq., VII. 354 et seq. ; 2 Sewel, History, &c., 87, 106, 107,134. |