Christians chained the heretic to the | learn, in that Leicestershire village, of stake. Protestantism in England, hav-more importance than all the culture ing freed its neck from the yoke of the of the universities, a love of absolute papacy, hastened to submit itself to the yoke of Puritanism. Puritanism, in its turn, fleeing to New England from the pillory and the cart-tail, devoted its surplus energy to the branding of Quakers and the hanging of witches. Even the Quakers, who had promised "love" to the Indians under the great elm-tree at Shakamaxon, ended by investing their capital in negroes and cow-hides. Such being the inveterate tendency of human endeavor, it is easily conceivable that the noblest aspirations of Quakerism were best served by the very eccentricities of its conception, which, by militating against its progression, kept its converts in the van of the struggle for religious freedom, instead of by a complete victory putting them in a position to dictate terms to their opponents. How important its accomplishments were, how auspiciously timed its birth, may best be studied in the career of its founder. veracity, or, as he put it in his Quaker English, "to keep to yea and nay in all things." So that, in days to come, when his quaint "verily" was heard amid the crowd about his goods at the fairs, the purchasers ceased to haggle, for, said they, "if George Fox'says verily,' there is no altering him." He grew up a sober, dreamy youth, taking little or no part, one would imagine, in the boisterous frolics on the village green, and exhibiting a rather unnatural contempt for frivolity in his seniors. Such a spirit seemed to mark him out for the priesthood; and a priest his parents had determined upon making him, when other influences were brought to bear, and he was apprenticed instead to a cobbler. What line Fox would have taken if, at the very threshold of his career, he had found himself a representative of the great State Church, is a rather curious speculation. Would he, like many an ardent reformer before him, have George Fox was born in July, 1624, bowed to the prejudices of his position at Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicestershire. and settled down, like the vast majorHis father, Christopher Fox, was by ity of the rural clergy, to marry on a trade a weaver, one of the old frater-miserable pittance the cook of some nity of workmen who bent over the fox-hunting Tory squire, and preach weft in their own cottages, in the days in a tattered cassock to a handful of before the flying-shuttle and the power-yokels and dairymaids? Or would he, loom had begun to rear the factory like a Luther or a Wesley, have risen chimneys along the village street. His up, and rent the mighty corporation in mother, Mary Lago, was, he is careful which he found himself embedded to to inform us, 66 an upright woman, of the roots? The question can never be the stock of the martyrs." Of educa- answered, and is futile enough. tion, in the modern sense of the word, the boy had none. In an age when a great noble could often with difficulty write a letter and the country gentle-him well and faithfully. Indeed on the man still regarded literature with dis- very first page of his book there occurs dain, the son of a village weaver was a specimen of that habit of self-apprescarcely likely to receive any such ciation from which the worthy Quaker teaching at all. Books, indeed, were is never entirely free: "While I was still even rarer than readers. In the with him," he writes, "he was blest, whole hamlet, with the exception of but after I left him he broke and came the Bible, there was probably not a to nothing." His period of service single volume, unless some ancient cannot, however, have been a very folio which in bygone days had been long one. In his nineteenth year one chained to the pillars of the parish of those trifling occurrences which so church. Something, however, he did frequently dominate a man's whole Besides being a maker of shoes Fox's new master was a wool merchant and a grazier. In each capacity Fox served future caused him to turn his back for- | self tempted of the devil. The struggle ever upon the shoe-lasts and the woolbales, and to go forth clothed in his garb of leather to preach in the wilderness of unrighteousness. It was the summer of Marston Moor, and there was little peace to be found at that moment anywhere in England. The whole conscience of the nation was fermenting like the malt in a brewer's was a sore one, though as a matter of fact the devil never seems to have had a chance; and it drove him onwards from his leafy solitude in the chase at The immediate cause of his decision | Barnet to the vast metropolis hard by. was completely unheroic. Chancing What Rome had proved to Luther, at a fair, where he was present upon that London was to Fox. The hoarse business, on a couple of acquaintances, roar of the streets jarred upon his he adjourned with them to a neighbor- already distracted brain; the scenes of ing tavern to share a jug of ale. As vice and misery, inevitable in a great soon as his thirst was satisfied Fox pro- city, filled the country-bred boy with posed to leave; but his friends, calling terror. Worn out and homesick, his for more drink, startled him by the thoughts naturally turned to his native suggestion that he who first succumbed Leicestershire. He fled from the alshould pay the score. To a youth in lurements and wickedness with which Fox's state of mental agitation such a he felt himself beset back to his own proposition sounded little less than country and his own people. demoniacal. Starting up, and throwing a groat upon the board, he shook the dust of the place from off his feet. He reached home in a condition which made rest impossible. All night he paced his room, groaning with agony vat. The country was swarming with and calling upon the Lord to rescue evangelists; professors Fox dubs them, him. History teaches us that to a man believing their professions to be the in such a condition a manifestation of most important part of them. Sects Providence is practically assured. Fox were cropping up like mushrooms; was no exception to the rule. Towards and, to listen to their various expomorning the voice of the Almighty sounded in the little chamber, saying: "Thou seest how young people go together in vanity, and old people into the earth; thou must forsake all, young and old, keep out of all, and be as a stranger unto all." Thus, he writes, "At the command of God, the ninth of the seventh month, 1643, I left my relations, and broke off all familiarity or fellowship with young or old." He wandered slowly south, avoiding and rave against everything that had company as much as possible, but seek-been taught from it for centuries. The ing help continuously from the priests, Ranter cursed the Muggletonian; the whom he found for the most part as Muggletonian damned all and sundry; empty casks," and always commun- the Independent displayed his affection ing with God, and reviewing his past for freedom by clapping both Ranter life, which indeed, rather, one fancies, and Muggletonian in the Round House. to his disappointment, seems to have Little wonder if, in the tents of the been blameless beyond reproach. The Malignants, wild, devil-may-care spirits discase followed its usual course. The of the type of Goring and Lunsford moment came, while he was at Barnet, jumbled all Puritans up together as a when, in common with all men of tran- crew of crop-eared canting hypocrites. scendent spiritual activity, men of such different temperament as St. Anthony and Hugh of Lincoln, he imagined him nents, Christianity might have been founded on hate rather than on love. The Parliamentarian army, conceived on the lines of the New Model, had degenerated into something approaching a huge perambulating Little Bethel. Wherever a troop of Ironsides or a file of musketeers appeared, some sourfaced saint, with a name purloined from the Book of Nehemiah, would thrust himself into the parish pulpit Such a condition of affairs was not likely to calm Fox's nerves. His parents, by this time seriously alarmed for The gravity and insistence with which Fox dwells upon so extraordinarily natural a conclusion compel the inference that it was the first link in that chain of reasoning by which, in of the many erratic developments in which the mental activity of the day was exploding itself. In the vale of Belvoir he fell in with a little body of Pantheists among whom he made some He was even more success him, would have had him marry and settle down; others of his friends were of opinion that a little roughing it in the ranks would prove beneficial. Both suggestions the lad put sternly aside. He must, he told his mother, "get wis-years to come, his soul swung safely at dom" before a wife. As for the idea anchor amidst "the raging waves, foul of carrying a pike it merely filled him weather, tempests, and temptations. with indignation. By this time the which compose the ocean of doubt. devil was again busy with him. His From that moment he became less of a temptations were more than he could recluse, and wandered about the neighbear. He spent whole nights tramping boring country in search of "tender" the fields in prayer. At last he again people. This time he gave the Church left his father's house and recom- a wide berth, and passed more among menced his wanderings. He made a Dissenters, who, in the end, do not apfinal effort to find salvation in the Es-pear to have impressed him much more tablished Church, plodding from vicar- favorably. He stumbled across some age to vicarage, and laying bare his heart to the incumbents. The results, comical enough to us, must have been near death to him. One parson listened to all he had to say, plied him with numerous questions, and made converts. use of the answers to embellish his ful with a people who relied for guid next Sunday's sermon. Another, no-ance upon the interpretation of dreams. ticing that in the heat of his confidences he mistook the flower-beds for the garden-path, drove him away with a torrent of abuse. A third advised him to smoke and sing psalms, and when his back was turned made fun of him to the dairymaids. Finally, one old gentleman, who evidently could not comprehend any one save a lunatic being in trouble about his soul, insisted upon physicking and bleeding him. But it was the boy's mind, not his stomach, that was disordered; no number of incisions could draw a drop of blood from his veins. Despairing of human aid he fell back once more upon the divine command that he should withdraw himself entirely from the world. He prayed and fasted continually; he passed whole days hidden in hollow trees, and whole nights with no other roof over him than the sky. Suddenly, when the darkness seemed most blinding, a way was opened for him into light. One morning, as he was walking towards Coventry, it was revealed to him that a university education was not in itself sufficient to qualify a man for the ministry. Henceforth his contempt for the Establishment was supreme. But he was routed by some atrabilious misogynists who held that no woman possessed a soul, no more, they assured him, than a goose. Later on, in their prison at Coventry, he had his first encounter with the Ranters, and was shocked and dazed by the blasphemy which led them to proclaim that they were God. By this time Fox was fairly embarked upon his career as a reformer. The devil, it is true, still continued to plague him, but the old feeling of terror was fast giving place to one of ecstasy. Towards the close of 1647 one Brown, being on his deathbed, had visions of him, and prophesied that he would prove the chosen instrument of the Lord. Immediately his carnal body underwent a species of transfiguration. His countenance and person, he declares, were changed as if they had been new moulded. Henceforth, instead of hiding in trees, he stood forth to combat unrighteousness. In the town meetings of the Dissenters, in the gatherings by the hedgerows and in the fields, at the boards of magistracy, even in the aisles of the churches at the close of divine service, his voice was heard proclaiming his gospel of justice and perfection. The result of his eloquence not infrequently took the course he had taught himself to expect; and after a great meeting at Mansfield, the house in which he had prayed was shaken like the chamber of the Apostles at Jerusalem. At length, in the beginning of 1648, the Lord spoke to him again, and commanded him to go out into the world to preach repentance unto men. feeling overcame him (it was in a church at Nottingham, where "all the people seemed as fallow ground"), he found himself seized by the constable, and cast incontinently into "a nasty, stinking prison.” The days passed in that prison were the prelude to many months of confinement. Wandering, as he necessarily did, up and down the country, he made during the next thirty years the acquaintance of most of the gaols between Bodmin and Carlisle. What he, a prisoner for conscience' sake, suffered in Hitherto Fox's troubles had arisen entirely from his own spiritual activity. He was now to experience persecution that time, starved by one gaoler, cudat the hands of others. His disciples, known in those days as the Children of Light, were rapidly increasing; and were beginning to attract attention as much by the quaintness as by the earnestness of their proceedings. Their grand method of attack lay in attending at the churches (steeple-houses as they preferred to denominate them, in distinction to the primitive meaning of church as a congregation) in order, by disputing with the parson, to convince his flock of error. As a result they had been denounced as mere brawlers in sacred places; and people who read history without appreciating the variation of custom with succeeding ages, have honestly come to regard them as such. In point of fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The law of the seventeenth century distinctly authorized a person at the close of the sermon to enter into discussion with the priest. It was this right of which Fox availed himself; and to call him and his followers brawlers, because on exceptional occasions they were so carried away as to interrupt the service before the appointed time, is absurd and unjust. Had Fox had behind him the long swords of the Independent troopers, who made little of ejecting the minister bodily from his pulpit, no doubt he might have acted with impunity. But having no more material support than the prayers of a few poor men, who had accepted literally the gospel-teaching, "Whosoever smite Fox meekly, "it was not civil in him thee on thy right cheek turn to him to do so;" then, very dryly, "Soon the other also," the very first time his after the Lord cut him off." gelled by another, denied the common The imprisonment at Nottingham | their authority, were determined upon had the usual result of such methods. suppressing him. At his very first atFox left the gaol convinced more than tempt to speak in public the constables ever that he was the chosen vessel of were called in, and he was hauled bethe Lord, and even that power had fore the magistrates. Then followed been granted him to heal the sick and one of those curious scenes which were cast out devils. Coming to Mansfield enacted whenever he appeared in the Woodhouse he heard of a 66 distracted dock. Called upon to account for his woman " whom the doctors could not presence in the town, he replied that it even so much as succeed in bleeding. was at the command of God, and bade The poor creature was probably in them tremble at his word. The authe same state of mental excitement swer so irritated one of the justices as Fox himself, when the lancet and named Bennet, that he retaliated with boluses of Parson Macham refused to the term Quaker, a word which, act on him; but he was confident that muttered in anger, quickly became histhe devil, and not hysteria, was the torical. But Fox was equal to the occaroot of the complaint. Entering the sion. Falling upon his knees he began house, he told the keepers to unbind to pray aloud for the offender. This so her, and then in the name of the maddened Bennet that he sprang from Lord bade her be still. Whereupon, his seat and, running across the courtwhether from astonishment or relief, house, struck him where he knelt. she actually became so, and shortly Having thus established their respect after received the truth. The cure for law, the bench proceeded to comwas not a singular one. Many, Fox mit the prisoner for blasphemy. There assures us, were made whole in those was, however, considerably more force days, more than the "unbelieving age in the blow than in the charge. And was able to receive." The people of the magistrates, having got him in Mansfield Woodhouse were, however, prison, seem to have become sensible of the scoffers. Catching the miracle- of their error. They accordingly found worker in the street, they half mur- means to approach him with a view to dered him and stoned him out of the conniving at his escape. But they had place. But Fox was not to be terrified mistaken their man. Fox, who afterby brickbats. Learning at Twy Cross wards declined a pardon from the king that there was a man given over by the for an offence of which he had held physicians, he at once ascended to the himself innocent, was not likely to be death-chamber and "spake the word of guilty of playing into the hands of so life" over him that was sick, so that shallow a creature as Beunet. In the he at once began to mend. In this in-prison therefore he remained until the stance it is extremely probable that moment of the battle of Worcester, Fox was a better doctor than he knew. when, the Parliament being in want of In an age when the lancet was the be-men, the justices bethought them of a all and the end-all of the village prac- new idea, and sending for him tentitioner, when live lice were considered dered him press-money, and would a sovereign remedy for ague, and, pow-have made him a soldier. The action ders scraped from mummies were the of course was persecution in its most joys of such as could afford them, any-naked form, but Fox's refusal supplied thing so wholesome as the prayers of a good man may well have proved efficacious. Fox, however, did not look at it in that light. Strong in his sense of election, he pressed upon his way, and came to Derby. His reputation had preceded him. The Dissenting ministers and the clergy of the Establishment, alike jealous of an apparently legal excuse for a further term of imprisonment. How long the game would have gone on it is impossible to say. There were those who thought that it was the intention of the powers to make an end of him; a result which in the days of prison fever might not have been long delayed. Fox, however, was under no such ap |