When they met as prisoner and Lord Protector, they recognised their brotherhood. 'If thou and

I,' said Cromwell, 'were but an hour of the day together, we should be nearer one to the other.' Fox and Cromwell had both felt the power of the promises of religion. They had fed on the talk of men 'who claimed to gaze full on the intolerable brightness of God and to commune with Him face to face, who held themselves to be beings on whose slightest actions the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest, destined as they were, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth had passed away.' Fox and Cromwell tried to make this talk a matter of actual experience. Fox heard the professions, but as an honest man, whose 'verily' was as another's oath, he did not himself realise them; and as a good man generally loved 'for innocency and honesty,' he was wounded by the conduct of two professors, who in the alehouse 'began to drink healths, calling for more drink, and agreeing that he that would not drink should pay all.' Vainly he went to priests who told him to take tobacco and sing psalms, vainly to ministers who quoted texts and preached up sin.

At length, as

he kept himself to himself, living in hollow trees and 'desolate places,' it was opened to him that 'all believers had passed from death to life,' and 'that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to make men fit to be ministers of Christ." Fox learned to look within and not without, to the spirit of God in his soul rather than to the spirit of God in the priest or the Bible. As I was walking by the steeple-house in the town of Mansfield, the Lord said to me, "That which people trample upon must be thy food," and the Lord opened to him that 'high professors trampled on the life of Christ within them while they fed one another with words.' 'Scripture,' he cried at another time, ‘are the words of God, but not Christ the Word.' 'Christ is the light which lighteneth every man who cometh into the world; He is in every man, in savage Indian and high professors; they who look to Him may even in this life reach to Adam's perfection.' 'Light,' 'seed,' 'life,' were the words on which he hung his sermons, and his was a gospel of hope to many in England, America, and Holland, to whom preachers had spoken only of sin.

Fox, though, did something more than preach a doctrine. He was first a 'heavenly-minded man,'

but he was secondly a man of deep understanding and of a discerning spirit. He was, as we should say, a shrewd and quick-witted man. He soon realised that his teaching, unrestrained by discipline, would lead to extravagance. Men, in the name of the light within, would break rules of order and decency. Fox, therefore, as the light within himself showed him what to do and what not to do, made these guidings a rule to all his followers. In these matters he brought the highest principles to bear on the smallest duties.

4

It was the Lord who forbad him to put off his hat to any man, high or low, and he was required to thee' and 'thou' 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 one. Because their teacher is the Holy Ghost, his followers must not directly or indirectly support teachers who sell the Gospel. Because Christ the substance is come, they must not use church or sacraments. Because all days are Christ's, they must not call them by the name of heathen gods, but speak of first day and second day and so forth. When, therefore, Fox broke in upon a congregation or entered barefoot the streets of some city, it was not only that he cried, 'Thus saith

the Lord, "Take heed to the light within you, cherish the seed planted in your hearts," but also 'Thus saith the Lord, "Your churches are idol temples, your teachers are hirelings, your worship is superstition, your steeple-house is painted, the painted beast had a painted house." When acts and words like these ended in his being taken before the judge, his refusal to take off his hat brought down on him the anger of the court, and his refusal to take the oath brought down on him committal to prison. Month after month in Devon and Yorkshire he spent in prison chambers which were open to the weather, so that rain came in, and 'when his clothes were wet he had no fire to dry them.'

His discipline, or, as we may say, the importance he attached to ritual, was the cause of his persecution. Neither the judges of Cromwell nor of Charles could pass by one 'who thundered at congregations till they fled as chaff,' who refused to take the customary oath of allegiance, and who by his conduct showed contempt of court. It was their outward peculiarities rather than their doctrine which left seven hundred Quakers in prison at the death of Cromwell, and made Charles II. a persecutor.

If, however, their forms brought upon them

persecutions, they also brought to them the support of cultivated and politic men Ilke Fell and Penn. When Fell, who had expected that his wife had been led captive by a Ranter, found instead the quiet and restrained Fox with his grand manner and clean person, and heard him expound his rules of life, he was satisfied. The consequence was that even in Fox's time greater and greater care was paid to matters of discipline. Meetings were appointed which were soon constituted as monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings. Το these meetings was given the power not only of caring for the poor and protecting the oppressed, not only of allowing and disallowing marriages, but also that of turning out members who fell from any of the rules established by Fox. It is remarkable that the last words of this unconquerable opponent of forms were 'The seed reigns over all disorderly spirits.' He rejoiced, that is, that the seed of Christ had shown fruit, but he rejoiced more that unruly spirits had submitted to the order which the seed seemed to him to enforce. Those thousands who passed from Gracechurch Street to Bunhill Fields following the body of their great teacher heard from the lips of Penn the doctrine of the inward light which will