reached home in a condition which made rest impossible. All night he paced his room, groaning with agony and calling upon the Lord to rescue him. History teaches us that to a man in such a condition a manifestation of Providence is practically assured. Fox was no exception to the rule. Toward morning the voice of the Almighty sounded in the little chamber, saying: "Thou seest how young people go together into 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 company as much as possible, but seeking help continuously from the priests, whom he found for the most part as "empty casks," and always communing with God, and reviewing his past life, which indeed, rather, one fancies, to his disappointment, seems to have been blameless beyond reproach. The disease followed its usual course. The moment came, while he was at Barnet, when, in common with all men of transcendent spiritual activity, men of such different temperament as St. Anthony and Hugh of Lincoln, he imagined himself tempted of the devil. The struggle was a sore one, though as a matter of fact the devil never seems to have had a chance; and it drove him onward from his leafy solitude in the chase at Barnet to the vast metropolis hard by. What Rome had proved to Luther, that London was to Fox. The hoarse roar of the streets jarred upon his already distracted brain; the scenes of vice and misery, inevitable in a great city, filled the country-bred boy with terror. Worn out and homesick, his thoughts naturally turned to his native Leicestershire. He fled from the allurements and wickedness with which he felt himself beset back to his own country and his own people.

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 vat. The country was swarming with

evangelists; professors Fox dubs them, believing their professions to be the most important part of them. Sects were cropping up like mushrooms ; and, to listen to their various exponents, 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 sour-faced saint, with a name purloined from the Book of Nehemiah, would thrust himself into the parish pulpit and rave against everything that had been taught from it for centuries. The Ranter cursed the Muggletonian; the Muggletonian damned all and sundry; the Independent displayed his affection for freedom by clapping both Ranter and Muggletonian in the Round House. Little wonder if, in the tents of the Malignants, wild devil-may-care spirits of the type of Goring and Lunsford jumbled all Puritans up together as a crew of crop-eared canting hypocrites.

Such a condition of affairs was not likely to calm Fox's nerves. His parents, by this time seriously alarmed for 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 wisdom" before a wife. As for the idea of carrying a pike it merely filled him with indignation. By this time the devil was again busy with him. His temptations were more than he could bear. He spent whole nights tramping the fields in prayer. At last he again left his father's house and recommenced his wanderings. He made a final effort to find salvation in the Established Church, plodding from vicarage 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 use of the answers to embellish his next Sunday's sermon. Another, noticing that in the heat of his confidences he mistook the flower-beds for the garden path, drove

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 thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also," the very first time his 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."

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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 jails between Bodmin and Carlisle. What he, a prisoner for conscience' sake, suffered in that time, starved by one jailer, cudgelled by another, denied the common decencies of life, and immured with the vilest scum of the criminal population, must to a great extent be imagined. In the whole of his wonderful journal there is an absence of acidity and a dignity of diction that disguises the worst horrors of prison life in the seventeenth century. Sometimes his patience overcame the passions of his captors. At Nottingham he made such an impression on the sheriff, that the good man (his name was Reckless) rushed from his house in his slippers to preach repentance in the market-place. One night at Derby the prison-keeper burst into his cell, crying, "I have been as a lion against you, but now I come like a lamb, and like the jailer that came to Paul and Silas trembling." These, it must be admitted, were the exceptions, For the most part the men remained, after their kind, brutal. Sometimes, however, Fox obtained a

victory which, it is to be feared, he was sufficiently human to enjoy. As when he put the fear of God into the lame wife of the jailer at Leicester who was wont to beat her husband with her crutch; or, as in the case of a young fellow, one Hunter of Lancaster, who, being ordered to convey him on horseback to Scarborough Castle, whiled away the time by lashing the quadruped till the rider nearly tumbled off, crying out all the time, out all the time, "How do you do, Mr. Fox ?" "I told him," says Fox, meekly, "it was not civil in him to do so;" then, very dryly, "Soon after the Lord cut him off."

The

The imprisonment at Nottingham had the usual result of such methods. Fox left the jail convinced more than ever that he was the chosen vessel of the Lord, and even that power had been granted him to heal the sick and cast out devils. Coming to Mansfield Woodhouse he heard of a "distracted woman" whom the doctors could not even so much as succeed in bleeding. poor creature was probably in the same state of mental excitement as Fox himself, when the lancet and boluses of Parson Macham refused to act on him; but he was confident that the devil, and not hysteria, was the root of the complaint. Entering the house, he told the keepers to unbind her, and then in the name of the Lord bade her be still. Whereupon, whether from astonishment or relief, she actually became so, and shortly after received the truth. The cure was not a singular one. Many, Fox assures us, were made whole in those days, more than the "unbelieving age was able to receive." The people of Mansfield Woodhouse were, however, of the scoffers. Catching the miracleworker in the street, they half murdered him and stoned him out of the place. But Fox was not to be terrified by brickbats. Learning at Twy Cross that there was a man given over by the physicians, he at once ascended to the death-chamber and "spake the word of life" over him that was sick, so that he at once began to mend. In this instance it is extremely probable that Fox was a better doctor than he knew. In an age when the lancet was the beall and the end-all of the village practitioner, when live lice were considered

a sovereign remedy for ague, and powders scraped from mummies were the joy of such as could afford them, anything 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 their authority, were determined upon suppressing him. At his very first attempt to speak in public the constables were called in, and he was hauled before the magistrates. Then followed one of those curious scenes which were enacted whenever he appeared in the dock. Called upon to account for his presence in the town, he replied that it was at the command of God, and bade them tremble at His word. The answer so irritated one of the justices named Bennet, that he retaliated with the term Quaker, a word which, muttered in anger, quickly became historical. But Fox was equal to the occasion. Falling upon his knees he began to pray aloud for the offender. This so maddened Bennet that he sprang from his seat and, running across the court house, struck him where he knelt. Having thus established their respect for law, the Bench proceeded to commit the prisoner for blasphemy. There was, however, considerably more force in the blow than in the charge. And the magistrates, having got him in prison, seem to have become sensible of their error. They accordingly found means to approach him with a view to conniving at his escape. But they had mistaken their man. Fox, who afterward declined a pardon from the King for an offence of which he had held himself innocent, was not likely to be guilty of playing into the hands of so shallow a creature as Bennet. In the prison therefore he remained until the moment of the battle of Worcester, when, the Parliament being in want of men, the justices bethought them of a new idea, and sending for him tendered him press money, and would have made him a soldier. The action of course was persecution in its most naked form, but Fox's refusal supplied 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 apprehension. He was perfectly satisfied that he was the special care of the Almighty, and that in the appointed season all would be well. Accordingly he calmnly announces that, toward the close of 1651, it pleased God to visit the town with a pestilence, which so alarmed his persecutors that they threw open the doors of his prison. He had been in jail just on twelve months.

For the next few years he roamed about the northern counties, adding to the numbers and stirring up the zeal of his followers. It was a time of fearful hardship endured with singular fortitude and gentleness. Hounded by ministers of all denominations who feared comparison with his saintliness; stoned and beaten by savage mobs; mocked even by the little children taught to jeer at the man in leather breeches ; sometimes in prison, never knowing a home; driven from door to door, and refused even food or shelter; sleeping in winter in the deep snow in the fields, and in summer fainting from heat and exhaustion, forced to lap the green water in the ditches, but never faltering, never murmuring, never doubting, he held on his way. Until at last, one gray morning in 1654, torn overnight by the Ironsides from a Friends' meeting at Whetstone, he knelt by the bedside of Hacker, the regicide, in Leicester, and learned that he was to be sent to London, charged with plotting against the Protector.

Early one morning, a few weeks later, Fox presented himself under escort at Whitehall. The Protector was not yet giving audience, but the prisoner was permitted to ascend to his apartments. He found Cromwell partially dressed, and, having saluted him with the words, "Peace be to this house," planted himself before him and plunged straightway into an exhortation upon godly living. Cromwell listened to him patiently, drew him on to speak of gen

eral religious topics, and then, brushing aside all theological difference, asked him point-blank why he must be always quarrelling with the ministers. The question, coming from the man who, with his hat on his head and his Ironsides at his heels, had stalked up the nave at Ely and roughly bidden the Rev. Mr. Hitch to "Leave off that fooling and come down," was a curious one and touched Fox to the quick. Ever since he had had it opened to him that the universities were not the royal road to heaven, his contempt for their graduates had been gathering force. He launched out into a violent attack upon the whole brood, men he declared who preached for filthy lucre, and for hire, who divined for money, and were covetous and greedy." Then, noticing that the room was filling with people, he ceased suddenly, and stood back. As he did so Cromwell sprang up and seized his hand: "Come again to my house," he cried, "for if thou and I were but an hour a day together, we should be nearer one to the other." Thus they parted, and as he descended the stairs he learned that it was Cromwell's wish that he should dine in the great hall with the household. Sternly and somewhat surlily, he declined. "Let the Protector know," said he, "that I will not eat of his meat or drink of his drink." The reply raised him even higher in Cromwell's estimation. "Now," cried he, in a sentence which showed how much in accord he was with Fox's strictures on the ministers, now I see that there is a people risen that I cannot win either with gifts, honors, offices, or places; but all other sects and people I can."

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The two men met occasionally after that. One day Fox, riding into town from Kingston, caught sight of Cromwell's coach near Hyde Park, and pushed toward it. The guards would have driven him back, but the Protector recognized him, and shouted to them to let him pass.

The two men talked to gether earnestly till they reached St. James's, when they parted with a promise from Fox to attend next day at Whitehall. "I can give you good news," laughed the Protector to one of his wife's maids as he entered the Palace; "Mr. Fox is come to town."

When they met next day the stern old warrior was in one of those playful moods into which, as troubles thickened about him, he less and less frequently lapsed. Seated carelessly upon the edge of a table he bantered the Quaker unceasingly, and dismissed him with the laughing, but extremely true reflection that his self-satisfaction was by no means the least part of him. A year or so later Fox saw him for the last time. He met him riding into Hampton. "Before I came to him," he writes, "as he rode at the head of his Life Guards, I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him." A few nights later, while a terrific storm was raging over London, the strong spirit passed away. Fox had lost a sincere and a powerful friend.

Like

It was during this residence of Fox in London that he became involved in that extraordinary controversy with regard to which he is so eloquently silent in his journal. While he had been tramping the moors and climbing the hills of Yorkshire and of Cumberland, a half-mad tailor, by name Ludowick Muggleton, had been haunting the taverns and alleys about Old St. Paul's, proclaiming a revelation evolved partly from a study of the mystical effusions of those quaint dreamers Jacob Böhme and Hans Eckhart, and partly from his own crazy brain. The universe, he roundly declared, was governed by a deity transparent as crystal and in height just six feet, whose vicegerent upon earth he, Ludowick, was. all the popular theologians of the day, to whom Fox was so markedly opposed, he relied for proselytism upon the reality of the flames of hell. Indeed, he naïvely admitted that his own conversion was wrought, not so much by a desire to be saved, as because he was not minded to be damned. The apostleship of such as chose to seek him out he accepted without he accepted without emotion; the strictures of such as dared to differ from him he met with lavish sentences of damnation. That such colossal folly should have survived in a concrete form down to our own times is remarkable enough; that it at one time should have assumed so serious a complexion as to threaten the very existence of Quakerism, is perhaps more remarkable