[The Peaceable Kingdom] is a book of epic sweep, a book crammed with great and noble deeds of high adventure, but an epic without heroes; a saga of the gentle people called Quakers, a hymn to that of God in every man, but a book filled with rapes and violence, a bestial lynching, Indian massacres and the fetid corruption and the outrage of slavery. (pp. 220-21)

No heroes and no saints…. [Quaker leader George Fox is] a man who loves all mankind, yet one who, filled with the sense of God's power, is careless of how he affects others.

Nor does Margaret Fell, the mother of Quakerdom, appear more saintly…. [She] remains a prisoner of her upbringing….

[What] a rich and varied gallery of characters the author has created (among them George Fox and Margaret Fell) to reveal the seed of Light in a troubled and violent world...