apprehension.  “Brother Fountain can guess at his brother’s meaning,” he had written to Cromwell in Scotland August 2, 1651, with reference to some troublesome on-goings in the Council of State during Cromwell’s absence, begging him not to believe ill-natured reports about “Brother Heron” in connexion with them, and adding, “Be assured he answers your heart’s desire in all things, except he be esteemed even by you in principles too high to fathom; which one day, I am persuaded, will not be so thought by you, when, by increasing with the increasings of God, you shall be brought to that sight and enjoyment of God in Christ which passes knowledge.”  If this to Cromwell, what to others?  Three years had passed, and Vane was now in compulsory retirement.  His Retired Man’s Meditations had not yet been published.  Such Vanists, therefore, as there were in 1654 must have imbibed their knowledge of them from Sir Henry’s conversation or indirectly.  Among these Baxter mentions Peter Sterry, one of Cromwell’s favourite preachers, and afterwards known as a mystic on his own account.  Of Sterry’s preaching, already notoriously obscure, Sir Benjamin Rudyard had said that “it was too high for this world and too low for the other,” and Baxter puns on the association of Vane and Sterry, asking whether Vanity and Sterility had ever been more happily conjoined.  But the sect of the VANISTS existed perhaps mainly in Baxter’s fancy.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Stationers’ Registers from 1644 to 1654; Baxter, 77-78; Neal, IV. 112-113.]

[Footnote 2:  Engl.  Cycl.  Art. Lilly; Stationers’ Registers of date June 10, 1653 (Gataker’s Tract) and of other dates (Lilly’s Almanacks).]

[Footnote 3:  Baxter, 74-76; Milton Papers by Nickolls, 78-79; Wood’s Ath.  III, 578 et seq. and IV. 136-138.]

QUAKERS OR FRIENDS:—­Who can think of the appearance of this sect in English History without doing what the sect itself would forbid, and reverently raising the hat?  And yet in 1654 this was the very sect of sects.  It was about the Quakers that there had begun to be the most violent excitement among the guardians of social order throughout the British Islands.—­It was then six or seven years since they had first been heard of in any distinct way, and four since they had received the name QUAKERS.  A Derbyshire Justice of the Peace, it is said, first invented that name for them, because they seemed to be fond of the text Jer. v. 22, and had offended him by addressing it to himself and a brother magistrate:  “Fear ye not me? saith the Lord; will ye not tremble at my presence?” But Robert Barclay’s account of the origin of the name in his Apology for the Quakers (1675) is probably more correct, though not inconsistent.  He says it arose from the fact that, in the early meetings of “The Children of the Light,” as they first called themselves, violent physical agitations were not unfrequent, and conversions were often signalized by that accompaniment.