and abstinence from all ordinary callings, the Judge remarking that even the Apostles had worked with their hands.  Dewsbury admitted that some of the Apostles had been fishermen, and Paul a tent-maker, but asserted that, “when they were called to the ministry of Christ, they left their callings to follow Christ whither he led them by his Spirit,” and that he and his fellow-prisoners had but done the same.  The end of the colloquy was that the Judge, with every wish to be lenient, could not make up his mind to discharge the prisoners.  “I see by your carriage,” he said, “that what my brother Hale did at the last assizes, in requiring bond for your good behaviour, he might justly do it, for you are against magistrates and ministers”; and they were remitted to Northampton jail accordingly.—­If judges like Hale and Atkins had to act thus, one may imagine how the poor Quakers fared in the hands of inferior and rougher functionaries.  Fines and imprisonment for vagrancy, contempt of court, or non-payment of tithes, were the ordinary discipline for all; but there were cases here and there of whipping by the hangman, and other more ferocious cruelties.  For among the Quakers themselves there were varieties of milder and wilder, less provoking and more provoking.  The Quakerism of men like Fox and Dewsbury was, at worst, but an obdurate and irritating eccentricity, in comparison, for example, with the Quakerism run mad of James Nayler.  This enthusiast, once quarter-master in a horse troop under Lambert, and regarded as “a man of excellent natural parts,” had for three or four years kept himself within bounds, and been known only as one of the most eminent preachers of the ordinary Gospel of the Quakers and a prolific writer of Quaker tracts.  But, having come to London in 1655, he had been unbalanced by the adulation of some Quaker women, with a Martha Simmons for their chief.  “Fear and doubting then entered him,” say the Quaker records, “so that he came to be clouded in his understanding, bewildered, and at a loss in his judgment, and became estranged from his best friends, because they did not approve his conduct.”  In other words, he became stark mad, and set up for himself, as “The Everlasting Son, the Prince of Peace, the Fairest among Ten Thousand, the Altogether Lovely.”  In this capacity he went into the West of England early in 1656, the admiring women following him, and chaunting his praises with every variety of epithet from the Song of Solomon, till he was clapped up in Exeter jail.  Nor was Nayler the only madman among the Quakers about this time.  A kind of epidemic of madness seems to have broken out in the sect, or among those reputed to belong to it.  “One while,” says Baxter, “divers of them went naked through divers chief towns and cities of the land, as a prophetical act:  some of them have famished and drowned themselves in melancholy;” and he adds, more especially, as his own experience in Kidderminster, “I seldom preached a lecture,