[Footnote 355:  It may be interesting to compare the following passage from George Fox, which dramatises the irruption of natural science, with its faith in fixed laws, into the sphere of the religious consciousness:—­“One morning, while I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me, a temptation beset me; and I sat still.  It was said, All things come by Nature; and the elements and stars came over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded by it.  And as I sat still under it and let it alone, a living hope and a true voice arose in me, which said, There is a living God who made all things.  Immediately the cloud and temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all; my heart was glad, and I praised the living God.”]

[Footnote 356:  So we may fairly say, if we remember that we are speaking of what transcends time.  Neither Boehme nor Law looks forward to a golden age on this earth.]

[Footnote 357:  Henry More’s judgment is as follows:  “Jacob Behmen, I conceive, is to be reckoned in the number of those whose imaginative faculty has the pre-eminence above the rational; and though he was a good and holy man, his natural complexion, notwithstanding, was not destroyed, but retained its property still; and, therefore, his imagination being very busy about Divine things, he could not without a miracle fail of becoming an enthusiast, and of receiving Divine truths upon the account of the strength and vigour of his fancy; which, being so well qualified with holiness and sanctity, proved not unsuccessful in sundry apprehensions, but in others it fared with him after the manner of men, the sagacity of his imagination failing him, as well as the anxiety of reason does others of like integrity with himself.”]

[Footnote 358:  Canon G.G.  Perry, in his Students’ English Church History, disposes of this noble group of men in one contemptuous paragraph, as a “class of divines who were neither Puritans nor High Churchmen,” and makes the astounding statement that “to the school thus commenced, the deadness, carelessness, and indifference prevalent in the eighteenth century are in large measure to be attributed.”  It is of these very same men that Bishop Burnet writes, that if they had not appeared to combat the “laziness and negligence,” the “ease and sloth” of the Restoration clergy, “the Church had quite lost her esteem over the nation.”  Alexander Knox (Works, vol. iii. p. 199) speaks of the rise of this school as a great instance of the design of Providence to supply to the Church what had never before been produced, writers who do “full honour at once to the elevation and the rationality of Christian piety....  In their writings we are invited to ascend, by having a prospect opened before us as luminous as it is sublime....  They are such writers as had never before existed....  No Church but the English Church could have produced them.”  Of John Smith he says, “My value for him is beyond what words can do justice to.”  The works of Whichcote, Smith, Cudworth, and Culverwel are happily accessible enough, and I beg my readers to study them at first hand.  I do not believe that any Christian could rise from the perusal of the two first-named without having gained a lasting benefit in the deepening of his spiritual life and heightening of his faith.]