thought so and so,” or “I made up my mind to do so and so,” George Fox says, “It was opened to me,” or “at the command of God I did so and so.”  “Then at the command of God on the ninth day of the seventh month 1643 (Fox being just nineteen), I left my relations and brake off all familiarity or friendship with young or old.”  “About the beginning of the year 1647 I was moved of the Lord to go into Darbyshire.”  Fox hears voices and he sees visions, some of which he brings before the reader with apocalyptic power in the simple and strong English, alike untutored and undefiled, of which, like John Bunyan, his contemporary, he was a master.

“And one morning as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me and a temptation beset me; and I sate still.  And 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 with it....  And as I sate still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and a true voice arose in me which said, There is a living God who made all things.  And immediately the cloud and the temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all, and my heart was glad and I praised the living God” (p. 13).

If George Fox could speak, as he proves in this and some other passages he could write, his astounding influence on the contemporaries of Milton and of Cromwell is no mystery.  But this modern reproduction of the ancient prophet, with his “Thus saith the Lord,” “This is the work of the Lord,” steeped in supernaturalism and glorying in blind faith, is the mental antipodes of the philosopher, founded in naturalism and a fanatic for evidence, to whom these affirmations inevitably suggest the previous question:  “How do you know that the Lord saith it?” “How do you know that the Lord doeth it?” and who is compelled to demand that rational ground for belief, without which, to the man of science, assent is merely an immoral pretence.

And it is this rational ground of belief which the writers of the Gospels, no less than Paul, and Eginhard, and Fox, so little dream of offering that they would regard the demand for it as a kind of blasphemy.

FOOTNOTES: 

     [33] My citations are made from Teulet’s Einhardi omnia
          quae extant opera, Paris, 1840-1843, which contains a
          biography of the author, a history of the text, with
          translations into French, and many valuable
          annotations.

     [34] At present included in the Duchies of Hesse-Darmstadt
          and Baden.

     [35] This took place in the year 826 A.D.  The relics were
          brought from Rome and deposited in the Church of St.
          Medardus at Soissons.

     [36] Now included in Western Switzerland.

     [37] Probably, according to Teulet, the present
          Sandhoferfahrt, a little below the embouchure of the
          Neckar.