time when the Church was so entirely free from any possible peril in that direction.  Their fear, however, was not without some foundation.  When an important phase of spiritual truth is comparatively neglected by established authorities and in orthodox opinion, it is sure to find full vent in another less regular channel.  We are told that in the first years of the century, the Quakers had immensely increased.  ‘They swarm,’ said Leslie, ’over these three nations, and they stock our plantations abroad.’[483] Quakerism had met with little tolerance in the previous century.  Churchmen and Dissenters had unanimously denounced it, and Baxter, large-minded as he often proved himself, denied its adherents all hope of salvation.  But the sect throve under persecution; and; in proportion as its follies and extravagances became somewhat mitigated, the spirituality of belief, which even in its most exaggerated forms had always been its soul of strength, became more and more attractive to those who felt its deficiency elsewhere.  Between the passing of the Toleration Act and the end of William III.’s reign it made great progress.  After that it began gradually to decline.  This was owing to various causes.  Some share in it may perhaps be attributed to the continued effects of the general religious lethargy which had set in some years before, but may have now begun to spread more visibly among the classes from which Quakerism was chiefly recruited.  Again, its intellectual weakness would naturally become more apparent in proportion to the daily increasing attention paid to the reasonable aspects of faith.  The general satisfaction felt, except by the pronounced High Church and Jacobite party, at the newly established order in Church and State, was unfavourable to the further progress of a communion which, from its rejection of ideas common to every other ecclesiastical body, seemed to many to be rightly called ’the end and centre of all confusion.’[484] It may be added that, as the century advanced, there gradually came to be within the confines of the National Church a little more room than had lately existed for the upholders of various mystical tenets.  With the rise of Wesleyanism enthusiasm found full scope in a new direction.  But the power of Quakerism was not only silently undermined by the various action of influences such as these.  In the first years of the century it received a direct and serious blow in the able exposure of its extravagances written by Leslie.  The vagaries of the French ‘Prophets’ also contributed to discredit the assumption of supernatural gifts in which many Quakers still indulged.