the most bigoted among them from falling into the prevalent opinion which looked upon the heathen as altogether without hope and without God in the world.  They, almost alone of all Christian missionaries of that age, pointed their hearers (not without scandal to their orthodox brethren) to a light of God within them which should guide them to the brighter radiance of a better revelation.  Nor did they scruple, to assert that ’there be members of this Catholic Church both among heathens, Jews, and Turks, men and women of integrity and simplicity of heart, who, though blinded in some things of their understanding, and burdened with superstition, yet, being upright in their hearts before the Lord, ... and loving to follow righteousness, are by the secret touches of the holy light in their souls enlivened and quickened, thereby secretly united to God, and thereby become true members of this Catholic Church.’[490] Such expressions would be generally assented to in our day, as embodying sound and valuable truths, which cannot be rejected on account of errors which may sometimes chance to attend them.  At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were few, except Quakers, who were willing to accept from a wholly Christian point of view the element of truth contained in the Deistical argument of ‘Christianity as old as the Creation.’

Somewhat similar in kind was the protest of the Quakers against dogmatism as to the precise nature of the Atonement,[491] and against unspiritual and, so to say, physical interpretations put upon passages in Scripture which speak of the efficacy of the blood of Christ.  On this ground also they, and the mystic school in general, were constantly inveighed against as mere Deists.  Yet the rigid definitions insisted upon by many of the Reformers were much at variance with the wider views held in earlier and later times.  It is at all events certain that, both within and without the English Church, those who held these views were protected from many of the most forcible objections with which the Christianity of the age was assailed.

The Quakerism, which at the end of the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth century was strong in numbers and in religious influence, has claimed our attention thus far in regard only of those modes of thought which it holds in common with most other forms of so-called mystic theology.  On this ground it comes into close relation with the history of the English Church.  M. Matter, in his ’History of Christianity,’ speaks of Quakerism in conjunction with Methodism as the two forms of English reaction against formalism alike in doctrine and in government.[492] But it has been a merit of the English Church, and its most distinguishing title to the name of ‘National,’ that it has been able to learn from the sects which have grown up around it.  Cautiously and tardily—­often far too much so for its own immediate advantage—­it has seldom neglected to find at last within its ample