inquirer turned in disgust from these advisers to
the Dissenters, and found them also blind guides.24
After some time he came to the conclusion that no
human being was competent to instruct him in divine
things, and that the truth had been communicated to
him by direct inspiration from heaven. He argued
that, as the division of languages began at Babel,
and as the persecutors of Christ put on the cross
an inscription in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, the knowledge
of languages, and more especially of Latin, Greek and
Hebrew, must be useless to a Christian minister.25
Indeed, he was so far from knowing many languages,
that he knew none; nor can the most corrupt passage
in Hebrew be more unintelligible to the unlearned
than his English often is to the most acute and attentive
reader.26 One of the precious truths which were divinely
revealed to this new apostle was, that it was falsehood
and adulation to use the second person plural instead
of the second person singular. Another was, that
to talk of the month of March was to worship the bloodthirsty
god Mars, and that to talk of Monday was to pay idolatrous
homage to the moon. To say Good morning or Good
evening was highly reprehensible, for those phrases
evidently imported that God had made bad days and bad
nights.27 A Christian was bound to face death itself
rather than touch his hat to the greatest of mankind.
When Fox was challenged to produce any Scriptural
authority for this dogma, he cited the passage in
which it is written that Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego
were thrown into the fiery furnace with their hats
on; and, if his own narrative may be trusted, the
Chief Justice of England was altogether unable to
answer this argument except by crying out, “Take
him away, gaoler."28 Fox insisted much on the not
less weighty argument that the Turks never show their
bare heads to their superiors; and he asked, with
great animation, whether those who bore the noble
name of Christians ought not to surpass Turks in virtue.29
Bowing he strictly prohibited, and, indeed, seemed
to consider it as the effect of Satanical influence;
for, as he observed, the woman in the Gospel, while
she had a spirit of infirmity, was bowed together,
and ceased to bow as soon as Divine power had liberated
her from the tyranny of the Evil One.30 His expositions
of the sacred writings were of a very peculiar kind.
Passages, which had been, in the apprehension of all
the readers of the Gospels during sixteen centuries,
figurative, he construed literally. Passages,
which no human being before him had ever understood
in any other than a literal sense, he construed figuratively.
Thus, from those rhetorical expressions in which the
duty of patience under injuries is enjoined he deduced
the doctrine that selfdefence against pirates and
assassins is unlawful. On the other hand, the
plain commands to baptize with water, and to partake
of bread and wine in commemoration of the redemption
of mankind, he pronounced to be allegorical.
He long wandered from place to place, teaching this