strange theology, shaking like an aspen leaf in his paroxysms of fanatical excitement, forcing his way into churches, which he nicknamed steeple houses interrupting prayers and sermons with clamour and scurrility,31 and pestering rectors and justices with epistles much resembling burlesques of those sublime odes in which the Hebrew prophets foretold the calamities of Babylon and Tyre.32 He soon acquired great notoriety by these feats.  His strange face, his strange chant, his immovable hat and his leather breeches were known all over the country; and he boasts that, as soon as the rumour was heard, “The Man in Leather Breeches is coming,” terror seized hypocritical professors, and hireling priests made haste to get out of his way.33 He was repeatedly imprisoned and set in the stocks, sometimes justly, for disturbing the public worship of congregations, and sometimes unjustly, for merely talking nonsense.  He soon gathered round him a body of disciples, some of whom went beyond himself in absurdity.  He has told us that one of his friends walked naked through Skipton declaring the truth.34 and that another was divinely moved to go naked during several years to marketplaces, and to the houses of gentlemen and clergymen.35 Fox complains bitterly that these pious acts, prompted by the Holy Spirit, were requited by an untoward generation with hooting, pelting, coachwhipping and horsewhipping.  But, though he applauded the zeal of the sufferers, he did not go quite to their lengths.  He sometimes, indeed, was impelled to strip himself partially.  Thus he pulled off his shoes and walked barefoot through Lichfield, crying, “Woe to the bloody city."36 But it does not appear that he ever thought it his duty to appear before the public without that decent garment from which his popular appellation was derived.

If we form our judgment of George Fox simply by looking at his own actions and writings, we shall see no reason for placing him, morally or intellectually, above Ludowick Muggleton or Joanna Southcote.  But it would be most unjust to rank the sect which regards him as its founder with the Muggletonians or the Southcotians.  It chanced that among the thousands whom his enthusiasm infected were a few persons whose abilities and attainments were of a very different order from his own.  Robert Barclay was a man of considerable parts and learning.  William Penn, though inferior to Barclay in both natural and acquired abilities, was a gentleman and a scholar.  That such men should have become the followers of George Fox ought not to astonish any person who remembers what quick, vigorous and highly cultivated intellects were in our own times duped by the unknown tongues.  The truth is that no powers of mind constitute a security against errors of this description.  Touching God and His ways with man, the highest human faculties can discover little more than the meanest.  In theology the interval is small indeed between Aristotle and a child, between Archimedes and a naked savage.