become entangled; and whilst consistently forbidding such worship as was instinct with the spirit of treason, justly to concede full toleration for such worship as was simply Episcopalian. But, looking at human nature, and at the exasperation of men's feelings in those days, such clear discrimination and such calm equity are much more than could be expected; and therefore whilst we decidedly condemn the intolerance of forbidding the use of the Prayer Book altogether, we are bound to recognize -as some excuse for the Commonwealth Rulers, or, at least, as a fact claiming some mitigation of our censures of their conduct-the political position of the Episcopalians, assumed either by their continued use of the old royalistic formularies, or by their adoption of new ones even stronger and more revolutionary in their place. It is also only fair to recollect what large provocations the Puritans had received only a few years earlier from persons of this very class when they were in the ascendant; as well as to remember what provocation the rulers of the country still met with from persons of the same class who were known to be actually engaged in plots for their overthrow. And after all, the pressure put upon the Episcopal party in the darkest hour of their history under the Commonwealth is not to be compared, as it respects violence on the one side and suffering on the other, with what was inflicted by Churchmen, and experienced by Nonconformists, under Charles the First and Charles the Second.1 Nor is there any resem 1 Hallam observes: "It is somewhat bold in Anglican writers to complain, as they now and then do, of the persecution they suffered at this period, when we consider what had been the conduct of the Bishops before, and what it was afterwards. I do not know that any member of the Church of England was imprisoned under the Commonwealth, except for some political reason; certain it is the jails were not filled with them."-Const. Hist., ii. 14. Distinction must be made between blance between the amount of persecution endured by the disciples of Prelacy at the period under review, and the amount of sorrow and pain which was then borne by another class of Christians whose history will be unfolded in the following chapter. the sufferings of the Episcopalians during the Civil Wars and under the Protectorate. I am persuaded, after a long and careful enquiry into the subject, that the suffering during the latter of these periods has been immensely over-estimated. TH CHAPTER XIII. HERE is in humanity an element of mysticism presenting manifold developments. It characterizes both individual minds and schools of thought: mediæval theologians, and men and women of Romish Christendom, altogether ignorant of scientific divinity, and only burning with pious fervour, have been mystics without knowing that they were so. Since the Reformation particular members of all sects have been tinged with this peculiarity; and a whole body of religionists in England have from the very beginning of their remarkable history avowed the love and walked in the light of a mystical spiritualism. Though the Anglo-Saxon race are believed generally to have less sympathy with transcendental views than Spaniards, Germans, or Frenchmen, yet it is a fact that nowhere as in this country has mysticism produced a distinct and permanent ecclesiastical organization. And what is further remarkable, whilst it claims a purely spiritual basis-there is no other sect which has an equal distinctness of form and an equal prominence in external singularity; for not only in worship and discipline does it stand out in marked visibility before the world, but so obvious are or were its outward signs that, until very lately, a member of the Society might be as easily recognized as a Roman Catholic priest or a Capuchin friar. The origin of the Quakers, as they were first derisively called,1 of the Friends, as they prefer to be designated, was under the Commonwealth. Then the freedom granted to enquiry within Evangelical limits, the violent reaction which had set in against the forms and ceremonies of Anglo-Catholicism, the generally unsettled state of religious thought, the activity of tendencies towards a sort of ultra-spirituality, and a natural craving -amidst the revolutions of an age which tore up old conventionalities of belief-to get at the pure substance of truth, and at the heart of things, combined to draw out and to nourish whatever of the mystical element there might be in English souls. Sympathies of that order were vaguely working and were indefinitely expressed in many quarters. Quakerism, as a congenial centre, speedily attracted them to itself. The true Friend, travelling in modern days on religious service, finds in churches the most remote, persons whose inner life presents strange affinities to his own. Discoursing in his peculiar way upon the mysteries of religious experience, he evokes recognitions of brotherhood from the Spanish Catholic and the Russian Greek; no wonder, therefore, when mysticism in England found for itself such a voice in the middle of the seventeenth century, that it soon drew within the circle of its fellowship thousands who were waiting for its call. 2 The rise of Quakerism must be sought in the life of its founder. If ever the child was father to the man, it certainly was so in the case of George Fox. Born of 1 Justice Bennet, of Derby, 66 was the first that called us Quakers, because I bid them tremble at the word of the Lord. This was in the year 1650."-Fox's Journal, i. 2 See the very interesting Memoirs of Stephen Grellet, by B. Seebohn. humble but virtuous parents-his father, Christopher, an honest weaver, winning amongst his companions the name of "righteous Christer;" his mother, Mary Lago, a pure-minded woman, sprung from a family stock which had borne fruits of martyrdom-he was not likely in his early days to see much of immorality, nor were the folks who crossed his parents' threshold, and whom the boy heard talking round the hearth-stone, likely to be otherwise than of the better sort in morals; yet their cheerfulness and mirth shocked little George so much, that he would say within himself, "If ever I come to be a man. surely I will not be so wanton." He was too precocious to like childish games, and shewed his activity of intellect and depth of feeling in strange questions about religion, and in ways of worship unlike his mother's. When only eleven, he had inward monitions, inclining him to an ascetic life, and impulses which two hundred years earlier would have made a youth of his stamp an exemplary monk. Apprenticed to a dealer in leather and wool, who bred sheep for the sake of the fleece, George was set to watch the flocks, and in his shepherd life he found "a just emblem of his after ministry and service." As he grew older, men admired the justness of his dealings, and in his "verily " found what was more than equivalent to another man's oath, so that it became a proverb, "If George says verily there is no altering him." When business or persuasion took him to the market or the fair, his righteous soul was vexed with what he saw and heard-for even drinking healths appeared offensive and he would return from the gaiety of the gathering to mourn in secret, through sleepless nights, over the world's vanity and sin. He resolved to separate from his acquaintances and to spend a life of retirement and devotion. None of the professions of religion in those |