George Fox
Hodgkin, Thomas, 1831-1913
r.\' ■'•-,■ ''';''■-■. '•7*' - .Mmrmm. 3fc'S^r'' < /' •I'',' ".-■'-.' J '5'' -J .-■. ,^.r' V!>. Jlcabex^ of ^leliciion Edited by H. C. Beeching, M.A. GEOKGE FOX S^eabex^ of ^leligion Edited by H. C. Beechino, M.A. Crown 8vo, cloth extra, u-ith portrait, 3s. 6d. Under the above title Messrs. Methuen are publishing a series of short biographies of the most prominent leaders of religious life and thought. The following are ready — CARDINAL NEWMAN JOHN WESLEY BISHOP WILBERFORCE CHARLES SIMEON CARDINAL MANNING THOMAS CHALMERS LANCELOT ANDREWES WILLIAM LAUD JOHN KEBLE AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY JOHN KNOX JOHN HOWE THOMAS KEN GEORGE FOX In Preparation MARTIN LUTHER THOMAS CRANMER HUGH LATIMER JOHN CALVIN JOHN DONNE JOSEPH BUTLER FRANCOIS FENELON ERNEST RENAN C. H. SPURGEON B. H. HxMon J. H. Overton G. W. Daniell H. G. O. Mo^de A. W. Button Mrs. Oliphant R. L. Ottley W. H. Button TV. Lock E. L. Ctitts Florence A. MacGunn E. F. Barton F. A. Clarke Thomas Bodgkin Owen Edwards A. J. Mason A. J. Carlyle W. A. B. Coolidge Augustus Jessopp B. Bashdall Viscount St. Gyres Madame Darmesteter J. Clifford Other volumes will be announced in due coarse GEORGE FOX F}-oin the Portrait by Sir I'eter Lely, in the /lossessioii of the Trustees of S~ivartliiiu>re Collciie GEORGE FOX BY THOMAS HODGKIN, D.C.L. METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET, W.C. LONDON 1896 THOMAS HODGKIN AUTHOR OF THEODORIC M Ct 77^5" CO PREFACE Having been asked by my friend, the Editor of this series, to write the life of George Fox, I have completed the work to the best of my ability, though I am aware of the disadvantage under which I labour in not having for some years made that period a subject of special study. The reader will no doubt perceive that I am myself a member of the Society of Friends, to which my ^ ancestors have belonged since its first foundation by George Fox ; but I trust that this fact has not caused me to swerve from that absolute fidelity of portraiture which ought to be the aim of every biographer. There are some lines in the portrait which, out of love to Fox's memory, I would gladly have omitted ; but loyalty to " the Truth," which has ever been the watch- word of the Society of Friends, forbade me to do so. Only I may repeat a remark which has been often made, that his faults (especially his polemic bitterness) were, for the most part, faults characteristic of his age, while his nobler qualities, his courage, his conscientious- ness, and his intense love of truth, were emphatically his own. There is an interesting question, into which I have 335242 vi PREFACE not had space to enter, how far Fox's system was peculiar to himself, and how far it was borrowed from other sects, especially the Baptists and Mennonites. My own impression is that Fox was essentially an original religious thinker, and that few men have ever had less of the Eclectic character than he : but for a careful statement of the other side of the question I may refer my readers to a book frequently quoted in the following pages, Barclay's Intur Life of the Religious Societies of the Gommoniuealth. It only remains to express my thanks to the following gentlemen, who have helped me in various ways in the composition of this little book — Prof. Gardiner, Mr. C. J. Spence (the possessor of the original MS. of George Fox's Journal), Messrs Jno. Fell, J. S. Rowntree, and Alexr. Gordon. It will be seen that I am under many obligations to Mrs. Webb's Fells of Stvarthmoor Hall, which contains ^several letters of the Fell family and of George Fox not elsewhere published. But, beyond all other books, I have been helped by Prof. Masson's Life of Milton, the most valuable work, as it seems to me, which has been written, not only on the literary but also on the religious history of England during the central years of the seventeenth century. Thos. Hodgkin. CONTENTS CHAP. I. INTRODUCTION ... II. BIRTHPLACE III. EARLY LIFE IV. fox's message ... V. MISSIONARY JOURNEYS : MIDLAND COUNTIES AND YORKSHIRE VI. SWARTHMOOR HALL VIL AT LANCASTER AND CARLISLE ... VIII. AT FENNY DRAYTON AND WHITEHALL. IX. LAUNCESTON GAOL X. IN WALES AND SCOTLAND XI. THE END OF THE PROTECTORATE XII. THE STUARTS AND THE QUAKERS : IMPRISONMENTS AT LANCASTER AND SCARBEO" XIII. MARRIAGE XIV. VISIT TO AMERICA XV. THE LAST IMPRISONMENT XVr. CLOSING YEARS ... XVII. CONCLUSION INDEX PAGE 1 8 15 33 45 63 79 102 115 141 157 170 204 222 238 245 273 281 GEORGE EOX CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION " George Fox, the founder of Quakerism." That is the formula which expresses, and will probably always express, Fox's place in religious history. Yet of him, even more emphatically than of the men who have given their nam.es to great sections of the Christian Church, Luther, Calvin, or Wesley, it may be con- fidently affirmed that to found a new sect was the furthest thing from his hopes and aspirations. A religious reformer, at any rate one who desires to Avork in harmony Avith the spirit of Christianity, cannot have sectarian aims. He cannot be satisfied with conquering one little province of the Christian world, and labelling it with his own name. He must believe that he is the bearer of a world-wide message, adapted to all sorts and conditions of men, and that for the whole Christian Church the only hope of health and cleansing lies in the acceptance of that message. Such was most emphatically the belief of George Fox, 2 GEORGE FOX and accordingly in studying his life it is necessary as much as possible to dissever him in thought from the quiet, respectable, unaggressive sect of which he was in fact, though not in intention, the founder. But a man who believes, as Fox believed, that he has a Divine commission to testify against the errors and corruptions of the religion which is professed by those around him, will be the last man to do justice to the germs of a holier and better life underlying every corruption. He will have little or nothing of that sympathetic, eclectic spirit which is perhaps the best quality in the religious life of our generation, and which enables us to deal fairly with schools of thought to which intellectually we are utterly opposed. A man of such intense convictions as dominated the soul of the first Quaker is almost of necessity narrow, and very narrow the reader will probably consider some of George Fox's judgments. Yet if we would understand this man's life in even the least degree, if we are to look upon him as anything more than a wrong-headed and troublesome disturber of the public peace, — that is to say, if we would learn anything of the results produced by his preaching, and the secret of his power, — we must be willing, at least for a time, to place ourselves at his point of view, and look forth upon the Christian world as he, knowing scarce any other book than the English Bible, and imbued with the spirit of a Hosea or a Jeremiah, looked forth ^ upon it. It is difficult for us Englishmen of the nineteenth century to throw ourselves back into the state of feeling as to all religious matters which prevailed among our forefathers at the time of the Civil War. We have INTRODUCTION 3 been always accustomed to the sight of many religious denominations existing side by side, if not in love, at any rate in peace. Round the great Established Church of England revolve in their own orbits the Noncon- formist Churches of Protestantism, while the old his- toric Church of Rome has perfect freedom to worsljip as she pleases, and to make proselytes as she can. How utterly different was the state of things under Elizabeth and James I, ; yes, and even when Charles I. had been vanquished, and Puritanism had gained the upper hand ! The popish " Recusants " were persecuted with a ferocity Avhich is the disgrace of Protestantism, and which is only explained, not justified, by the cruelties which had marked the victorious march of the Counter-Reformation in the Netherlands and Germany, and by the disloyal and even murderous projects of which some of the English Papists were guilty. Within the Protestant camp, from the beginning of Charles's reign, Episcopalian and Presbyterian were contending, not for bare existence, not even for priority of place and possession of old revenues, but for the right absolutely to suppress the defeated party. Not Laud himself was more intolerant of the " Calvinian " lecturers than the adherents of the Solemn Leacrue and Covenant were intolerant of every other form even of Puritan discipline which squared not with their precise notions of Presbyterian orthodoxy. In the minds of some of the Independents, it is true, the great principle of religious toleration had taken root, and had begun to show itself above ground. Great leaders of the sect, such as Roger Williams in America and Cromwell in England, were sacrificing much of their populai'ity in the attempt to persuade the bigots around them to 4 GEORGE FOX bear with other usages than their own ; but entire and absolute religious toleration was still, in the middle of the seventeenth century, a theory and a dream, as much as is the reunion of all Christians in one Church at the close of the nineteenth century. In the years of Fox's childhood and boyhood the Episcopal Church of England was ruling England with absolute sway, and Archbishop Laud was everywhere removing the altars to the eastern end of the churches, insisting on the kneeling posture of communicants, and on the worshippers bowing at the name of Jesus. Ere Fox had completed his seventeenth year, the system of " Thorough " in Church and State had broken down. Strafford's head had fallen on Tower Hill, Laud was in prison, and the immense latent strength of Puritanism was about to manifest itself both on the battle-field and in the Houses of Parliament. It is important to re- member this fact. In the really formative years of Fox's religious development, not Episcopacy, but Presby- terianism was the dominant form of Church govern- ment. Calvin's Institutes, not Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, was the text-book of the clergy with whom he was brought in contact. It was not high sacramental teaching, nor discourses on Apostolical Succession, from which this young man's soul revolted, but it was the long sermons (reaching to eighteenthly and nineteenthly) on abstruse points of doctrine, the almost equally long and sermon-like prayers, the Calvinistic teaching of the predestined and eternal misery of a large portion of the human race, the superstitious reverence for every letter in that collection of writings by holy men of old made by the Jewish and Christian Churches, to which was given the name of " the Word of God " ; the determina- INTRODUCTION 5 tion to keep the Lord's Day as if it had been a Jewish Sabbath, fencing it round with the same awful sanctions with which that day was encompassed in the legislation of the Pentateuch : these and similar exaggerations of what was then called the Puritan, and has since been called the Evangelical, school, were what first called forth the impassioned protest of the young shepherd of Leicestershire. In 16G0, when Fox had fully reached middle life, and had been for twelve years a zealous missionary preacher, came the restoration of kingship in England, and the downfall of Puritan ascendency. Too soon after this great event, which it was hoped would intro- duce an era of religious peace and mutual toleration, came that cruel and vindictive persecution of Noncon- formity in the name of a perjured and profligate king, which forms the darkest page in the history of the Church of England, one which all who are zealous for her good name would gladly obliterate from her annals. This persecution fell heavily on the followers of Fox, as on all the other Nonconformists : even more heavily on the former by reason of their stern and unbending disposition, than on the latter. The utter failure of the Episcopalians, though armed with the whole power of the State, to suppress or even to diminish the numbers of these dauntless dissenters from the Established Church, was undoubtedly a powerful factor in convincing the nation of the necessity of that general toleration which was the best result of the Revolution of 1G88, But though during this quarter of a century Episcopalian parsons and squires were the chief agents in the perse- cution of Fox and his friends, it can hardly be said that even then they were the chief objects of his religious 6 GEORGE FOX polemics. Still the Calvinistic teaching was that against which he bore his most persistent protest, and when his young disciple Barclay gave literary and logical form to the new sect's teaching, his Ajjology was a veiled attack upon the Westminster Confession, the great manifesto of seventeenth-century Calvinism.^ From this statement it must not be inferred that there was any leaning in the mind of Fox and his friends towards what is called Catholic teaching, whether Anglican or Roman. All that was distinctively char- acteristic of media)val Christianity was condemned by them as belonging to " the dark night of apostacy," and the attempts of the disciples of Laud to re-establish the Anglican Church on a basis which should be Catholic, but not Roman, were not indeed actively opposed) because they were never understood by the early Quakers, bred up as these men had been in a universally ditfused atmosphere of Puritanism. Lastly, there is one characteristic of early Quakerism which must in fairness be noted, and which it shared with every other religious party of the time. This is the extreme bitterness with which they spoke of their opponents, the absolute certainty which they felt that they alone were in the right, and that all who differed from them went wilfully astray. To most of the first generation of Quakers, as to his Presbyterian opponents, might Cromwell have addressed his well-known appeal, " I beseech you, by the mercies of Jesus Christ, think it ^ This relation of Barclay's Apology to the Westminster Con- fession and the Shorter Catechism has not hitherto attracted sufficient attention. Whoever compares the order of Barclay's Propositions with that of the questions in the Shorter Catechism, will, I think, have no doubt that the former document intention- ally follows the latter. INTRODUCTION 7 possible that you may be mistaken." In this, as I have said, they shared that " form and pressure of the times " from which the most original thinkers cannot expect wholly to escape. With us, it may be, the danger is of an opposite kind. New horizons of thought have been opened out to us. The universe presents itself to our minds as an infinitely greater and more wonderful thing than it was supposed to be by those eager combatants of the seventeenth century. We are no longer so abso- lutely sure that our little plummets have sounded its awful depths, that we have mapped out all its vastness. Hence comes doubt ; hence, it may be, sometimes too languid a grasp of the truths which have been revealed to us. But hence also comes mutual tolerance, and a willingness to acknowledge that others who walk not exactly in our paths may have their faces set towards the Heavenly City ; and that is in itself a gain, perhaps a gain which even outweighs the loss that has made it possible. CHAPTEH 11 BIRTHPLACE The little hamlet of Drayton-in-the-Clay (as George Fox styles it in his Journal), or Fenny Drayton, as it is now called by the inhabitants, might in the seven- teenth century have been fitly described by either name. It is situated on the western verge of Leicester- shire, on a clay level, with the rising ground of Market Bosworth on the east, and the pleasant hills of Ather- stone on the west. The road which leads to it from Bosworth is still called Fen Lane, and though the country is now well drained, it is easy to see how two hundred years ago the desolate waters of the Fens must have lain, all the winter through, round about the little hamlet. Fenny Drayton lies about two miles to the east of the main line of the London and North-Western Railway between London and Liverpool. The Wat- ling Street, of which the modern railway here, as so often elsewhere, is the faithful companion, and which forms the modern boundary between the counties of Leicester and Warwick, comes yet nearer, within a mile of Fenny Drayton, and the little village of Man- cetter hard by represents a station which is named 8 BIRTHPLACE 9 in the road-book of the Roman Empire.^ This is not a mere matter of antiquarian interest, for in the seven- teenth century the Roman roads were still the chief available highways of the country. Along the Watling Street doubtless passed in Fox's day the waggons which carried the wool of the north of England up to the markets of London. By the same route may have ridden both Cavaliers and Roundheads towards the battle-field of Marston Moor, and it was along the same road undoubtedly that Henry of Richmond, a century and a half before the time of Fox's boyhood, came to pluck the crown of England from the head of Richard III. The rising ground of Market Bos- worth, as has been already said, is all but within sight of Drayton, and George Fox, in his lonely wanderings over the fields which surrounded his birthplace, must have often passed the site of Henry's camp, perhaps may have drunk sometimes at the well at which Richard is said to have quenched his thirst ere he rushed into the battle." At the present day but little is left to show what Drayton-in-the-Clay looked like two hundred years ago. Uninteresting modern buildings, with shallow windows and slated roofs, have replaced the picturesque, deep-mullioned Jacobean houses, with their thatches of straw, which George Fox must have looked on as a boy. ^ Manduesedum, mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary. - A more modern set of associations, but one which will interest some readers, is connected with a recent novelist. The visitor to Fenny Drayton finds himself in the heart of "George Eliot's countTy." Marian Evans was born at Nuneaton, the capital of this district; and the scenes oi Adam Beck, Janefs Kepentance, Mr. Gilfil, and Amos Barton, are all to be found within a few miles of George Fox's birthplace. 10 GEORGE FOX The house which tradition pointed out as his birthplace has long since disappeared. One antique cottage which stood near to it remained till a few years ago, and was rapidly becoming a little local sanctuary; nay, it was on the point of being transported to the other side of the Atlantic by an enterprising American speculator, and being re-erected as the home of the friend of the founder of Pennsylvania, Apparently, however, in the course of the negotiations the fictitious nature of its claims was made manifest, the proposal was with- drawn, the house tumbled down, and the last vestiges of its fabric have recently disappeared. A little obelisk of Quaker-like simplicity has been erected within a hundred yards or so of the site of the original cottage, to keep alive the memory of George Fox's birthplace. In this utter modernization of the little hamlet, we are driven by the irony of Fate to look for our only links of connection with the past, in that build- ing to which George Fox would only allow the name of " steeple-house," and on which he would never have expected his remotest disciples to gaze with interest. The church of Fenny Drayton is a building chiefly in the late Decorated style, but possesses a rather peculiar Norman doorway somewhat concealed by a modern porch. It has two aisles and a chancel; and the chief objects of interest which it contains are the monuments of the Purefoy family, who were for more than three centuries the territorial aristocracy of Dray- ton. One of these monuments is in the northern aisle, which was apparently a kind of chapel of the Purefoys, with a private door leading out to their closely adjoin- ing manor-house. The other, which lines the northern BIRTHPLACE 11 wall of the chancel, and of which probably only a part is still remaining, Avas erected towards the end of the sixteenth century by " Jocosa " (Joyce) Purefoy, Avho had married her cousin Edward Purefoy of Shawleson, and conveyed to him the lordship of her father's lands. In two long and pompous inscriptions, written in Latin hexameters, the stately lady, or rather the scholar who did her bidding, celebrates the virtues of her deceased husband, and describes how he kept inviolate the " pure faith" from which his family derived their name, and the courage with which some remote ancestor had de- fended his lord on the field of battle with the broken spear which was ever after the family's crest. Hundreds of times during the long prelections of the minister of Drayton must the boyish eyes of Fox have wandered over these mysterious monuments. His education was too imperfect to enable him to comprehend their mean- ing; otherwise we might please ourselves with the thought that he had determined to take for his own the motto of the Squire's family, PURE FOY MA 10 YE ; and we might recall the fact that the great militant Quietist gazed so often in his boyhood on a line fancifully adapted from Horace — "Omne tulit puuctum qui miscixit arma quieti."^ But this, we must admit, is but a caprice of the fancy. The Purefoys of Drayton fell into difficulties in the hard-drinking Hanoverian times, and the representa- tive of the family towards the middle of the eighteenth century obtained a private Act of Parliament enabling him to alienate his estate. Only the funereal monu- ments now remain to attest the family's former great- ^ "He gains all hearts who blendeth war with rest," 12 GEORGE FOX ness. The stately manor-house has vanished from the earth, its site only marked by a slight inequality which shows where the moat once guarded the house. Altogether Fenny Drayton somewhat depresses the visitor by the conviction which it forces upon him of the obliterating power of only two centuries of time. One great natural landmark remains in the quadran- gular belt of solemn yew-trees which still surrounds the parish church, and which probably look very much as they did when Jocosa Purefoy reared her monument. " 0 not for thee the glow, the bloom, Who changest not in any gale, Nor branding summer suns avail To touch thy thousand years of gloom." Even more than the squire, the parson of the parish must have exercised a powerful influence on the boy- hood of the future reformer. The living was in the squire's gift, and George Purefoy, " Jocosa's " son, pre- sented to it^ (probably somewhere about 1640) the Reverend Nathaniel Stephens, M. A., who held it till the year 1662. From the fact that Stephens belonged to the Puritan party in the Church, we may probably infer that his patron was of the same way of thinking, and this conjecture is confirmed by our finding that his cousin, William Purefoy of Caldecote, was a General in the Parliamentary army, and a diligent member of the Court by which Charles I. was sentenced to death. Nathaniel Stephens was the son of a Wiltshire clergy- man, was born in 1606, and received his education as ^ Wood's statement that Stephens was intruded into the living in 1643 in place of an ejected Episcopalian, is shown by Calamy to be erroneous. BIRTHPLACE 13 a " batler " at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. He seems to have been a fair specimen of the Presbyterian divines who came to the front during the ascendency of the Long Parliament. A staunch defender of the right of the clergy to tithes, and of the practice of infant baptism, he fought long paper battles with the Inde- pendents and Baptists on tliese questions. On the other hand, he was great in Apocalyptic literature, composing a Plain and Easy Calculation of the Name, Marl', and Number of the Beast, and was a thorough Calvinist in his teaching as to the utter depravity of man, and in his defence of the doctrine of Election and Reprobation by God's absolute decree. Any one who takes the trouble to glance through his Vindicice Fundamenti, or Threefold Defence of the Doctrine of Original Sin, with its wearisome speculations as to Adam's state before and after the fall, will easily under- stand how little help a tired soul seeking for rest, and longing to hear the voice of the Living God, would derive from this self-satisfied scholastic divine. Thus we shall find that " Priest Stephens " is spoken of with little gratitude in George Fox's Journal, and as this is practically the only rock which raises him ever so little out of the waters of oblivion, he has received from posterity somewhat harder measure than he deserves. It is clear, indeed, that he failed to understand the nature of " the questings and the guessings " of his strange young parishioner; but there is small blame to him, trained as he had been, for such a failure ; and after all, the fact that he went forth from his pleasant rectory on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1662, to spend the remaining fifteen years of his life in obscurity as a Nonconformist preacher at Stoke Golding, shows that 14 GEORGE FOX he was a true man, and willing to suffer for conscience' sake. After this brief sketch of George Fox's birthplace we may proceed to the story of his early years. Our chief authority here and everywhere must be his own Journal, but as that book reaches to a thousand octavo pages, it is obvious that only a few of its more striking passages can be laid under contribution. CHAPTER III EARLY LIFE George Fox was born in July 1624.^ His parents were persons in a humble station, but apparently not in actual poverty, and they probably belonged to the numerous class which conformed to the worship of the national Church, while sympathizing with what was beginning to be known as Puritanism. His own ac- count of them is as follows : — " My father's name was Christopher Fox : he was by profession a weaver, an honest man ; and there was a seed of God in him. The neighbours called him Righteous Christer. My mother was an upright woman ; her maiden name was Mary Lago, of the family of the Lagos, and of the stock of the martyrs." William Penn's statement is that " he was born of honest and sufficient parents, who endeavoured to bring him up, as they did the rest of their children, in the way and worship of the nation : especially his ^ Fox does not seem to have known the exact day of hia birth, and unfortunately the blank cannot be filled up from the parish registers, which have suffered denudation at the hands of a sexton's wife in the last century, requiring paper for her jam- pots. The present Rector of Fenny Draytun tells me, however, that he has found the register of the baptism of George Fox's sister Mary. 15 16 GEORGE FOX mother, who was a woman accomplished above most of her degree in the place where she lived." As to the time of Fox's birth, we note in passing that it was in the year before the death of King James I. The old king, who was in failing health, had practically abandoned the direction of affairs to the Prince of Wales and his brilliant, unstable friend the Duke of Buckingham, who had just returned from that foolish piece of knight-errantry, the journey to Spain. When Fox was born, negotiations were proceeding for Prince Charles's marriage to the daughter of Henry IV. of France, that marriage which was one of the links in the chain of events which drew on the Civil War and the bloody tragedy of Whitehall. However little a man may be affected by the acts and thoughts of his contemporaries, it is always interest- ing to observe who those contemporaries were. In the year before Fox's birth, Blaise Pascal began his frail but wonderful life. John Dryden (born 1631) and John Locke (1632) were his juniors by seven and eight years respectively ; and his birth-year placed him nearly at the middle point between John Milton (1608) and Sir Isaac Newton (1642). Yet, as has been already hinted, the future Quaker apostle dwelt mostly in a sphere apart, very little influenced by the thoughts, philosophical, poetical, or political, of the men of his stirring generation. The Bible seems to have been his only literature, and it may safely be said that Amos, the herdsman of Tekoa, who was separated from him by an interval of twenty-four centuries, had infinitely more influence on his mind than William Shakespeare, who died but eight years before he came into the world. EARLY LIFE 17 So, too, for the political events of his time. Wliile he was passing through his cliiklliood and boyhood, the terrible Thirty Years' War was draining the life- blood of Germany ; and Laud and Strafford by their policy of Thorough Avere gradually alienating the hearts of Englishmen from their king, and preparing them to open " the purple testament of bleeding war." The Civil War began when Fox was in the eighteenth year of his age, and lasted till about the time when he began his missionary journeys. Yet to all these events he makes no allusion, and it may be doubted whether even at the time they greatly moved him. The history of his own soul, his struggles with the power of dark- ness, his Teachings forth after the light and peace of God, seem to have absorbed all his thoughts, and the thunderstorms of war and revolution crashed round him unheeded. The childhood and youth of George Fox are thus described by William Penn : — " But from a child he appeared of another frame of mind than the rest of his brethren : being more religious, inward, still, solid and observing beyond his years, as the answers he would give, and the questions he would put upon occasion, manifested to the astonishment of those that heard him, especially in divine things. " His mother taking notice of his singular temper, and the gravity, wisdom, and piety that very early shined through him, refusing childish and vain sports and company when very young, she was tender and indulgent over him, so that from her he met with little difficulty. As to his employment, he was brought up in country business ; and as he took most delight in sheep, so he was very skilful in them ; an employment 0 18 GEORGE FOX that very well suited his mind in several respects, both from its innocency and solitude; and was a just figure of his after ministry and service." His own account of this period of his life is given in these words : — " In my very young years I had a gravity and stayed- ness of mind and spirit not usual in children ; insomuch that when I saw old men carry themselves lightly and wantonly towards each other, I had a dislike thereof raised in my heart, and said within myself, ' If ever I come to be a man, surely I shall not do so, nor be so wanton.' " When I came to eleven years of age, I knew pure- ness and righteousness ; for while I was a child I was taught how to walk to be kept pure. The Lord taught me to be faithful in all things, and to act faithfully two ways, viz. inwardly to God, and outwardly to man ; and to keep to Yea and Nay in all things. For the Lord showed me, that though the people of the world have mouths full of deceit, and changeable words, yet I was to keep to Yea and Nay in all things; and that my words should be few and savoury, seasoned with grace ; and that I might not eat and drink to make myself wanton, but for health, using the creatures in their service, as servants in their places, to the glory of Him that hath created them ; they being in their covenant, and I being brought into the covenant, and sanctified by the Word which was in the beginning by which all things are upheld ; wherein is unity with the creation. " But people being strangers to the covenant of life with God, they eat and drink to make themselves wanton with the creatures, wasting them upon their own lusts, and living in all filthiness, loving foul ways, EARLY LIFE 19 and devouring the creation ; and all this in the world, in the pollutions thereof, without God ; therefore I was to shun all such. " Afterwards, as I grew up, my relations thought to make me a priest, but others persuaded to the contrary : whereupon I was put to a man that was a shoemaker by trade, and that dealt in wool, and used grazing, and sold cattle ; and a great deal went through my hands. While I was with him, he was blessed ; but after I left him he broke, and came to nothing. I never wronged man or woman in all that time ; for the Lord's power was with me, and over me to preserve me. While I was in that service, I used in my dealings the word Verily, and it was a common saying among the people that knew me, ' If George says Verily, there is no altering him.' When boys and rude people would laugh at me, I let them alone, and went my way ; but people had generally a love to me for my innocency and honesty." Fox's autobiography constantly reminds us of the experiences of his contemporary John Bunyan, whether as described in G^'ace Abounding, or as allegorized in Pilgrims Progress ; and yet the relation between them is more often one of contrast than of similarity. Thus here his spiritual life does not begin with that intense self-loathing, that agony in the thought of unforgiven sin, which is the keynote of Bunyan's early experience. Fox does not feel that he is born in the City of Destruction, nor does he begin his journey with a heavy burden on his back which will roll off at the sight of the Cross ; yet all the same he is a pilgrim, and a very ardent one, and he will have as little sympathy with Vanity Fair, and will suffer as much 20 GEORGE FOX for his testimony against its wickedness as Bunyan's Cliristian himself. " When I came towards nineteen years of age," he continues, " being upon business at a fair, one of my cousins, whose name was Bradford, a professor,^ and having another professor with him, came to me, and asked me to drink part of a jug of beer with them; and I being thirsty, went in with them, for I loved any that had a sense of good, or that did seek after the Lord, When we had drunk a glass apiece, they began to drink healths, and called for more drink, agreeing together that he that would not drink should pay all. I was grieved that any that made profession of religion should do so. They grieved me very much, having never had such a thing put to me before by any sort of people, wherefore I rose up to go, and putting my hand into my pocket I took out a groat, and laid it upon the table before them, and said, ' If it be so, I will leave you.' So I went away, and when I had done what business I had to do, I returned home, but did not go to bed that night, nor could I sleep, but sometimes walked up and down, and some- times prayed and cried to the Lord, who said unto me, * Thou seest how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth ; thou must forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, 'and be a stranger unto all.' " Though not struggling under the burden of unforgiven sin. Fox, in these years of dawning manhood, was made miserable by the thought of the evil of the world around him. EARLY LIFE 21 of the great Civil War struck their own harshly jarring note on the Divine harmony for which he longed. At this, as well as some later periods of his career, his words remind us of the utterances of a man of Avhom he probably never heard — Girolamo Savonarola. At the age of nineteen Savonarola was seeking solitude, was composing his poem on the Ruin of the World, had ever on his lips the Virgilian line — " Heu ! fuge crudeles terras, fuge littus avarum ;" and three years later his depression and despair drove him into the cloister, his treatise De Contemptu Mundi being the only legacy left to comfort his sorrowing father for the wreck of the ambitious hopes which had gathered round this favourite son. To Fox the shelter of the convent was of course not accessible, but he broke off his intercourse with his family as completely as if he had turned monk. His narrative proceeds — " Then at the command of God, on the ninth day of the seventh month 1643, I left my relations, and broke off all familiarity or fellowship with old or young." For the next three or four years he seems to have led a wanderinor life, movinsj about throusfh the home counties, but spending several months at Barnet, and afterwards in London. At Barnet, when he was walk- ing solitary in Enfield Chace, the temptation to despair came over him. He thought that his fear of desertion by God might be a judgment upon him for leaving his relations, but he was comforted in the thought that even Christ was also tempted. The " great professors " of London could not help him, nor yet could an uncle of his who belonged to the Baptist community, though, as he says, " they were tender then." He returned into 92 GEOEGE FOX Leicestershire, and his relations, fearing probably for his reason, urged him to marrv, " but I told them I was but a lad and must get wisdom. Others would have had me into the auxihary band among the soldiery " (we have now reached 1645, the year of the battle of ^Naseby), " but I refused : and I was grieved that they profifered such things to me being a tender youth. Then I went to Coventry, where I took a chamber for a while at a professor's house, till people began to be acquainted with me; for there were many tender people in that town." We are already making acquaintance with this word " tender," which is a favourite expression of Fox's throughout the Journal , denoting, not delicacv of the physical frame, for he and his disciples endured hard- ships which might break down the strongest constitu- tion, but delicacy of spiritual perception, unwillingness to be satisfied with the polemical theology of the ordinary Puritan — a desire to get into communion with the Spirit of the Eternal One, and to learn His will. He returned to his native village, and now at length, if not before, had some converse with the parson of his parish, and with some of the neighbouring divines about the state of his soul. To quote again from the Journal : " The priest of Drayton, the town of my birth, whose name was Nathaniel Stevens {sic), came often to me, and I went often to him ; and another priest sometimes came with him ; and they would give place to me to hear me, and I would ask them questions, and reason with them. And this priest Stevens asked me a question, viz. Why Christ cried out upon the cross, ' My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? and why He said, ' If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me ; yet not My will, but Thine be done ' ? I EARLY LIFE i3 told him that at that time the sins of all manlriivl were upon Him, and their iniquities and transgresBioiis with which He was wounded, which He was to bear, and to be an offering for, as He was man, but He died not, as He was God : and so, in that He died for aR men, and tasted death for every man, He was an offering for the sins of the whole world. This I sp:;ke, being at that time in a measure sensible of Christ's sufferings and what He went through. And the priest said, ' It was a very good, full answer, and such a one as he had not heard.' At that time he would applaud and speak highly of me to others; and what I said in discourse to him on the week-days, that he would preach on the first-days, for which I did not like him. This priest afterwards became my great persecutor. "After this I went to another ancient priest at Mancetter in Warwickshire, and reasoned with him about the groimd of despair and temptations ; but he was iornorant of mv con<lition : he bid me take tobacco and sing psalms. Tobacco was a thing I did not love, and psalms I was not in a state to sing; I could not sing. Then he bid me come again, and he would tell me many things : but when I came he was angry and pettish, for my former words had displeased him. He told my troubles, sorrows, and griefs to his servants, so that it was got among the milk-lasses ; which grieved me that I should open my mind to such a one. I saw they were all miserable comforters, and this brought my troubles more upon me. Then I heard of a priest living about Tamworth, who was accounted an experienced man, and I went seven miles to him ; but I found him only like an empty, hollow cask. I heard also of one called Dr. Cradc'ck, of 24 GEORGE FOX Coventry, and went to him ; I asked him the ground of temptations and despair, and how troubles came to be wrought in man ? He asked me. Who was Christ's father and mother ? I told him, Mary was His mother, and that He was supposed to be the son of Joseph, but He was the son of God. Now as we were walking together in his garden, the alley being narrow, I chanced, in turning, to set my foot on the side of a bed, at which the man was in a rage as if his house had been on fire. Thus all our discourse was lost, and I went away in sorrow, worse than I was when I came. I thought them miserable comforters, and saw they were all as nothing to me ; for they could not reach my condition. After this I went to another, one Macham, a priest in high account.^ He would needs give me some physic, and I was to have been let blood ; but they could not get one drop of blood from me, either in arms or head (though they endeavoured ^ " This Macham, a priest in high account," seems to have been a man of George Fox's own age — John Machin (1624 — 1664), of whom there is a long account in Calamy's Ejected Ministers. He was born in 1624, educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, and ordained in 1644. HecametoAtherstone as lecturer in 1652. We should be naturally disposed to connect the entry in the Journal with this part of Machin' s career, as Atherstone is only a few miles from Fenny Drayton ; but if so it must be mentioned by Fox out of its chronological order. Machin went from Atherstone into Cheshire in 1654. At the Restoration he held the living of Whitley in that county, and was ejected from it on St, Bartholomew's Day, " And hardly any one bore his ejectment with less reflection upon superiors, or with more grief for so sad a dispensation. The neighbouring gentry, convinced of his integrity, and the peaceableness of his spirit, gave him no molestation. Several of his old neighbours going to see him, he dropped the words, ' Ah ! my friends ! I never lived since I died,' His death happening soon after, viz, September 6, 1664, made them conclude that being silenced broke his heart. He was not above forty years of age,'' EARLY LIFE 25 it), my body being, as it were, dried up with sorrows, grief, and troubles, which were so great upon me that I could have wished I had never been born, or that I had been born blind, that I might never have seen wickedness or vanity ; and deaf, that I might never have heard vain and wicked words, or the Lord's name blasphemed. When the time called Christmas came, while others were feasting and sporting themselves, I looked out poor widows from house to house, and gave them some money. He has, as he terms it, " great openings." " As I was walking in a field on a first day [Sunday] morning, the Lord opened unto me, that being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to fit or qualify men to be ministers of Christ, and I wondered at it, because it was the common belief of people. But I saw it clearly as the Lord opened it to me, and was satisfied, and admired the goodness of the Lord, who had opened this thing unto me that morning." He feels that this strikes at " priest Stevens's" ministry, and to the great trouble of his relations he will no longer go with them to hear the priest, but wanders through the fields or the orchard alone with his Bible. 