an interpretation of the fact. We may admit his
evidence as to the former, and yet think his opinion as to the latter
worthless. If Eginhard's calm and objective narrative of the historical
events of his time is no guarantee for the soundness of his judgment
where the supernatural is concerned, the heated rhetoric of the Apostle
of the Gentiles, his absolute confidence in the "inner light," and the
extraordinary conceptions of the nature and requirements of logical
proof which he betrays, in page after page of his Epistles, afford still
less security.

There is a comparatively modern man who shared to the full Paul's trust
in the "inner light," and who, though widely different from the fiery
evangelist of Tarsus in various obvious particulars, yet, if I am not
mistaken, shares his deepest characteristics. I speak of George Fox, who
separated himself from the current Protestantism of England, in the
seventeenth century, as Paul separated himself from the Judaism of the
first century, at the bidding of the "inner light"; who went through
persecutions as serious as those which Paul enumerates; who was beaten,
stoned, cast out for dead, imprisoned nine times, sometimes for long
periods, who was in perils on land and perils at sea. George Fox was an
even more widely-travelled missionary; while his success in founding
congregations, and his energy in visiting them, not merely in Great
Britain and Ireland and the West India Islands, but on the continent of
Europe and that of North America, were no less remarkable. A few years
after Fox began to preach, there were reckoned to be a thousand Friends
in prison in the various gaols of England; at his death, less than fifty
years after the foundation of the sect, there were 70,000 Quakers in the
United Kingdom. The cheerfulness with which these people--women as well
as men--underwent martyrdom in this country and in the New England
States is one of the most remarkable facts in the history of religion.

No one who reads the voluminous autobiography of "Honest George" can
doubt the man's utter truthfulness; and though, in his multitudinous
letters, he but rarely rises far above the incoherent commonplaces of a
street preacher, there can be no question of his power as a speaker, nor
any doubt as to the dignity and attractiveness of his personality, or of
his possession of a large amount of practical good sense and governing
faculty.

But that George Fox had full faith in his own pow