ough 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 for 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 powers as a
miracle-worker, the following passage of his autobiography (to which
others might he added) demonstrates:--

Now after I was set at liberty from Nottingham gaol (where I
had been kept a prisoner a pretty long time) I travelled as
before, in the work of the Lord. And coming to Mansfield
Woodhouse, there was a distracted woman, under a doctor's
hand, with her hair let loose all about her ears; and he was
about to let her blood, she being first bound, and many
people being about her, holding her by violence; but he
could get no blood from her. And I desired them to unbind
her and let her alone; for they could not touch the spirit
in her by which she was tormented. So they did unbind her,
and I was moved to speak to her, and in the name of the Lord
to bid her be quiet and still. And she was so. And the
Lord's power settled her mind and she mended; and afterwards
received the truth and continued in it to her death. And the
Lord's name was honoured; to w