hom the glory of all His works
belongs. Many great and wonderful things were wrought by the
heavenly power in those days. For the Lord made bare his
omnipotent arm and manifested His power to the astonishment
of many; by the healing virtue whereof many have been
delivered from great infirmities, and the devils were made
subject through his name: of which particular instances
might be given beyond what this unbelieving age is able to
receive or bear.[45]

It needs no long study of Fox's writings, however, to arrive at the
conviction that the distinction between subjective and objective
verities had not the same place in his mind as it has in that of an
ordinary mortal. When an ordinary person would say "I thought so and
so," or "I made up my mind to do so and so," George Fox says, "It was
opened to me," or "at the command of God I did so and so." "Then at
the command of God on the ninth day of the seventh month 1643 (Fox
being just nineteen), I left my relations and brake off all
familiarity or friendship with young or old." "About the beginning of
the year 1647 I was moved of the Lord to go into Darbyshire." Fox
hears voices and he sees visions, some of which he brings before the
reader with apocalyptic power in the simple and strong English, alike
untutored and undefiled, of which, like John Bunyan, his contemporary,
he was a master.

"And one morning as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over
me and a temptation beset me; and I sate still. And it was said, _All
things come by Nature_. And the elements and stars came over me; so
that I was in a manner quite clouded with it.... And as I sate still
under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me, and a true
voice arose in me which said, _There is a living God who made all
things_. And immediately the cloud and the temptation vanished away,
and life rose over it all, and my heart was glad and I praised the
living God" (p. 13).

If George Fox could speak, as he proves in this and some other
passages he could write, his astounding influence on the
contemporaries of Milton and of Cromwell is no mystery. But this
modern reproduction of the ancient prophet, with his "Thus saith the
Lord," "This is the work of the Lord," steeped in supernaturalism and
glorying in blind faith, is the mental antipodes of the philosopher,
founded in naturalism and a fanatic for evidence, to whom these
affirmations inevitably suggest the