tself so variously, and among so many thousands
of every creed, and has yet arrived, by whatsoever different paths,
at one and the same result.

That he was more or less right--that there is nothing in the essence
of Mysticism contrary to practical morality, Mr. Vaughan himself
fully confesses. In his fair and liberal chapters on Fox and the
Early Quakers, he does full justice to their intense practical
benevolence; to the important fact that Fox only lived to do good, of
any and every kind, as often as a sorrow to be soothed, or an evil to
be remedied, crossed his path. We only wish that he had also brought
in the curious and affecting account of Fox's interview with
Cromwell, in which he tells us (and we will take Fox's word against
any man) that the Protector gave him to understand, almost with
tears, that there was that in Fox's faith which he was seeking in
vain from the "ministers" around him.

All we ask of Mr. Vaughan is, not to be afraid of his own evident
liking for Fox; of his own evident liking for Tauler and his school;
not to put aside the question which their doctrines involve, with
such half-utterances as--

The Quakers are wrong, I think, in separating particular movements
and monitions as Divine. But, at the same time, the "witness of the
Spirit," as regards our state before God, is something more, I
believe, than the mere attestation to the written word.

As for the former of these two sentences, he may be quite right, for
aught we know. But it must be said on the other hand, that not
merely Quakers, but decent men of every creed and age, have--we may
dare to say, in proportion to their devoutness--believed in such
monitions; and that it is hard to see how any man could have arrived
at the belief that a living person was working on him, and not a mere
impersonal principle, law, or afflatus--(spirit of the universe, or
other metaphor for hiding materialism)--unless by believing, rightly
or wrongly, in such monitions. For our only inductive conception of
a living person demands that that person shall make himself felt by
separate acts.

But against the second sentence we must protest. The question in
hand is not whether this "witness of the Spirit" "is something more"
than, anything else, but whether it exists at all, and what it is.
Why was the book written, save to help toward the solution of this
very matter? The question all through has been: Can an immediate
influence be exercise