Christ and
the saints upon earth, and in their zeal to hasten such a consummation
had sallied into London streets with drawn swords and loaded matchlocks.
The government took strong measures for suppressing dissenters' meetings
or "conventicles;" and the poor Quakers, although not at all implicated
in the disturbance, suffered more severely than any others. Let us look
at the "freedom of conscience and worship" in England under that
irreverent Defender of the Faith, Charles II. Ellwood says: "He that
commanded the party gave us first a general charge to come out of the
room. But we, who came thither at God's requiring to worship Him, (like
that good man of old, who said, we ought to obey God rather than man,)
stirred not, but kept our places. Whereupon, he sent some of his
soldiers among us, with command to drag or drive us out, which they did
roughly enough." Think of it: grave men and women, and modest maidens,
sitting there with calm, impassive countenances, motionless as death, the
pikes of the soldiery closing about them in a circle of bristling steel!
Brave and true ones! Not in vain did ye thus oppose God's silence to the
Devil's uproar; Christian endurance and calm persistence in the exercise
of your rights as Englishmen and men to the hot fury of impatient
tyranny! From your day down to this, the world has been the better for
your faithfulness.

Ellwood and some thirty of his friends were marched off to prison in Old
Bridewell, which, as well as nearly all the other prisons, was already
crowded with Quaker prisoners. One of the rooms of the prison was used
as a torture chamber. "I was almost affrighted," says Ellwood, "by the
dismalness of the place; for, besides that the walls were all laid over
with black, from top to bottom, there stood in the middle a great
whipping-post.

"The manner of whipping there is, to strip the party to the skin, from
the waist upward, and, having fastened him to the whipping-post, (so that
he can neither resist nor shun the strokes,) to lash his naked body with
long, slender twigs of holly, which will bend almost like thongs around
the body; and these, having little knots upon them, tear the skin and
flesh, and give extreme pain."

To this terrible punishment aged men and delicately nurtured young
females were often subjected, during this season of hot persecution.

From the Bridewell, Ellwood was at length removed to Newgate, and thrust
in, with other "Friends," amids