says, "he
came and got me by the hand very lovingly,"[23] and seemed no longer
afraid of the Quaker's "piercing eyes." In spirit they were very near
together, and with a little more insight on both sides the two movements
might have joined in one single stream. For many years afterwards the
common people, not given to nice distinctions, called the annual
gathering of the Collegiants at Rynsburg "the meeting of the Quakers."[24]

The other tendency in the movement, which received its fullest expression
in the group of Collegiants at Rynsburg and their friends in Amsterdam,
had a still greater parallelism with Quakerism, in fact, the most
important book which came from a member of this group--_The Light on the
Candlestick_--is indistinguishable in its body of ideas from Quaker
teaching, and differs only in one point, that it reveals a more
philosophically trained mind in the writer than does any early Quaker
book with the single exception of Barclay's _Apology_. The author of
_The Light on the Candlestick_--written originally in Dutch and published
in 1662 under the title _Lucerna super candelabro_--was probably Peter
Balling, though the book, with characteristic Collegiant modesty, was
published anonymously. Peter Balling was one of an interesting group of
scholarly Collegiants who became very intimate friends of Baruch Spinoza,
and who received from the Jewish philosopher a strong impulse toward
mystical religion. Before they became acquainted with the young Spinoza,
however, they had already received through Descartes a powerful
intellectual awakening, {124} and had discovered that consciousness
itself, when fully sounded, has its own unescapable evidence of God. It
is not possible here to turn aside and study adequately this
extraordinary philosophical movement known as Cartesianism, beginning in
Descartes (1596-1650) and culminating in Spinoza (1632-1677), but the
distinct religious influence of it is so profoundly apparent, both in
Peter Balling and in the Quaker apologist Robert Barclay (1648-1690),
that a very brief review of the contribution from this source seems
necessary.

Rene Descartes, like almost every other supreme genius who has discovered
a new way and has forever shifted the line of march for the race, passed
through a momentous inward upheaval, amounting to a conversion
experience, and emerged into a new moral and intellectual world.[25] It
was on November 10, 1619, in the midst of a great cam