ith great boldness, as deeming
themselves to have arrived to Perfection and so visibly distinguishing
themselves from all the rest, and I said, Now surely the anointed of
the Lord is before Him. But a Voice said, Neither are these they; for
the Lord seeth not as man seeth."[66]

A third and intellectually far greater member of this group of
"Behmenists" was Francis Lee, a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, a
student in Leyden University, and a man of splendid parts. He became
acquainted with the movement while in Holland, and on his return home
sought out Jane Leade, became her adopted son, and, later, on the
strength of a "revelation" made to his {231} spiritual mother, he
married her daughter. Until the time of Jane Leade's death in 1704, he
was her devoted disciple, writing for her in the period of her
blindness, and editing and publishing many of her books. He was the
moving spirit in the formation of "the Philadelphian Society" for the
propagation of the mystical ideas of the followers of Boehme--a Society
which existed from 1697 to 1703, and which had a far-reaching influence
not only in England but still more on the Continent of Europe.[67]

John Anderdon, an interesting Quaker pamphleteer, born in 1624,
convinced of the Truth of the Quaker Message by the preaching of
Francis Howgil in 1658, and for many years a prisoner for his faith,
for which he finally died in prison, furnishes in his attack on the
"Behmenists" in 1661 the earliest data available for an estimate of
their views and practices.[68] The writer has evidently read the works
of Jacob Boehme, or at least some of them, and he contends that the
"Behmenists" whom he is attacking have failed to understand the
writings of their master and have never fathomed "the tendencie of his
spirit": "The Conclusion which you have drawn to yourselves from his
Writings will not profit you; neither doth it make you any jot the more
excellent, that ye can talk much of him and his Books and Writings,
being not come to the right Spirit in which is life, which brings men
out of dead Forms."[69]

His main criticism of the little sect is that its members make use of
"Mediums and borrowed Instruments for the conveyance of God's Grace and
Virtue into the Soul,"[70] and that they have "not come to the Light
which gives {232} a true understanding of the things of God," though he
admits that there "was sometime" in them "a hungering and thirsting
after Righteousness."[