ast come. They rose to the
group-consciousness that they were the beginners, in modern times, of a
Church of the spiritual order, and a community-loyalty was born which
gave the movement great conquering power and an amazing capacity for
endurance and suffering.

In Fox we have a person of extraordinary psychical experiences and of
dynamic leadership, and in him the "prophetical" and "enthusiast" traits
of the movement are strikingly in evidence. He reveals in a variety of
ways his connections with the great body of spiritual ideas that had been
accumulating for more than a century before his time, but for the most
part these influences worked upon him in sub-conscious ways as an
atmosphere and climate of his spirit, rather than as a clearly conceived
body of truth which he got by reading authors and which he apprehended
through clear intellectual processes. He can be rightly appreciated only
as he is seen to be a potent member of an organic group-life which formed
him as much as he formed it.

The expositions, however, of the more trained and scholarly Quakers show
an explicit acquaintance with the writings of these men whom we have been
studying, and they cannot be adequately understood in isolation. The
fruits of reading and of contact with a wider intellectual world are
clearly in evidence, and the ideas and the peculiar phrases of the
spiritual reformers "pass and come again" in their voluminous works.
Robert Barclay is the chief literary exponent of Quakerism. His range of
familiarity with religious and theological literature is very extensive,
and he shows intimate acquaintance with contemporary thought. For him,
as for his spiritual predecessors, the existing Church is "in apostasy";
it has departed from "the simplicity and purity of the gospel as it was
in the apostles' days." Christian faith has become "burdened with
manifold inventions and traditions, with various notions and opinions"
which {344} have been "substituted instead" of the true religion of
Christ.[14]

The Quaker interpreters all unite in treating "notions and opinions"--or,
to use their sweeping phrase, "notional religion"--as barren
_substitutes_ for a true religion of spiritual reality, which for them is
always born in a first-hand experience of Christ as the inner spirit and
life and power of one's entire being and activity. A good specimen
instance of this position is found in William Penn's Tract, "A Key
opening the Way to every