eed, this Light, is not _natural_. "We assert,"
William Penn wrote, "the Light of Christ not to be a Natural Light,
otherwise than as all men born into the world have a Measure of Christ's
Light, and so in a sense it may be called Natural to all Men. But this
Light is something else than the bare Understanding which Man hath as a
Rational Creature."[23] What man does naturally have, in William Penn's
view, is a _capacity_ for the Light, but the Light itself is from a
source wholly heavenly and divine. Barclay, in quite Cartesian fashion,
interprets it to be "a real spiritual Substance," "a substantial Seed"
from another world, hidden away within man's soul at birth, lying there
"like naked grain in stony ground," until the child is old enough to feel
its stirrings and to determine by his own free choices of obedience or
disobedience to its movings whether it shall grow and develop or not.[24]
We plainly have here a double world. The once-born man is "natural,"
though he carries buried deep in the subsoil of his nature a Seed of God,
a germ of Life drawn from the higher, spiritual world. He may live in
and under the dominion of either world, but he must choose which it shall
be. By response to and participation with the divine Seed of
radio-active spiritual energy, he can become transformed--utterly and
completely--into a new nature, and can belong here and now to the
spiritual World which Christ by His victorious Life has brought across
the chasm and planted in our soil. On the other hand, by negligence or
by disobedience he can live a mere empirical, natural life, and keep his
inestimable Seed of God buried and forgotten in a region of himself which
he seldom or never visits.

The Quakers, however, as a consequence of their heightened
group-consciousness, and as a result of the intense experiences enjoyed
in their gatherings, exhibited a far greater degree of _enthusiasm_ than
had appeared in the earlier exponents of the inner Word; and they showed
a heightened element of _prophetism_, both in their faith {348} and
practice. They devoutly believed that in them the prophecy of Jeremiah
had found fulfilment: God had written His Word in their hearts, so that
they were recipients of His will and His message. The more sure Word of
prophecy, announced by Peter, had come and the Day Star had risen in
their hearts. Their Light was to them not only a principle of connection
with a higher world, a germ of a new nativit