cher. Weak in
body, worn with sickness, fasting, stripes, and prison-penance, and
naturally credulous and imaginative, is it strange that in some measure
he yielded to this miserable delusion? Let those who would harshly judge
him, or ascribe his fall to the peculiar doctrines of his sect, think of
Luther, engaged in personal combat with the Devil, or conversing with him
on points of theology in his bed-chamber; or of Bunyan at actual
fisticuffs with the adversary; or of Fleetwood and Vane and Harrison
millennium-mad, and making preparations for an earthly reign of King
Jesus. It was an age of intense religious excitement. Fanaticism had
become epidemic. Cromwell swayed his Parliaments by "revelations" and
Scripture phrases in the painted chamber; stout generals and sea-captains
exterminated the Irish, and swept Dutch navies from the ocean, with old
Jewish war-cries, and hymns of Deborah and Miriam; country justices
charged juries in Hebraisms, and cited the laws of Palestine oftener than
those of England. Poor Nayler found himself in the very midst of this
seething and confused moral maelstrom. He struggled against it for a
time, but human nature was weak; he became, to use his own words,
"bewildered and darkened," and the floods went over him.

Leaving London with some of his more zealous followers, not without
solemn admonition and rebuke from Francis Howgill and Edward Burrough,
who at that period were regarded as the most eminent and gifted of the
Society's ministers, he bent his steps towards Exeter. Here, in
consequence of the extravagance of his language and that of his
disciples, he was arrested and thrown into prison. Several infatuated
women surrounded the jail, declaring that "Christ was in prison," and on
being admitted to see him, knelt down and kissed his feet, exclaiming,
"Thy name shall be no more called James Nayler, but Jesus!" Let us pity
him and them. They, full of grateful and extravagant affection for the
man whose voice had called them away from worldly vanities to what they
regarded as eternal realities, whose hand they imagined had for them
swung back the pearl gates of the celestial city, and flooded their
atmosphere with light from heaven; he, receiving their homage (not as
offered to a poor, weak, sinful Yorkshire trooper, but rather to the
hidden man of the heart, the "Christ within" him) with that self-
deceiving humility which is but another name for spiritual pride.
Mournful, y