WILLIAM AND MABY.

137

A warrant was issued against Penn; and he narrowly chap.escaped the messengers. It chanced that, on the day on -whichthey were sent in search of him, he was attending a remarkableceremony at some distance from his home. An event had taken P 01 ™-place which a historian, whose object is to record the real lifeof a nation, ought not to pass unnoticed. AVhile London wasagitated by the news that a plot had been discovered, GeorgePox, the founder of the sect of Quakers, died.

More than forty years had elapsed since Fox had begun to Q°“^ 0 ofsee visions and to cast out devils.* He was then a youth of 1,1111 his

^ charac-.

pure morals and grave deportment, with a perverse temper, ter.with the education of a labouring man, and with an intellect inthe most unhappy of all states, that is to say, too much dis-ordered for liberty, and not sufficiently disordered for Bedlam.

The circumstances in which he was placed were such as couldscarcely fail to bring out in the strongest form the constitu-tional diseases of his mind. At the time when his facultieswere ripening, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents,Baptists, were striving for mastery, and were, in every cornerof the realm, refuting and reviling each other. He wanderedfrom congregation to congregation: he heard priests harangueagainst Puritans: he heard Puritans harangue against priests;and he in vain applied for spiritual direction and consolation todoctors of both parties. One jolly old clergyman of the Angli-can communion told him to smoke tobacco and sing psalms:another advised him to go and lose some blood.** The younginquirer turned in disgust from these advisers to the Dissenters,

See also a Dialogue between the Bishop of Ely and his Conscience,

36th February 169J. The dialogue is interrupted by the sound of trumpets.

The Bishop hears himself proclaimed a traitor, and cries out,

“ Come, brother Pen, ’tis time we both were gone.”

* For a specimen of his visions, see his Journal, page 13.; for hiscasting out of devils, page 26. I quote the folio edition of 1765.

** Journal, page 4.