want of the Lord Jesus Christ, no longer to seek the living among the dead, but look from the mountains and hills, dead ways and worships, unto Christ Jesus, the fountain of life and salvation; and there was added unto the gathering daily, and great dread was in our meetings, under the seasonings of the Holy Ghost. Oh, the tears, sighs and tremblings and mournings because of the middle wall of partition that we saw, in our awakened state, stood between us and the Lord in the sense of our spiritual wants and necessities! Oh, the hungerings and thirstings of soul that attended daily and great travail of spirit to obtain, through the working of the mighty power of God, dominion and spiritual victory over the enemy of our souls, who had led us in the paths of death and darkness. The visit of God's holy and ever-blessed day was signal, and, in his fear and dread, we received the Gospel with a ready mind and with broken hearts, and gave up to follow the Lord fully, casting off the weights and the sin that easily besets, and departed from the evil ways and vanities of this world; stripping off all needless apparel and forsaking superfluities in meats and drinks, walking in the plain, self-denying path, having the fear and dread of God on our souls, whom we were afraid of offending in word or deed. Our words were few and savory, our apparel and houses plain, being stripped of superfluities, our countenances grave and deportment weighty amongst those we had to do with. Indeed, we were a plain, broken-hearted, contrite-spirited people; our souls being in an inexpressible travail to do all things well pleasing in the sight of God. Our concern, night and day, was to obtain, through Jesus Christ, the great work of salvation, and thereby, an assurance of the everlasting rest and sabbath of our God. Oh, the labor, travails and spending of strength of these servants of the Most High God, in those days, in great assemblies in that city and counties around about. Our meetings were so large that we were forced to meet out of doors, and that in frost and snow; and in those meetings the voices of these servants of God reached over the multitudes when several thousands have been assembled together.

The sixty ministers who, as has been mentioned, went forth from the north about this time, spread themselves over almost

all England, as well as in Scotland and Ireland, and such was their zeal and the Divine power accompanying their ministry, that it is no marvel that, as William Penn states, thousands in a short time were turned to the Truth through their testimony.

Our early Friends were well aware that their success depended on the Lord's blessing which accompanied their labors. William Penn says: "Without this secret Divine power, there is no quickening and regenerating of dead souls." And again, "These experimental preachers of glad tidings of God's truth and kingdom, could not run when they list, or pray or preach when they pleased, but as Christ, their Redeemer, prepared and moved them by his own blessed Spirit, for which they waited in their services and meetings, and spoke as that gave them utterance." It is evident, therefore, that no amount of preaching or other effort in a religious way, that has its root in an imitation of the proceedings of our early members, can be expected to produce similar results, for it is the Lord alone who can change the heart of man, and only those labors which flow from the movings of his Spirit can we reasonably suppose will receive his blessing.

CHAPTER II.

CHARGES AGAINST FRIENDS.

The sudden rise and rapid growth of the new Society caused, as might be expected, much excitement in many parts of England. The Friends and their principles were often misunderstood, and many false charges were made against them, which filled the popular mind with rage and prejudice. Of

this the early records of our Society furnish many illustrations. The priests of that day were among the foremost of those who thus slandered Friends, and it is not surprising that it should have been so, for the doctrines of Friends as to the ground and nature of Gospel ministry and their contention that the system of tithes had no proper place in the Christian dispensation, struck at their business. When at Wakefield in 1652, George Fox said the priest of that church raised many wicked slanders upon me, as:

That I carried bottles about with me, and made people drink of my bottles, which made them follow me. And, that I rid upon a great black horse, and was seen in one county upon my black horse in one hour, and in the same hour in another county three score miles off. With these lies he fed his people, to make them think evil of the Truth which I had declared amongst them. But by those lies he preached many of his hearers away from him; for I travelled on foot, and had no horse at that time; and that the people generally knew.

Such slanderous reports would seem childish and useless at the present day, but at that time there still existed among the people of England a wide-spread belief in witchcraft, to which this priest maliciously appealed. Many hundreds of people were put to death as witches, indeed the last of these murders in England occurred more than sixty years after the date of which we are speaking. So infatuated with this superstition were the people, that one Hopkins made a regular business of going about the country and freeing the different neighborhoods of witches for a stated fee. Many were the innocent victims that were put to death through his means. One of his methods of determining their guilt was to throw them into a pond of water. If they floated it was regarded as a proof that they were witches-but if they sank they were supposed to be innocent.

Rutty in his history of Friends in Ireland, mentions that Thomas Wight attended a Friends' Meeting near Bandon, out of curiosity, but "Finding that the people sat silent for a long time, he began to be very uneasy, and to think within himself, that as he had heard the Quakers were witches, he might be bewitched if he should stay any longer." Elizabeth Bathurst, in "Truth Vindicated," has some remarks which explain Thomas Wight's uneasiness. She says:

Some not knowing the way of the Spirit in themselves, and yet seeing the evident change which hath been wrought upon others by virtue of the powerful operation of this spiritual principle or power of God in their consciences, they have hereupon confidently affirmed the same to be effected by the art of witchcraft and diabolical enchantment; which affirmation, though false, yet may it truly be said to be fixed as a scarecrow or ghostly apparition, to frighten people from so much as looking towards this religion. They have enviously cast upon the professors of it, as the means whereby they convert and turn people to it; alleging it as a matter of wonder that any should be so strangely altered both in countenance, carriage and communication, that on a sudden too (as some have been observed to be) unless it were by the power of sorcery, or some satanical possession. And hence have they mocked at and derided that godly fear and holy trembling, that hath been made to appear in some when the terrors of the Almighty took hold of them by reason of sin, as though this were occasioned through some frenzy humor, being the product of natural weakness and defect, or else produced by the invincible force of magic art, which the creature can no ways resist. So that this hath been a main argument why people should not adventure themselves so much as to go into a Quaker meeting for fear of the great danger (that some suppose there is) of being charmed into that religion; which fear hath so much affrighted the hearts of some, that notwithstanding there are good desires in them after satisfaction in matters of religion, and they have freely confessed even in my hearing: "That this seemeth to be the way to attain the

same; yet they never were, nor do they dare to come amongst this people, to wit, the Quakers, for fear of being forcibly possessed with the belief of their principles."

A belief in demoniacal possession had come down from the earliest ages, and "had been fanned into a new intensity at the close of the middle ages by the physical calamities and moral scepticisms which threw their gloom over the world. But it was not till the chaos and turmoil of the Reformation put its strain on the spiritual imagination of men, that the belief deepened into a general panic. The panic was common to both Catholics and Protestants; it was in Catholic countries, indeed, that the persecution of supposed witches was carried on longest and most ruthlessly. Among Protestant countries, England was the last to catch the general terror; but it was not till the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign that it became a marked feature of the time.

To men like the Puritans, says Green, in his "History of the English People," who looked on the world about them and the soul within them as battle-fields for a never-ceasing contest between God and the devil, it was natural enough to ascribe every evil that happened to many, either in soul or body, to the invisible agency of the spirit of ill. A share of his supernatural energies was the bait by which he was held to lure the wicked to their own destruction; and women, above all, were believed to barter their souls for the possession of power which lifted them above the weakness of their sex."

A bull issued by Pope Innocent VIII., in 1484, and several by succeeding popes, tended to increase the agitation of the public mind on this subject. A writer in Chambers' Encyclopedia, thus describes the result: "A panic fear of witchcraft took possession of society. If any one felt an unaccountable illness, or a peculiar pain in any part of his body, or suffered any misfortune in his family or affairs; or, if a storm arose