Think of the England he lived in when he was a young man, the distracted England of the Civil Wars. Think of all the tiger spirits of hatred that had been unloosed and that were trampling the land. The whole country lay torn and bleeding. Some bad men there were on both sides certainly; but the real misery was that many good men on each side were trying to kill and maim one another, in order that the cause they believed to be 'the Right' might triumph. 'Have at you for the King!' cried the Cavaliers, and rushed into the fiercest battle with a smile. 'God with us!' shouted back the deep-voiced Puritans. 'For God and the Liberties of England!' and they too laid down their lives gladly. Far away from all the hurly-burly, though in the very middle of the clash of arms, George Fox, the unknown Leicestershire shepherd lad, went on his way, unheeded and unheeding. He, too, had to fight; but his was a lonely battle, in the silence of his own heart. It was there that he fought and conquered first of all, there that he tamed his own Tiger at last--more than that, he learned to find God. 'One day,' he says in his Journal, 'when I had been walking solitarily abroad and was come home, I was taken up into the love of God, and it was opened to me by the eternal light and power, and I therein clearly saw that all was to be done in and by Christ, and how He conquers and destroys the Devil and all his works and is atop of him.' He means that he saw that all the outward fighting was really part of one great battle, and that to be on the right side in that fight is the thing that matters eternally to every man. Another time he writes: 'I saw into that which was without end, things which cannot be uttered and of the greatness and infiniteness of the love of God, which cannot be expressed by words, for I had been brought through the very ocean of darkness and death, and through and over the power of Satan by the eternal glorious power of Christ; even through that darkness was I brought which covered over all the world and shut up all in the death.... And I saw the harvest white and the seed of God lying thick in the ground, as ever did wheat that was sown outwardly, and I mourned that there was none to gather it.'