the same class who were known to be actually engaged in plots for their overthrow. And after all, the pressure put upon the Episcopal party in the darkest hour of their history under the Commonwealth is not to be compared, as it respects violence on the one side and suffering on the other, with what was inflicted by Churchmen, and experienced by Nonconformists, under Charles the First and Charles the Second.[362] Nor is there any resemblance between the amount of persecution endured by the disciples of Prelacy at the period under review, and the amount of sorrow and pain which was then borne by another class of Christians whose history will be unfolded in the following chapter. [Illustration] CHAPTER XIII. There is in humanity an element of mysticism presenting manifold developments. It characterizes both individual minds and schools of thought: mediæval theologians, and men and women of Romish Christendom, altogether ignorant of scientific divinity, and only burning with pious fervour, have been mystics without knowing that they were so. Since the Reformation particular members of all sects have been tinged with this peculiarity; and a whole body of religionists in England have from the very beginning of their remarkable history avowed the love and walked in the light of a mystical spiritualism. Though the Anglo-Saxon race are believed generally to have less sympathy with transcendental views than Spaniards, Germans, or Frenchmen, yet it is a fact that nowhere as in this country has mysticism produced a distinct and permanent ecclesiastical organization. And what is further remarkable, whilst it claims a purely spiritual basis--there is no other sect which has an equal distinctness of form and an equal prominence in external singularity; for not only in worship and discipline does it stand out in marked visibility before the world, but so obvious are or were its outward signs that, until very lately, a member of the Society might be as easily recognized as a Roman Catholic priest or a Capuchin friar. [Sidenote: _Rise of Quakerism._] The origin of the Quakers, as they were first derisively called,[363] of the Friends, as they prefer to be designated, was under the Commonwealth. Then the freedom granted to enquiry within Evangelical limits, the violent reaction which had set in against the forms and ceremonies of Anglo-Catholicism, the generally unsettled state of religious thought, the activity of tendencies towards a sort of ultra-spirituality, and a natural craving--amidst the revolutions of an age which tore up old conventionalities of belief--to get at the pure substance of truth, and at the heart of things, combined to draw out and to nourish whatever of the mystical element there might be in English souls. Sympathies of that order were vaguely working and were indefinitely expressed in many quarters.