and I praised the living God."[368] [Sidenote: _George Fox._] Fox was mighty in prayer. So great an effect he produced on one occasion, that the persons present felt as if the house were shaken by a mighty wind and the day of Pentecost had once more fully come; and Penn declared: "The most awful living reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer."[369] By Fox's public teaching he became more widely known, and exerted an influence which has lasted from that day to this. Believing in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity,[370] and regarding them in an anti-Calvinistic light, strong in a simple Evangelical faith, but without any theological discipline of thought, preferring the language of Scripture to the words of men--he added to all this, as the first-fruit of his mystical tendencies, a belief in the "inward light," even the revelation of Christ in the soul, not as superseding holy Scripture, but as its necessary witness and its gracious supplement. He dwelt very largely upon redemption through Christ, as consisting in deliverance from sin, not simply from its guilt, but from its power;--a view of salvation of the very last importance, and one which had been, at least partially, obscured through the prominence given by some theologians of the day to the doctrine of pardon, and the change effected in our legal relationship by the work of Christ, without a due exhibition of the moral change in the heart and life which forms so important an aspect of the one salvation of the Gospel of God. He dwelt much on the subject of man's deliverance from sin itself--from its power and practice--which the Divine Redeemer had accomplished. Ideas of human perfectibility through Christ[371] blended with Fox's conceptions of holiness and of the work of the Spirit; and his notion of Christianity as a purely spiritual system[372] led to further peculiarities which, in fact, chiefly distinguished this remarkable teacher in the estimation of contemporaries. Hence sprang his opposition to sacraments, to ceremonies, and to forms of prayer, and also his delight in the exercises of silent worship. Hence, too, his dislike to all compulsory support of the ministry, whether by tithes or taxation; together with a horror of human priesthoods, and even of any order of Christian teachers educated and exclusively set apart for the service. His condemnation of the use of oaths and of the practice of war resulted from his reverence for the Supreme Being, and from the deep sympathies of his benevolent nature with the pacific spirit of the Gospel. [Sidenote: _George Fox._]