Mysticism, at the close of the seventeenth century, found a home almost exclusively amongst Quakers. It had won wide sympathies at one time; Davenant had predicted that in a hundred years religions would come to a settlement in a kind of “_ingeniose_ Quakerism;” and Hales, as he studied writings of the mystical Familists’ school, used to say that some time or other these fine notions would take in the world. But, instead of a widening flow, these “fine notions” came to be contracted within a single channel. Instead of an “_ingeniose_ Quakerism” leavening the world, the world left this leaven to ferment all but entirely amongst the people called Friends. Norris was the principal person outside that circle who, in the reign of William III., cultivated a mystical spirit; and he did so in a limited degree. But few of the many pieces written by him indicate any marked quietest sentiments. In a paper entitled _An Idea of Happiness_, he speaks mystically of the fruition of God and of seraphic love, but in the same paper he speaks of the mystical doctrine of infused virtue as being a paradox in Divinity, like the doctrine of occult qualities in philosophy.[543] Norris’s mysticism did not go beyond that of a Platonistic divine. The Quakers had almost all the English mysticism of the age to themselves. [Sidenote: NONCONFORMISTS.] [Sidenote: 1688–1702.] Amongst them, too, there was more of religious enthusiasm than amongst any other body of Nonconformists as a whole. Then occurred what is a curious but not uncommon fact, that as a rationalistic spirit was creeping over theology, sobering the spirit of most denominations, the fires of excitement were kept burning in two extreme divisions of the Christian camp. The Quakers and the Nonjurors were the two most fervent religious bodies at the end of the seventeenth century. * * * * *