Now after I was set at liberty from Nottingham gaol (where I had
been kept a prisoner a pretty long time) I travelled as before, in
the work of the Lord. And coming to Mansfield Woodhouse, there was
a distracted woman, under a doctor's hand, with her hair let loose
all about her ears; and he was about to let her blood, she being
first bound, and many people being about her, holding her by
violence; but he could get no blood from her. And I desired them to
unbind her and let her alone; for they could not touch the spirit
in her by which she was tormented. So they did unbind her, and I
was moved to speak to her, and in the name of the Lord to bid her
be quiet and still. And she was so. And the Lord's power settled
her mind and she mended; and afterwards received the truth and
continued in it to her death. And the Lord's name was honoured; to
whom the glory of all His works belongs. Many great and wonderful
things were wrought by the heavenly power in those days. For the
Lord made bare His omnipotent arm and manifested His power to the
astonishment of many; by the healing virtue whereof many have been
delivered from great infirmities, and the devils were made subject
through His name: of which particular instances might be given
beyond what this unbelieving age is able to receive or bear.[27]
It needs no long study of Fox's writings, however, to arrive at the
conviction that the distinction between subjective and objective
verities had not the same place in his mind as it has in that of an
ordinary mortal. When an ordinary person would say "I thought so and
so," or "I made up my mind to do so and so," George Fox says, "It was
opened to me," or "at the command of God I did so and so." "Then at the
command of God on the ninth day of the seventh month 1643 (Fox being
just nineteen), I left my relations and brake off all familiarity or
friendship with young or old." "About the beginning of the year 1647 I
was moved of the Lord to go into Darbyshire." Fox hears voices and he
sees visions, some of which he brings before the reader with apocalyptic
power in the simple and strong English, alike untutored and undefiled,
of which, like John Bunyan, his contemporary, he was a master.
"And one morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over
me and a temptation beset me; and I sate still. And it was said, _All
things come by Nature_. And the elements and stars came over me; so that
I was in a manner quite clouded with it.... And as I sate still under
it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me and a true voice arose
in me which said, _There is a living God who made all things_. And
immediately the cloud and the temptation vanished away, and life rose
over it all, and my heart was glad and I praised the living God" (p.
13).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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