It is a belief which it is hardly possible to inculcate by anything more or less than a direct appeal to experience, to the witness within; and there is the further difficulty, that the experience to which we can appeal only as sharers in it, must be expressed in language very often and very naturally misunderstood. The assertion, however guarded, that one has actual experience of Divine inspiration in one’s own person, is very apt to sound like a claim to personal infallibility. Yet in reality nothing can be further from the mark. The first effect of the shining of light within is to show what is amiss—to “convince of sin.” It is not claiming any superiority to ordinary human conditions to say, in response to such an appeal as that of the Friends just referred to, “Yes, I have indeed been conscious of a power within making manifest to me my sins and errors, and I have indeed experienced its healing and emancipating power as well as its fiery purgings and bitter condemnations. That which has shown me my fault has healed me; the light has led and is leading me onwards and upwards out of the abyss, nearer and nearer to its own eternal Source; and I know that, in so far as I am obedient to it, I am safe.” What is such a reply but an acknowledgment that “the light, the Spirit, and grace of Christ” have indeed been an indwelling, inbreathing power in one’s own heart? If it be a claim to inspiration, it is a claim which implies no merit and no eminence in him who makes it; it is made on ground common to the publican, the prodigal, and the sinner, to Magdalen and to Paul. It is the history of every child returning to the Father’s house. But it is not every one to whom it would be natural to describe this experience in language so mystical as this, nor would the mystic’s experience be likely to stop short at anything so simple and elementary as the process just described. And here we are confronted with the real “peculiarity” of Quakerism—its relation to mysticism. There is no doubt that George Fox himself and the other fathers of the Society were of a strongly mystical turn of mind, though not in the sense in which the word is often used by the worshippers of “common sense,” as a mild term of reproach, to convey a general vague dreaminess. Nothing, certainly, could be less applicable to the early Friends than any such reproach as this. They were fiery, dogmatic, pugnacious, and intensely practical and sober-minded. But they were assuredly mystics in what I take to be the more accurate sense of that word—people, that is, with a vivid consciousness of the inwardness of the light of truth.