With the new rising tide of fervent zeal and benevolence came a great change in the prevailing tone of religious feeling. The Bible, which, in their dread lest the letter should usurp the place of the spirit, had amongst Friends been almost put under a bushel, was brought into new prominence, and so-called “evangelical” views respecting the unique or exceptional nature of its inspiration began to be entertained. Gradually the idea of the necessity of teaching “sound doctrine” assumed an importance which had formerly been reserved for that of looking for “right guidance;” and in some quarters a visible tendency has, of late years, been manifest towards more definition of doctrines and popularizing of methods than would have been tolerated half a century ago.[26] Although these modern tendencies have undoubtedly been accompanied by, and have probably in some degree led to, an increase in our numbers, a strong protest has from time to time been raised against them by those who feel that Quakerism had its root and its strength in a deep inward and spiritual experience which frees from all dependence upon outward things. In America the protest against (or, as those who protest would no doubt rather say, the introduction of) this modern phase of comparatively superficial religious activity has caused grievous schisms and troubles. About the year 1826, a large party, under the leadership of one Elias Hicks, in that country broke off altogether from the main body of Friends, and is suspected by the “orthodox” of having, under professed obedience to the inner light, become practically a Unitarian or rationalist body. In England, however, the two main currents have flowed side by side, and have not resulted in any considerable division of the stream. Both parties claim to be taking their stand upon the original principles of the early Friends. Those who uphold above all things the doctrine of the inner light, and the primary necessity of immediate inspiration and guidance to the bringing forth of any good word or work, and especially to the performance of any acceptable worship, have abundant evidence to produce, in the writings of Fox, Barclay, Penn, Penington, and other fathers of the Society, that this was the foundation and the constant burden of all their teaching. Those, on the other hand, who are throwing themselves heart and soul into missionary and “evangelistic” efforts, say truly enough that the early Friends did not so “wait for guidance” as to be content to sit still and make no effort to lighten the darkness around them, and that it was the intermediate or “mediæval,” not the “primitive” teaching of the Society which exalted the individual consciousness into the supreme authority, thus developing, in fact, a claim to something approaching personal infallibility.