No doubt the founders of the Society of Friends had their share of such instructive and at times mortifying experience.[30] They were brave men, and knew the reality of their own deep experience, and were not easily discouraged by a few extravagances (they appear, indeed, to have been remarkably few) amongst their followers. But there is reason to think that they were strongly impressed with the importance of specially guarding the sobriety becoming the children of the day, at a time when their own preaching was working in men’s minds like new wine. Besides the one great and invariable safeguard of their constant preaching of righteousness, and appeal to the light without as the test of the reality of the light within, there were two special precautions which they consciously or unconsciously took against the danger of spiritual, or _quasi_-spiritual, excitement. One of these was the full recognition that the action of the Spirit of God upon the heart consisted not only in impulse but in restraint, and that for its right interpretation the part of the creature was to be quiet. “Stand still in the light” is one of the familiar burdens of George Fox’s advice. Friends were, and are still, as carefully taught to submit to the restraints as to yield to the impulses of “best wisdom.” To “dwell deep,” to “pause upon it,” not to proceed unless “way opens,” nor on any account to disregard a “stop in one’s mind,”—these and many such familiar Quaker admonitions show by how much “holy fear” their zeal has habitually been tempered. “Quietism” is, indeed, the natural accompaniment of “mysticism” (of mysticism, that is, in the sense of belief in the inner light). That a vivid sense of the presence of the Creator should bring stillness to the creature is inevitable. And only under the restraining and controlling power of the deep awe thus inspired can it be safe or wholesome for the human spirit to stand in the immediate presence of its own Divine Source. There was surely a deep truth in the old Hebrew feeling, “Shall man see God and live?” Religious emotion need not be unreal to be unwholesome. The deeper the chord stirred, the more awful the danger arising from any jarring or deviation from the due and steady amount of tension.