George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, confesses that he "fasted much" and "walked abroad in solitary places," and "frequently in the night walked about mournfully by myself." After much brooding and fasting, he heard a voice which said, "There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition." Such an experience is not at all surprising, seeing the method pursued to acquire it. Less fasting and brooding, with more genial intercourse with his fellows, might easily have prevented Fox, as it has prevented others, hearing heavenly voices proffering him counsel. Such an experience is well within the reach of anyone who cares to acquire it. Tylor has well said that "So long as fasting is continued as a religious rite, so long the consequences in morbid mental exaltation will continue the old savage doctrine that morbid phantasy is supernatural experience. Bread and meat would have robbed the ascetic of many an angel's visit; the opening of the refectory door must many a time have closed the gate of heaven to his gaze." No one will question the truth of this principle, so long as we are dealing with uncivilised mankind. Many, however, shrink from acknowledging that the practices current in more civilised times are disguised illustrations of the same principle of interpretation, which descends direct from savages, and but for them would never have existed. Commenting on the practices of certain savage medicine-men, a missionary remarks:-- "It always appeared probable to me that these rogues, from long fasting, contract a weakness of brain, a giddiness, a kind of delirium, which makes them imagine that they are gifted with superior wisdom, and give themselves out for physicians. They impose upon themselves first, and afterwards upon others."[33] This is shrewdly said, and is a good example of the readiness with which obvious truths are recognised when they do not clash with religious prepossessions. The difficulty for others is to discern any real line of demarcation between the practices of civilised and uncivilised. So far as one can see, the only real distinction is that the method employed by savages is open. That followed by civilised people is more or less disguised. But derangement of function is derangement of function, no matter how produced. And if we decline to believe that a savage holds genuine intercourse with a spiritual world, as a consequence of this derangement, in what way are we justified in accepting the testimony of a Christian visionary to similar intercourse, when the derangement is in his case no less clear? It is a case of accepting both, or neither. The sane and scientific conclusion seems to lie in the following from Dr. Henry Maudsley:--