Just at this time Muggleton "fell into a melancholy." He had arrived at the prophetic age--he had completed his fortieth year. "Then did two motives arise in me and speak in me as two lively voices, as if two spirits had been speaking in me, one answering the other as if they were not my own spirit." So that our noble laureate was anticipated by two centuries, unless indeed the "two lively voices" make themselves heard at times to most men who have ears to hear them. Muggleton's voices were not very high-toned voices; they were voices that spake of heaven and hell, nothing more. Love and duty never seem to have formed the subject of his meditations. "For I did not so much mind to be saved, as I did to escape being damn'd. For I thought, if I could but lie still in the earth for ever, it would be as well with me as it would be if I were in eternal happiness... for I did not care whether I was happy so I might not be miserable. I cared not for heaven so I might not go to hell. These things pressed hard upon my soul, even to the wounding of it." The battle within him went on fiercely for some time, and it ended as we should have expected. "I was so well satisfied in my mind as to my eternal happiness, that I was resolved now to be quiet and to get as good a living as I could in this world and live as comfortably as I could here, thinking that this revelation should have been beneficial to nobody but myself." The "motional voices," and visions, and questionings, continued from April 1651 to January 1652; and it was during this time that the intimacy between Muggleton and Reeve became more closely cemented, for "John Reeve was so taken with my language that his desires were _extreme earnest_ that he might have the same revelation as I had. His desires were so great that he was troublesome unto me, for if I went into one room, into another, he would follow me to talk to me." His persistence was rewarded, and just when Muggleton's visions ceased "in the month of January 1652, about the middle of the month, John Reeve came to me very joyful and said, Cousin Lodowick, now said he, I know what revelation of Scripture is as well as thee." Reeve's revelations increased, and never ceased for two weeks. "First visions, then by voice of words to the hearing of the ear three mornings together the third, fourth, and fifth days of February, 1652, and the year of John Reeve's life forty-two, and the year of my life forty-one." Two men in this curious ecstatic condition obviously could not stop at this point. It was a critical moment--would they enter into rivalry or spiritual partnership? If the latter, then who was to be the leader, who would make the first move? It was soon settled.