phrases evidently imported that God had made bad mornings and bad evenings. To talk of the month of March was to worship Mars; and to talk of Monday was to pay idolatrous homage to the moon. A Christian was bound to face death itself rather than touch his hat to the greatest of mankind. Bowing was considered as the effect of Satanical influence, for the woman in the gospel, while she had a spirit of infirmity, was bowed together, and ceased to bow as soon as divine power had liberated her from the tyranny of the evil one. Fox long wandered from place to place, teaching this strange theology, shaking like an aspen leaf in his paroxysms of fanatical excitement, forcing his way into churches which he nicknamed steeple-houses, interrupting prayers and sermons with clamour and scurrility, and pestering rectors and justices with epistles much resembling burlesques of those sublime odes in which the Hebrew prophets foretold the calamities of Babylon and Tyre. He soon acquired great notoriety by these religious feats. His strange face, his nasal chant, his immovable hat, and his leather breeches, were known all over the country. He was repeatedly imprisoned and set in the stocks, sometimes justly, for disturbing the public worship of congregations; sometimes unjustly, for merely talking nonsense. He soon gathered round him a body of disciples, some of whom went beyond himself in absurdity. He also made some converts, as Barclay and Penn, to whom he was immeasurably inferior in everything, except the energy of his convictions. By these converts his rude doctrines were polished into a form somewhat less shocking to good sense and good taste. His gibberish was translated into English; and his system so much improved that he himself might have been excused if he had hardly known it. To the last his disciples professed profound reverence for him; and his crazy epistles were received and read in Quaker meetings all over the country. This founder of the Quaker sect died in 1690.[92] ----- Footnote 92: Macaulay. ----- As already intimated in a previous chapter, Samuel Wesley, like Macaulay, had no great liking for the Quakers. The following article, taken from the _Athenian Oracle_, vol. i. p. 331, in which the Quakers and Papists are compared, will tend to show his opinions concerning a sect which were much more numerous about two hundred years ago than they are at present, and whose views and vagaries then were much more wild than happily they are now:—