A new sect naturally attracts to itself a portion of the madmen of the time, and sets another portion into activity as alarmists and oppugnants. I cannot therefore pretend to say what More might not have found in the writings, or heard from the mouth, of some lunatic who called himself a Quaker. But I do not recollect, in any work of an acknowledged Friend, a denial of the facts narrated by the Evangelists, as having really taken place in the same sense as any other facts of history. If they were symbols of spiritual acts and processes, as Fox and Penn contended, they must have been, or happened;--else how could they be symbols? It is too true, however, that the positive creed of the Quakers is and ever has been extremely vague and misty. The deification of the conscience, under the name of the Spirit, seems the main article of their faith; and of the rest they form no opinion at all, considering it neither necessary nor desirable. I speak of Quakers in general. But what a lesson of experience does not this thirteenth chapter of so great and good a man as H. More afford to us, who know what the Quakers really are! Had the followers of George Fox, or any number of them collectively, acknowledged the mad notions of this Hendrick Nicholas? If not---- INQUIRY INTO THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY. Part II. ii. c. 2. Confutation of Grotius on the 17th chapter of the Apocalypse. Has or has not Grotius been overrated? If Grotius applied these words ('magnus testis et historiarum diligentissimus inquisitor') to Epiphanius in honest earnest, and not ironically, he must have been greatly inferior in sound sense and critical tact both to Joseph Scaliger and to Rhenferd. Strange, that to Henry More, a poet and a man of fine imagination, it should never have occurred to ask himself, whether this scene, Patmos, with which the drama commences, was not a part of the poem, and, like all other parts, to be interpreted symbolically? That the poetic--and I see no reason for doubting the real--date of the Apocalypse is under Vespasian, is so evidently implied in the five kings preceding (for Galba, Otho, and Vitellius, were abortive emperors) that it seems to me quite lawless to deny it. That [Greek: Lateinos] is the meaning of the 666, (c. xiii. 18.) and the treasonable character of this, are both shown by Irenæus's pretended rejection, and his proposal of the perfectly senseless 'Teitan' instead. [Footnote 1: Folio. 1708.--Ed.] [Footnote 2: 'Decem dierum vix mihi est familia'. Heaut. v. i.--Ed.] [Footnote 3: Hendrick Nicholas and the Family of Love.--Ed.] HEINRICHS'S COMMENTARY ON THE APOCALYPSE. [1] P. 245. It seems clear that Irenæus invented the unmeaning 'Teitan', in order to save himself from the charge of treason, to which the 'Lateinos' might have exposed him. See Rabelais 'passim'. P.246. 'Nec magis blandiri poterit alterum illud nomen, Teitan, quod studiose commendavit Irenoeus'.