The Quakers have never, in spite of their deprecation of the written word and their insistence on the secondariness of even the highest "notions" and doctrines, been backward in defending their faith. They sat at the feet of no man, nor did they desire that any man should sit at theirs; but when they met, not merely at the hands of the wilder sectaries, but from sober, godly people, with accusations of blasphemy, when they were told that they denied Christ and the Scriptures, they rose up and justified themselves. They were fully equal to those who attacked them in the savoury vernacular of the period, in apocalyptic metaphor, in trouncings and denunciations. Bunyan, their relentless opponent throughout, is thus apostrophized by Burrough: "Alas for thee, John Bunion! thy several months' travail in grief and pain is a fruitless birth, and perishes as an untimely fig, and its praise is blotted out among men, and it's passed away as smoke." But throughout the vehemence of the Friends' controversial writings runs the sense of fair play--the fearlessness of truth; the spirit, so to say, of tolerance of every belief in the midst of their intolerance of an "unvital" attitude in the believer. Their positive attitude to life, their grand affirmation, redeems much that on other grounds seems regrettable. By the time the classical apologist of Quakerism--Robert Barclay, a member of an ancient Scottish family, liberally educated at Aberdeen College and in Paris, who had on his conversion forced himself to ride through the streets of his city in sackcloth and ashes--had published his book,[13] any justification of Quakerism had, from the point of view of the laity at large, ceased to be necessary. They had had some thirty years' experience of the fruits of the doctrine; they knew the Quakers as neighbours; had scented something of the sweet fragrance of their austerity; had wondered at their independence of happenings, their freedom from fear, their centralized strength, their picking their way, so to say, amongst the externalities of life with the calm assurance of those who hold a clue where most men blunder, driven by fear or selfish desire. They knew them, moreover, as untiringly available outside their own circle on behalf of every sort of distress. The custodians, amateur and official, of theology still preyed upon them, though many of these were, no doubt, disarmed by the Puritan orthodoxy of the background upon which Barclay's rationale of the Quaker's attitude is wrought. [Footnote 13: _An Apology for the True Christian Divinity._ 1678.] There is ample evidence that he was widely read, both in England and abroad, and the fact that no one took up the challenge, though Baxter and Bunyan were still living and working, may perhaps be accounted for by the absence in the _Apology_ of any clear statement of the real irreconcilability between Quakerism and attitudes that are primarily doctrinal or institutional.