There were two kinds of service which the devoted leader rendered to Christian truth--he preached it with zeal and unction, and he suffered for its sake. His sufferings were unquestionably often the result of his own unwisdom. Many Friends themselves now lament his want of a conciliatory spirit. He could not put himself in the place of others, so as to see how they viewed himself, his conduct and his claims. Thus he was constantly led to impute dishonest and impure motives to others if they did not agree with him. All but his own unpaid ministers were "priests" and "hirelings" and so on. But nothing can justify the treatment he received, often through the connivance, sometimes from the instigation, of clergymen and magistrates. Whitefield's hootings and peltings were nothing, in comparison with Fox's stonings, and brutal beatings, and horrible imprisonments. As Marsden says, "He rebuked sin with the authority of a prophet, and he met with a prophet's reward." We must remember in extenuation of his admitted faults that he aimed to be a reformer, appealing afresh to first principles in conduct, and seeking to arouse others to feel their force. He purposely set himself against mere conventionalism, especially when it fostered pride or cloaked some rottenness in society. When persecuted, he never resorted to flattery or depended on wheedling, but appealed to conscience and to the humane or Christian feelings which ought to have been in the breast of the persecutor. He proved to the full the power of passive endurance. Smitten on the one cheek, he literally turned the other. He believed that a large share of his work for the Master was in the testimony of suffering, and he was more anxious to be obedient than to avoid what seemed to him the pains and penalties of obedience. He would not walk out of prison unless he could do it not only honourably, but conscientiously, satisfied that he was not flinching from his appointed testimony. He truly gloried in afflictions for Christ's sake. While refusing to honour an unchristian statute by keeping it, he bore patiently and unresistingly the legal penalties, unshaken in his loyalty to the government and unsoured in his disposition towards mankind. But further, Fox clearly saw that endurance was sure to end in victory, and he inspired his friends with the same conviction. "The more they imprison me," he writes triumphantly, "the more the truth spreads." In the same spirit said William Penn at a later date, "I will weary out their malice. Neither great nor good things were ever attained without loss and hardship. The man that would reap and not labour must perish in disappointment." No wonder that men grew weary of punishing those who endured in this spirit. No wonder that the lofty conscientiousness of the Quakers was felt to be the salt which had a large share in counteracting the corruption of the Stuart reigns, and in preserving our civil and religious liberties. Says Orme in his Life of Baxter,