From the Protestant point of view he becomes the man who made a temporarily successful attempt to undermine the authority of the Scriptures; his failure being attested by the return of the majority of the Quakers, from the third generation onwards, to biblicism--their tacit throwing up of their earlier position with regard to the inward light. The "free" churches find in Fox the collector and organizer of a type of Christian believers whose shining record has so fully justified his essential soundness and unity with the main purpose of Christendom that minor differences may be ignored. Students of mysticism, Christian mysticism in particular, seeing Fox as one in the long line of those who have adventured into the undivided truth they find stirring within their own souls, have placed him amongst the grand "actives" of European mysticism. Here and there an attempt has been made to disentangle the essential distinction of the man himself from his relation to groups and abstract ideas, and to show that distinctive character working itself out in his life and writings, and in the varying history of the church he founded. II. To the present writer George Fox appeals not only by the inherent strength of his mystical genius, not only because amongst his fellows in the mystical family he is, characteristically, the practical western layman, the market-place witness for the spiritual consciousness in every man, but also because he is, essentially, the English mystic--because he represents, at the height of its first blossoming, the peculiar genius of the English "temperament." He is English particularism, English independency and individualism expressed in terms of religion, and offering its challenge, for the first time, in the open to all the world. This is his unique contribution to the evolution of Christendom.