it is true, lays in her writings over-much stress upon this, the first step of the mystic way--failed to disturb. [Footnote 6: If we except the doomed Port Royalists.] For Fox, we cannot keep too clearly in mind, the relationship of the soul to the Light was a life-process; the "inner" was not in contradistinction to the outer. For him, the great adventure, the abstraction from all externality, the purging of the self, the Godward energizing of the lonely soul, was in the end, as it has been in all the great "actives" among the mystics, the most practical thing in the world, and ultimately fruitful in life-ends. He surprises us by the intensity of his objective vision, by the number of modern movements he anticipates: popular education; the abolition of slavery; the substitution of arbitration for warfare amongst nations, and for litigation between individuals; prison reform, and the revising of accepted notions as to the status of women. He delights us with the strong balance of his godliness, his instant suspicion of religiosity and emotionalism, his dealing with those extremes of physical and mental disturbance which are apt in unstable natures to accompany any sudden flooding of the field of consciousness; his discouragement of ranting and "eloquence," of self-assertion and infallibility--of anything indicating lack of control, or militating against the full operation of the light. But, enormously powerful as was the influence of Fox upon the movement which he liberated and steered, it was at the same time exceptionally free--even in relation to the comparatively imitative mass of the Quaker church--from that limitation which justifies the famous description of an institution as the lengthened shadow of a man. The partial escape of the Quaker church from this almost universal fate of institutions becomes clear when we fix our attention on the essential nature of Fox's "discovery" and what was involved in his offering it to the laity, when we note that within the Quaker borders there arose that insistence on the "originality" of life on all levels that has, at last, in our own day, made its appearance in official philosophy. II The history of the Quaker experiment reveals in England three main movements: the first corresponding roughly to the life of Fox, and covering the period of expansion, persecution,[7] and establishment; the second, which may be called the retreat of Quakerism, the quiet cultivation of Quaker method; and the third, the modern evangelistic revival.