He early recognized the need of a definite church organization, and matured a system whose final acceptance by the society as a whole was helped on by an incident occurring during his eight months' confinement in Launceston gaol.[9] James Nayler, one of the sweetest and ablest of Quaker writers and preachers, of an acutely "suggestible" temperament, and less stable than his followers, unsettled by the success attending his work both in the north and the south and by the adulations of some of the more excitable of his fellow-workers, permitted on the occasion of his entry into Bristol a triumphant procession, the singing of hosannas, and Messianic worship. It is noteworthy that of the thousand odd Quakers in Bristol at the time not one took any part in the outbreak. The matter was taken up by Parliament, a committee was appointed, and Nayler came near being put to death for blasphemy. He suffered in the pillory, was whipped through London and Bristol, his tongue was bored, his forehead branded, and he was kept in prison for three years. He made full public recantation of his errors, and enjoyed full communion with the society which had never repudiated him, recognizing even in his time of aberration the fine spiritual character of the man. This incident, loaded with publicity, brought much discouragement to Friends; but it also showed them their need of the organization and discipline insisted upon by Fox. And so the Quaker church--the most flexible of all religious organizations--came into being. [Footnote 9: Part of which was spent in a dungeon reserved for witches and murderers, and left uncleansed year after year.] CHAPTER III THE QUAKER CHURCH At the heart of the Quaker church is "meeting"--the silent Quaker meeting so long a source of misunderstanding to those outside the body, so clearly illuminated now for all who care to glance that way, by the light of modern psychology. We have now at our disposal, marked out with all the wealth of spatial terminology characteristic of that science, a rough sketch of what takes place in our minds in moments of silent attention. We are told, for instance, that when in everyday life our attention is arrested by something standing out from the cinematograph show of our accustomed surroundings, we fix upon this one point, and everything else fades away to the "margin" of consciousness. The "thing" which has had the power of so arresting us, of making a breach in the normal, unnoticed rhythm of the senses, allows our "real self"--our larger and deeper being, to which so many names have been given--to flow up and flood the whole field of the surface intelligence. The typical instances of this phenomenon are, of course, the effect upon the individual of beauty on all its levels--the experience known as falling in love and the experience of "conversion."