These characteristic neo-Protestantisms were obscured at the moment of the appearance of the Quakers by the opening in this country of the full blossom of the Genevan theology. The fate of the Presbyterian system, which covered England like a network, and had threatened during the shifting policies of Charles's long struggle for absolute monarchy to become the established church of England, was sealed, it is true, when Cromwell's Independent army checked the proceedings of a Presbyterian House of Commons; but the Calvinian reading of the scriptures had prevailed over the popular imagination, and in the Protectorate Church where Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians held livings side by side with the clergy of the Protestant Establishment, where the use of the Prayer-Book was forbidden and the scriptures were at last supreme, the predominant type of religious culture was what we have since learned to call Puritanism. In 1648 Puritanism had reached its great moment. Its poet[2] was growing to manhood, tortured by the uncertainty of election, half-maddened by his vision of the doom hanging over a sin-stained world. But far away beneath the institutional confusions and doctrinal dilemmas of this post-Reformation century fresh life was welling up. The unsatisfied religious energy of the maturing Germanic peoples, groping its own way home, had produced Boehme and his followers, and filled the by-ways of Europe with mystical sects. Outwards from free Holland--whose republic on a basis of religious toleration had been founded in 1579--spread the Anabaptists, Mennonites, and others. Coming to England, they reinforced the native groups--the Baptists, Familists, and Seekers--who were preaching personal religion up and down the country under the protection of Cromwell's indulgence for "tender" consciences, and found their characteristically English epitome and spokesman in George Fox. [Footnote 2: Bunyan was born in 1628, four years later than Fox.] Born in an English village[3] of homely pious parents,[4] who were both in sympathy with their thoughtful boy, his genius developed harmoniously and early.