of one under a bondage, keeping him from that which he knows to be accessible. One minister advised tobacco and psalm-singing, another physic and bleeding. His family urged him to marry. His distress grew, amounting sometimes to acute agony of mind: "As I cannot declare the great misery I was in, it was so great and heavy upon me, so neither can I set forth the mercies of God unto me in all my misery." Brief intermissions there were when he was "brought into such a joy that I thought I had been in Abraham's bosom." But on the whole his wretchedness steadily increased. None could help. The written word had ceased to comfort him. He wandered days and nights in solitary places taking no food. Illumination came at last--a series of convictions dawning in the mind that truth cannot be found in outward things, and, finally, the moment of release--the sense of which he tries to convey to us under the symbolism of a voice making his heart leap for joy--leaving him remade in a new world. Two striking passages from his Journal may serve to illustrate this period of his experience: "The Lord did gently lead me along, and did let me see His love, which was endless and eternal, and surpasseth all the knowledge that men have in the natural state, or can get by history or books ... and I was afraid of all company, for I saw them perfectly where they were, through the love of God which let me see myself"; and, again, as he struggles to express the change that had taken place for him: "Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before beyond what words can utter." Two years of intense life followed. He came back to the world with his message for all men, all churches, with no new creed to preach, but to call all men to see their creeds in the light of the living experience which had first produced them, to live themselves in that light shining pure and original within each one of them, the light which wrote the scriptures and founded the churches; to refuse to be put off any longer with "notions," mere doctrines, derivative testimonies obscuring the immediate communication of life to the man himself. This message--the message of the inner light of immediate inspiration, of the existence in every man of some measure of the Spirit of God--the Quakers laid, as it were, side by side with the doctrines of the Puritanism amidst which they were born. They did not escape the absolute dualism of the thought of their day. They believed man to be shut up in sin, altogether evil, and they declared at the same time that there is in every man that which will, if he yields to its guidance, lift him above sin, is able to make him here and now free and sinless. The essential irreconcilability of the two positions does not appear to have troubled them.