This belief in the divine light within the individual soul was, of course, nothing new. The Roman Church had taught it. Instruction as to the conditions whereby it may have its way with a man was the end of her less worldly labours. The Protestants taught it; the acceptance of salvation, the birth of the light in the darkness of the individual soul was the message of the Book. But George Fox and his followers claimed that the measure of divine life, nesting, as it were, within the life of each man, was universal, was before churches and scriptures, and had always led mankind. Yet it was not to be confused with the natural light of reason of the Socinians and Deists, for the first step towards union with it was a control of all creaturely activities, a total abandonment of each and every claim of the surface intelligence--"notions," as the Quakers called them--a process of retirement into the innermost region of being, into "the light," "the seed," "the ground of the soul," "that which hath convinced you." The God of the Quakers, then, was no literary obsession coming to meet them along the pages of history; no traditional immensity visiting man once, and silent ever since, to be momentarily invoked from infinite spatial distance by external means of grace; no "notion," no mere metaphysical absolute, but a living process, a changing, changeless absolute, a breath controlling all things, an amazing birth within the soul. Tradition they valued as a record of God's dealings with man. The Bible held for them no enfeebling spell. Their controversial writings have, indeed, anticipated, as has recently been pointed out,[5] the methods of the higher criticism; they touch on the synoptic problems; they ask their biblicist opponents whether they are talking of original autographs, transcribed copies, or translations. They rally them: "Who was it that said to the Spirit of God, O Spirit, blow no more, inspire no more men, make no more prophets from Ezra's days downward till Christ, and from John's days downward for ever? But cease, be silent, and subject thyself, as well as all evil spirits, to be tried by the standard that's made up of some of the writings of some of those men thou hast moved to write already; and let such and such of them as are bound up in the bibles now used in England be the only means of measuring all truth for ever." [Footnote 5: William C. Braithwaite: _The Beginnings of Quakerism._ (Macmillan, 1912.)] The Incarnation was to them the one instance of a perfect shining of the light, a perfect realization of the fusion of human and divine, the full indwelling of the Godhead, which was their goal. The incidents of that life shone clear to them in the light of what went forward in themselves in proportion as they struggled to live in the spirit.