But neither was this claim, the assertion of an immediate pathway to reality within the man himself, anything new in the world. Each nation, each great period of civilization, has produced individuals, or groups separated by time and creed, but unanimous in their testimony as to its existence. The giants among them stand upon the highest peaks of human civilization. Their art or method in debased or arrested forms is to be found in every valley. They have been called "mystics," and it is to the classical century of European mysticism, to the group (of which Tauler was the mainstay) calling themselves the "Friends of God," that we must go for an outbreak of mystical genius akin to that which took place in seventeenth-century England. Both groups made war on the official Christianity of their day, and strove to relate Christendom afresh to its true source of vitality, to re-form the church on a spiritual basis. The testimony, the end, and the means for the attainment of the end were the same in both. The immense distinction between them arose from the difference in the conditions under which the two ventures were made. The fourteenth-century mystics opened their eyes in a congenial environment, in a church whose symbolism, teaching, and ordinances, were a coherent reflection of their own experiences, stood justified by their personal knowledge of the "law" of spiritual development, the conditions of advance in the way on which their feet were set. They owed much to tradition, to their theological studies, to their familiarity with the recorded experiences of holy men; they recognized their church as the transmitter of this tradition, as the guardian of saintly testimony on the subject of their art. They recognized her, not as an end but as a means, not as a prison, but as a home for all the human family, keeping open her doors, on the one hand, to the unconverted, providing, on the other, a suitable medium, the right atmosphere and opportunities, whereby pilgrims in the spiritual life might develop, to their full, possibilities in advance of the common measure of the group. They chid her, they exposed abuses, and called for reforms; they challenged the "carnal conception" of the sacraments, and denounced the loose lives of her dignitaries; but they remained in the church. The Quakers, on the contrary, appeared when few of those who were in authority were able to understand what had arisen in their midst. Fox brought his challenge by the wayside; untrammelled by tradition, fearless in inexperience, he endowed all men with his own genius, and called upon the whole world to join him in the venture of faith. CHAPTER II THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS I