that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day star arise in your hearts," and had developed his theme in the sense that the sure word of prophecy was the record of the Scripture. Fox--whom we may imagine already much the man William Penn later on described for us as "no busybody or self-seeker, neither touchy nor critical ... so meek, contented, modest, easy, steady, tender, it was a pleasure to be in his company.... I never saw him out of his place or not a match for every service and occasion; for in all things he acquitted himself like a man--yea, a strong man, a new and heavenly-minded man--civil beyond all forms of breeding in his behaviour"--rose with his challenge, threw down the gauntlet to biblicism, and declared that the Light was not the Scriptures, but the Spirit of God.... But, as we have seen, religious England was not wholly Puritan. Fox's world was waiting for him. From every denomination and every rank of society the Children of the Light came forth. Very many--notably the nuclear members of small independent groups--had reached the Quaker experience before he came. The beliefs and customs which have since been identified with the Society of Friends were already in existence in the group of Separated Baptists at Mansfield in Nottingham, which formed in face of the closed doors of official religion the centre of the little Quaker church. The singleness of type, moreover, in the missionary work of the early Quakers, extending, as it did, over the whole of Christendom, carried on independently by widely differing natures--"narrow" nonconformist ministers, prosperous business men, army officers and privates, shepherds, cloth-makers, gentlewomen and domestic servants, under every variety of circumstance, would be enough in itself to reveal Fox as the child of his time. But as we watch the movement, as we see it assailed by those dangers arising wherever systems and doctrines are left behind and reason gets to work upon the facts of a man's own experience; as we find the fresh life threatening here to crystallize into formal idealism, there to flow away into pantheism or antinomianism, again to pour into a dead sea of placid illumination; as we see the little church surviving these dangers and continually reviving, we recognize that Fox was more than the liberator of mystical activity. He was its steersman. His constructive genius cast the mould which has enabled this experiment to escape the fate overtaking similar efforts. Seventeenth-century mysticism in France[6] and Spain was succumbing to Quietism. Molinos, the Spanish monk, a contemporary of Fox, popularized a debased form of Teresian mysticism, formulating it as a state "where the soul loses itself in the soft and savoury sleep of nothingness, and enjoys it knows not what"; while in France the practice of passive contemplation had gained in the religious life of the time a popularity which even the mystical genius of Madame Guyon--who herself,