by violence; but he could get no blood from her.  And I desired them to unbind her and let her alone; for they could not touch the spirit in her by which she was tormented.  So they did unbind her, and I was moved to speak to her, and in the name of the Lord to bid her be quiet and still.  And she was so.  And the Lord’s power settled her mind and she mended; and afterwards received the truth and continued in it to her death.  And the Lord’s name was honoured; to whom the glory of all His works belongs.  Many great and wonderful things were wrought by the heavenly power in those days.  For the Lord made bare His omnipotent arm and manifested His power to the astonishment of many; by the healing virtue whereof many have been delivered from great infirmities, and the devils were made subject through His name:  of which particular instances might be given beyond what this unbelieving age is able to receive or bear.[27]

It needs no long study of Fox’s writings, however, to arrive at the conviction that the distinction between subjective and objective verities had not the same place in his mind as it has in that of an ordinary mortal.  When an ordinary person would say “I thought so and so,” or “I made up my mind to do so and so,” George Fox says, “It was opened to me,” or “at the command of God I did so and so.”  “Then at the command of God on the ninth day of the seventh month 1643 (Fox being just nineteen), I left my relations and brake off all familiarity or friendship with young or old.”  “About the beginning of the year 1647 I was moved of the Lord to go into Darbyshire.”  Fox hears voices and he sees visions, some of which he brings before the reader with apocalyptic power in the simple and strong English, alike untutored and undefiled, of which, like John Bunyan, his contemporary, he was a master.

“And one morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me and a temptation beset me; and I sate still.  And it was said, All things come by Nature.  And the elements and stars came over me; so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it....  And as I sate still under it, and let it alone, a living hope arose in me and a true voice arose in me which said, There is a living God who made all things.  And immediately the cloud and the temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all, and my heart was glad and I praised the living God” (p. 13).

If George Fox could speak, as he proves in this and some other passages he could write, his astounding influence on the contemporaries of Milton and of Cromwell is no mystery.  But this modern reproduction of the ancient prophet, with his “Thus saith the Lord,” “This is the work of the Lord,” steeped in supernaturalism and glorying in blind faith, is the mental antipodes of the philosopher, founded in naturalism and a fanatic for evidence, to whom these affirmations inevitably suggest the previous question:  “How do you know that the Lord saith it?” “How do you know that the Lord doeth it?” and who is compelled to demand that rational ground for belief, without which, to the man of science, assent is merely an immoral pretence.