Note 380 — Chapter I

Journal, p. 89. This theopathetic mysticism is emphatically transitive. Every inward manifestation speedily becomes a something to be done, a testimony to be delivered. The Quaker is ‘exercised,’ not that he may deck himself in the glory of saintship, but to fit him for rendering service, as he supposes, to his fellows. The early followers of Fox often caricatured the acted symbolism of the Hebrew prophets with the most profane or ludicrous unseemliness. Yet stark-mad as seemed the fashion of their denunciations, their object was very commonly some intelligible and actual error or abuse.