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welcome. At length she left for Genoa and, as she left, Louis XIV died.

We know little of the remainder of her life. She passed over four years at Genoa, and there is reason to believe that she employed her time largely in political intrigue, even coquetting with the idea of returning to Spain. At the end, she retired to Rome, where she lived for eighteen months only, and where she died in 1722, at the age of eighty. During these months she attached herself to the toy court of the Old Pretender, and so ended her days happily and harmlessly, having secured absolute domination over yet another young royal pair, but this time over a king with no kingdom and a queen with no throne. She had never enriched herself at the expense of her office, yet she did not die in poverty, and she had the satisfaction of surviving Mme. de Maintenon, and living to see Alberoni disgraced and Philip already more than half-mad. Childless she was, but it is no exaggeration to say that the Spanish kingdom of to-day is her child, for without her efforts Philip could never have kept his

crown.

The muse of biography is a wayward mistress, but she is often kind to her votaries if they are prepared to strike the happy mean between solemnity and wantonness-and she has been kind to both Mme. Taillandier and Miss Cruttwell. It must be confessed that the English writer's vision of her subject appears the more vivid and human of the two, and Miss Cruttwell has the advantage of giving us, in a series of footnotes, references for her statements; references, some of which Mme. Taillandier has apparently overlooked, though it is only fair to say that there are moments when this situation seems to be reversed. It would be hard to expect a Frenchwoman to volunteer evidence tending to diminish the majesty and authority of Louis XIV, and though Mme. Taillandier writes like an angel and Miss Cruttwell's chronicle reads like a fairy tale, England appears to one reader, at least, to have the psychological advantage over France in these two re-creations of the amazing personality of the Princesse des Ursins.

WILLIAM KING

I.

2.

QUAKERISM

The Faith and Practice of the Quakers. By RUFUS M. JONES, Litt.D., LL.D. Methuen. 1927.

William Law and Eighteenth Century Quakerism. By STEPHEN HOBHOUSE, M.A. George Allen and Unwin. 1927.

3. A Quaker Saint of Cornwall. Loveday Hambly and her Guests. By L. V. HODGKIN (Mrs. John Holdsworth). Longmans, Green. 1927. The Beginnings of Quakerism. By WILLIAM C. BRAITHWAite, B.A., LL.B. Macmillan. 1912.

4.

5. The Second Period of Quakerism. By WILLIAM C. BRAITHWAITE, B.A., LL.B. Macmillan. 1919.

6. The Quakers in the American Colonies. By RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt. Macmillan. 1911.

Fox's Journal, Barclay's Apology, Penn's Works, Ellwood's Life, and many other books.

A

BRILLIANT Frenchman, in describing the religious denominations of the United States, says of the Quakers that" they are solid middle-class folk, with scrupulous consciences sitting on their money-bags "(" les quakers, des bourgeois solides à la conscience scrupuleuse, assis sur des sacs d'or "). The description is not attractive, but it is, perhaps, more unkind than unjust. At any rate, it is near enough to the truth to be a successful caricature, and indicates sufficiently the paradox which the history of Quakerism presents. How did the extravagant sectaries who owned George Fox as an inspired prophet, and goaded their contemporaries-Puritans and Anglicans alike-into violent persecution, develop so quickly into the most demure, respectable and respected of all the Christian sects? The Quaker in modern Christendom is the synonym of wealth, philanthropy, religious aloofness and a certain indefinable assumption of spiritual superiority, which is at once provoking and attractive. In the seventeenth century, the Quakers seemed to combine the offensive attributes of the ranter, the antinomian, the suffragette, and the anarchist. The eighteenth century had not advanced far before they had so completely shed their original characteristics as to be the accepted embodiments of smug and prosperous respectability. "To speak freely," wrote John Wesley, addressing the Quakers in 1745, "you cannot but observe, upon cool reflection, that you retain just so much of your ancient practice as leaves

your present without excuse: as makes the inconsistency between the one and the other glaring and undeniable." He denounced the hypocritical casuistry by which the Quakers were accustomed to explain away the distinctive disciplines on which their founder had laid so much store, and which had been clung to by his immediate followers at so heavy a cost of odium and suffering. Formalism and worldliness went hand in hand, and under the sinister influence of these baleful tempers evangelistic ardour had expired, and the fraternal charity, which had been the glory of the early" Friends," was visibly failing.

It is easy to discern how your people fell into this snare of the devil. You were at first a poor, despised, afflicted people. Then, what some of you had to spare, was little enough to relieve the needy members of your own society. In a few years you increased in goods, and were able to relieve more than your own poor. But you did not bestow all that you had to spare from them on the poor belonging to other societies. It remained either to lay it up, or to expend it in superfluities. Some chose one way, and some the other.

To John Wesley, aflame with missionary ardour, these respectable and well-to-do sectaries seemed the very expression of the lifeless Pharisaism which he denounced and fought against. "Go not near the tent of those dead, formal men called Quakers," was his counsel to a convert.

The seventeenth century in England was the insular counterpart of the sixteenth century in Europe, for the conditions under which the Reformation was carried through in England had the effect of postponing the spiritual crisis which it implied for nearly a century. When Henry VIII broke with the Pope, he recast the national Church accordingly, but he had no desire or intention of altering the national religion. He clung to the paradoxical policy of retaining the medieval system of faith and worship within the framework of an independent national Church. His attitude of ecclesiastical innovation and religious conservatism commended itself to the mass of his subjects. English people retained their adhesion to the medieval system of faith and worship far longer than is commonly supposed. The revolutionary interlude under Edward VI was too brief to affect the popular belief, and the Catholic reaction under Mary failed for other than religious reasons. Elizabeth's famous compromise went quite as far in the Protestant direction as the country would stand, and it was not until the collapse of the monarchy in the middle of the

seventeenth century, that the door was opened in England for that outburst of spiritual individualism which in Germany and Holland (where, from the first, the Reformation had been mainly a popular movement) was an early consequence of the religious revolution. Accordingly, when the new leaven began to work in England, there already existed on the continent the precedents and models of individualistic religion, which were eagerly appropriated and applied by the English sectaries.

In a series of remarkable volumes, edited by Dr. Rufus M. Jones, the spiritual ancestry of the Quakers has been investigated with pious ardour, indefatigable industry, and great literary ability. Probably no religious denomination has been better served by its apologists and advocates. We are enabled to place the Quaker movement in its historic setting, and to see it, not as its contemporaries saw it a monstrous portent springing suddenly into the arena like Melchisedech, "without father, without mother, without descent "--but as a notable expression of a spiritual tendency, truly coeval with Christianity itself, which had been stimulated by the crisis of the Reformation, and now found its representatives in those "mystical" Reformers who appeared in Germany and Holland on the morrow of Luther's revolt.

They themselves were not founders of sects or churches. Their sole mission was the propagation of a message, of a body of truth and of spiritual ideals. They were, from the nature of the case, destined to be voices crying in a wilderness-world, and they were obliged to trust their precious cause to the contagion of their word and life and truth. The Quakers of the seventeenth century are, obviously, one of the great historical results of this slowly maturing spiritual movement, and they first gave the unorganized and inarticulate movement a concrete body and organism to express itself through. The modern student, who goes to the original expositions of Quakerism to find what the leaders of this movement conceived their message and their mission to be, quickly discovers that they were not radical innovators setting forth novel and strange ideas, but that they were, on the contrary, the bearers, the interpreters, the living embodiment of ideas (of earlier spiritual reformers*).

The Civil War gave a terrific shock to authority as well ecclesiastical as civil, broke down the traditional disciplines of English life, and created in English minds a reckless questioning

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Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th centuries," p. 337.

temper which respected no boundaries of reticence and reverence. England became a humming hive of political and religious speculation. Individualism was naked and not ashamed. The orgy of sectarianism, which Baxter lamented, and Butler satirised, broke wildly over the country. With the English Bible in hand, illiterate men of the humblest class poured out the strangest opinions. All the Lord's people were prophets. It was in this milieu of excited fanaticism that George Fox spent his early manhood. His fierce protest against the meticulous and unloving dogmatism of the Puritans was shaped by the confusions of the time. It is certainly important to remember that Quakerism came into existence as a revolt, not against the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England, but against the severe and bigoted Calvinistic sectaries-Presbyterian, Independent, and Baptist for the most part-who had replaced it in the parishes. After the Restoration, Fox complained of being excommunicated for not attending the services of a Church which had never given him any opportunity of learning its tenets :

"Why," said I, "ye left us above twenty years ago, when we were but young lads and lassies, to the Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, many of whom made spoil of our goods and persecuted us, because we would not follow them. Now we, being but young, knew little then of your principles, and if ye had intended to keep the old men that did know them to you, and your principles alive that we might have known them, ye should either not have fled from us as ye did, or ye should have sent us your epistles, collects, homilies and evensongs; for Paul wrote epistles to the saints though he was in prison. But they and we might have turned Turks or Jews for any collects, homilies, or epistles we had from you all the while."

Fox's protest against the externalism of dogma and sacrament was eagerly welcomed by many who were hungering for a more spiritual religion than the reigning sects could offer. The soil had been prepared by a crowd of obscure mystics generally known as Seekers :

These Seekers or Waiters, who felt the insufficiency of the current doctrinal and external religion, and were not yet brought into a deeper soul-satisfying experience afforded the most receptive soil in England for the message of Fox. Indeed, it is not too much to say that over the part of England where Quakerism planted itself most readily the communities of Seekers had already prepared the way. There were

"Journal," vol. ii, p. 42; London, 1852.

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