of Christ; even
through that darkness was I brought which covered over all the world
and shut up all in the death.... And I saw the harvest white and the
seed of God lying thick in the ground, as ever did wheat that was sown
outwardly, and I mourned that there was none to gather it.'

When George Fox speaks of the 'seed,' he means the tender spot that
there must always be in the hearts of all men, however wicked, since
they are made in the likeness of God. A tiny, tiny something, the
first stirring of life, that God's Spirit can find and work on,
however deeply it may be buried (like a seed under heavy clods of
earth), if men will only yield to It. In another place he calls this
seed 'THAT OF GOD WITHIN YOU.' And it is this tender growing 'seed'
that gets trampled down when fierce angry passions are unloosed in
people's hearts, just as the tender springing corn in the Indian
village was trampled down by the hungry Tiger. George Fox believed
that that seed lay hidden in the hearts of all men, because he had
found it in his own. Everywhere he longed to set that seed free to
grow, and to tame the Tiger spirits that would trample it down and
destroy it. Let us watch and see how he did this.

One day when he was about twenty-five years old, he heard that some
people had been put in prison at Coventry for the sake of their
religion. He thought that there must be a good crop of seed in the
hearts of those people, since they were willing to suffer for their
faith, so he determined to go and see them. As he was on his way to
the gaol a message came to him from God. He seemed to hear God's own
Voice saying to him, 'MY LOVE WAS ALWAYS TO THEE, AND THOU ART IN MY
LOVE.' 'Always to thee.' Then that love had always been round him,
even in his loneliest struggles, and now that he knew that he was in
it, nothing could really hurt him. No wonder that he walked on towards
the gaol with a feeling of new joy and strength. But when he came to
the dark, frowning prison where numbers of men and women were lying in
sin and misery, this joyfulness left him. He says, 'A great power of
darkness struck at me.' The prisoners were not the sort of people he
had hoped to find them. They were a set of what were then called
'Ranters.' They began to swear and to say wicked things against God.
George Fox sat silent among them, still fastening his mind on the
thought of God's conquering love; but as they went on to say yet
wilder and more wicked things,