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words: 'I will go forth in the strength of the Lord God.' It was from
this place that George Fox set forth on the long search for a 'Pure
Faith' that, when he found it, was to bring both to him and to many
thousands of his countrymen a 'Sure Joy.'

Why Righteous Christer and his wife did not help George more at this
time remains a puzzle. They may have been afraid lest he was making a
terrible mistake in leaving the worship they knew and followed, or
they may have guessed that God was really calling him to do some work
for Him bigger than they could understand, and may have felt that they
could help their boy best by leaving him free to follow the Voice that
spoke to him in the depths of his own heart, even if he had to fight
his own battles unaided. Or possibly their thoughts were too full of
all the actual battles that were filling the air just then to think
any other troubles important. For our Quaker Saints are not legendary
people; they are a real part of English History.

All through the years of George's boyhood the struggle between King
Charles the First and his Parliament had been getting more tense and
embittered. The abolition of the Star Chamber (May 1640), the
attempted arrest of the five Members (October 1642), the trial and
death, first of Strafford (May 1641) and then of Laud (January
1645)--all these events had been convulsing the great heart of the
English nation during the long years while young George had been
quietly keeping his master's sheep and cattle in his secluded
Leicestershire village.

A year before he left home the long-dreaded Civil War had at last
broken out. But the Civil War that broke out in the soul of the young
shepherd lad, the struggle between good and evil when he saw his
Puritan cousin tempting other people to drink and carouse, was to him
a more momentous event than all the outward battles that were raging.
His Journal hardly mentions the rival armies of King and Parliament
that were marching through the land. Yet in reading of his early
struggles in his own spirit, we must always keep in the background of
our minds the thought of the great national struggle that was raging
at the same time. It was not in the orderly, peaceful, settled England
of his earliest years that the boy grew to manhood, but in an England
that was being torn asunder by the rival faiths and passions of her
sons. Men's minds were filled with the perplexities of great national
problems of Church and S