ese conventional customs were a lie and a
sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them, as
a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit they
professed might be more in accord.

"When the Lord sent me into the world," says Fox in his Journal, "he
forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was required to
'thee' and 'thou' all men and women, without any respect to rich or
poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and down, I was not to bid
people Good-morning or Good-evening, neither might I bow or scrape with
my leg to any one. This made the sects and professions rage. Oh! the
rage that was in the priests, magistrates, professors, and people of
all sorts: and especially in priests and professors: for though
'thou' to a single person was according to their accidence and grammar
rules, and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it:
and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all into a
rage.... Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the blows,
punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent for not
putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently plucked off
and thrown away, so that they quite lost them. The bad language and
evil usage we received on this account is hard to be expressed, besides
the danger we were sometimes in of losing our lives for this matter,
and that by the great professors of Christianity, who thereby
discovered they were not true believers. And though it was but a small
thing in the eye of man, yet a wonderful confusion it brought among all
professors and priests: but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the
vanity of that custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight
of Truth's testimony against it."

In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time
was secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid
account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in
following Fox's canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for
citation; but Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things
in a shorter passage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance
of spiritual sensibility:--

"By this divine light, then," says Elwood, "I saw that though I had not
the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery, profaneness, and
pollutions of the world to put away, because I had, through the great
goodness of God an