n rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself, and my
care was cast upon him alone."[198]

[198] George Fox: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59-61, abridged.

A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a
heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely
madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any
others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still
prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself
an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of
inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second
hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church,
in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth
counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous
religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from
which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless,
indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out
of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective
action of this politic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the
dealings of the Roman ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and
prophets yield examples enough for our instruction.

The plain fact is that men's minds are built, as has been often said,
in water-tight compartments. Religious after a fashion, they yet have
many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy
entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so
commonly charged to religion's account are thus, almost all of them,
not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion's
wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the
bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion's
wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the
passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in
theoretic system. The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the sum of
these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the
phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with
those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the
exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews, the hunting of
Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of
Methodists, the murdering of Morm