lities and attainments were of a very different order from his own.
Robert Barclay was a man of considerable parts and learning. William
Penn, though inferior to Barclay in both natural and acquired abilities,
was a gentleman and a scholar. That such men should have become the
followers of George Fox ought not to astonish any person who remembers
what quick, vigorous and highly cultivated intellects were in our own
times duped by the unknown tongues. The truth is that no powers of mind
constitute a security against errors of this description. Touching God
and His ways with man, the highest human faculties can discover little
more than the meanest. In theology the interval is small indeed between
Aristotle and a child, between Archimedes and a naked savage. It is not
strange, therefore, that wise men, weary of investigation, tormented by
uncertainty, longing to believe something, and yet seeing objections to
every thing, should submit themselves absolutely to teachers who, with
firm and undoubting faith, lay claim to a supernatural commission. Thus
we frequently see inquisitive and restless spirits take refuge from
their own scepticism in the bosom of a church which pretends to
infallibility, and, after questioning the existence of a Deity, bring
themselves to worship a wafer. And thus it was that Fox made some
converts to whom he was immeasurably inferior in every thing except the
energy of his convictions. By these converts his rude doctrines were
polished into a form somewhat less shocking to good sense and good
taste. No proposition which he had laid down was retracted. No indecent
or ridiculous act which he had done or approved was condemned; but what
was most grossly absurd in his theories and practices was softened down,
or at least not obtruded on the public; whatever could be made to appear
specious was set in the fairest light; his gibberish was translated into
English; meanings which he would have been quite unable to comprehend
were put on his phrases; and his system, so much improved that he would
not have known it again, was defended by numerous citations from Pagan
philosophers and Christian fathers whose names he had never heard.
[37] Still, however, those who had remodelled his theology continued
to profess, and doubtless to feel, profound reverence for him; and his
crazy epistles were to the last received and read with respect in Quaker
meetings all over the country. His death produced a sensation which wa