nd set up for
himself, as "The Everlasting Son, the Prince of Peace, the Fairest
among Ten Thousand, the Altogether Lovely." In this capacity he went
into the West of England early in 1656, the admiring women following
him, and chaunting his praises with every variety of epithet from the
Song of Solomon, till he was clapped up in Exeter jail. Nor was
Nayler the only madman among the Quakers about this time. A kind of
epidemic of madness seems to have broken out in the sect, or among
those reputed to belong to it. "One while," says Baxter, "divers of
them went naked through divers chief towns and cities of the land, as
a prophetical act: some of them have famished and drowned themselves
in melancholy;" and he adds, more especially, as his own experience
in Kidderminster, "I seldom preached a lecture, but going and coming
I was railed at by a Quaker in the market-place in the way, and
frequently in the congregation bawled at by the names of Hireling,
Deceiver, False Prophet, Dog, and such like language." The
Protector's own chapel in Whitehall was not safe. On April 13, 1656,
"being the Lord's day," says the _Public Intelligencer_ for that
week, "a certain Quaker came into the chapel in sermon time, and in a
very audacious manner disturbed the preacher, so that he was fain to
be silent a while, till the fellow was taken away. His Highness,
being present, did after sermon give order for the sending him to a
justice of peace, to be dealt with according to law."--Naturally, the
whole sect suffered for these indecencies and extravagances of some
of its members, and the very name _Quakerism_ became a synonym
for all that was intolerable. The belief had got abroad, moreover,
that "subtle and dangerous heads," Jesuits and others, had begun to
"creep in among them," to turn Quakerism to political account, and
"drive on designs of disturbance." Altogether the Protector and
Council were sorely tried. Their policy seems, on the whole, to have
been to let Quakerism run its course of public obloquy, and get into
jail, or even to the whipping-post _ad libitum_, for offences
against the peace, but at the same time to instruct the
Major-Generals privately to be as discreet as possible, making
differences between the sorts of Quakers, and especially letting none
of them come to harm for their mere beliefs. "Making a difference,"
as by the injunction in Jude's epistle, was, as we know, Cromwell's
own great rule in all cases where complete