set in some years before, but may have now
begun to spread more visibly among the classes from which Quakerism was
chiefly recruited. Again, its intellectual weakness would naturally
become more apparent in proportion to the daily increasing attention
paid to the reasonable aspects of faith. The general satisfaction felt,
except by the pronounced High Church and Jacobite party, at the newly
established order in Church and State, was unfavourable to the further
progress of a communion which, from its rejection of ideas common to
every other ecclesiastical body, seemed to many to be rightly called
'the end and centre of all confusion.'[484] It may be added that, as the
century advanced, there gradually came to be within the confines of the
National Church a little more room than had lately existed for the
upholders of various mystical tenets. With the rise of Wesleyanism
enthusiasm found full scope in a new direction. But the power of
Quakerism was not only silently undermined by the various action of
influences such as these. In the first years of the century it received
a direct and serious blow in the able exposure of its extravagances
written by Leslie. The vagaries of the French 'Prophets' also
contributed to discredit the assumption of supernatural gifts in which
many Quakers still indulged.

It is needless to dwell with Leslie on the wild heretical opinions into
which the over-strained spirituality of the disciples of Fox and Penn
had led them. Certainly, the interval between them and other Christian
communities had sometimes been so wide that there was some justification
for the assertions made on either side, that the name of Christian could
not be so widely extended as to be fitly applied to both. Archbishop
Dawes, for example, in the House of Lords, roundly refused them all
claim to the title; and there were thousands of Quakers who would
retaliate the charge in terms of the most unsparing vigour. To these
men, all the Gospel was summed up in the one verse that tells how Christ
is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Leslie
was able to produce quotations in plenty from acknowledged authorities
among them which allegorised away all belief in a personal Saviour, and
which bade each man seek within himself alone for the illuminating
presence of his Christ and God.

It was well that the special dangers to which Quakerism and other forms
of mysticism are liable should be brought clearly and