ion which looked upon the heathen as altogether without
hope and without God in the world. They, almost alone of all Christian
missionaries of that age, pointed their hearers (not without scandal to
their orthodox brethren) to a light of God within them which should
guide them to the brighter radiance of a better revelation. Nor did they
scruple, to assert that 'there be members of this Catholic Church both
among heathens, Jews, and Turks, men and women of integrity and
simplicity of heart, who, though blinded in some things of their
understanding, and burdened with superstition, yet, being upright in
their hearts before the Lord, ... and loving to follow righteousness,
are by the secret touches of the holy light in their souls enlivened and
quickened, thereby secretly united to God, and thereby become true
members of this Catholic Church.'[490] Such expressions would be
generally assented to in our day, as embodying sound and valuable
truths, which cannot be rejected on account of errors which may
sometimes chance to attend them. At the beginning of the eighteenth
century there were few, except Quakers, who were willing to accept from
a wholly Christian point of view the element of truth contained in the
Deistical argument of 'Christianity as old as the Creation.'

Somewhat similar in kind was the protest of the Quakers against
dogmatism as to the precise nature of the Atonement,[491] and against
unspiritual and, so to say, physical interpretations put upon passages
in Scripture which speak of the efficacy of the blood of Christ. On this
ground also they, and the mystic school in general, were constantly
inveighed against as mere Deists. Yet the rigid definitions insisted
upon by many of the Reformers were much at variance with the wider views
held in earlier and later times. It is at all events certain that, both
within and without the English Church, those who held these views were
protected from many of the most forcible objections with which the
Christianity of the age was assailed.

The Quakerism, which at the end of the seventeenth and at the beginning
of the eighteenth century was strong in numbers and in religious
influence, has claimed our attention thus far in regard only of those
modes of thought which it holds in common with most other forms of
so-called mystic theology. On this ground it comes into close relation
with the history of the English Church. M. Matter, in his 'History of
Christianity,' speaks o