founder of, the Society of Friends in Holland and parts of North Germany.

There are no exact statements to give of the number of members and adherents of the Society in Colchester in these early days; but from the entries of births, marriages and burials in Meeting minute-books, we can arrive at it with some degree of accuracy. Cromwell, in his

History of Colchester," says that in 1659 there were twenty-five burials. "From 5th month [July] 1665 to 10th month [December], 1666, ninety-eight Friends died of the plague. In 1675 there were thirty-one deaths from general causes; in 1708, thirty-two; and in 1726, twenty-two. Of marriages there were sometimes seven in the year, and in one year, fifteen births are recorded." From this and other information it may be computed that the numbers belonging to the four meetings in Colchester must have been at least 1,000, the total population of the town being reckoned in 1692 at 6,852.

It is striking to reflect that all this great following arose in the first place from the seed sown by one earnest young minister who died before he was twenty years old.

The meeting of the town of Colchester was called the "Two Weeks Meeting." Numerous small gatherings in the locality as at Harwich, Manningtree, Bentley, Horkesley and Copford, formed the Monthly Meeting of Colchester, and these, with others in the country parts of Essex, comprised the Quarterly Meeting of Coggeshall.

So important was Colchester in the Society at large, that at the General Meeting of Ministers, held in London in 1672, when the organisation of the Society throughout the country was finally completed, it was arranged that a Yearly Meeting of representatives should be held annually in London in Whit week, the basis of representation being six members from London, three from Bristol, and two from the town of Colchester, one or two from each of the counties of England and Wales respectively.

Afterwards, when the Society suffered a great decline in numbers, these early regulations were changed; the meeting at Colchester was merged in the Quarterly Meeting, and its special representation at the Yearly Meeting ceased.

Much fresh information has been collected for this account of James Parnell, and for the

brief notice of the sufferings of many Essex members of the Society in those early days, by the author, whose studies of the Crisp Collection of Quaker MSS. at Colchester, and upon the lives of Friends for the Dictionary of National Biography are well known. It is hoped that the little book may not only interest local readers, but inspire others, both in this country and in America, to emulate these devoted servants of God in their strivings to follow and obey the leadings of the Holy Spirit.

WILSON MARRIAGE.

Colchester,

June, 1906.

CHAPTER I.

BIRTH AND EDUCATION.

IN the year 1636, there was born at East Retford, in the county of Nottingham, a youth, whose early and tragic death at nineteen years of age, combined with his undoubted gifts of penmanship and eloquence, his rare devotion and high courage, were to render him conspicuous in the early annals of Quakerism. The hand of persecution, resulting from misconception, dislike and dread of innovation, as much as from sheer cruelty, fell upon James Parnell more heavily than upon any other of the first Friends.

His very short and insignificant figure, his appearance of arrested adolescence, conveyed to those who knew him nothing of the English dogged persistence and stedfast determination concealed beneath that "mean exterior. The enemies he made everywhere by his bluntness and plain speaking perhaps thought

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to cure his stubbornness, and bring him to their own way of thinking in the end; but James's short life only proved that though they might destroy his body, the spirit that fought for truth, as he saw it, was unconquerable. As a mere schoolboy, he himself escaped from "the house of bondage"-forms and rules and empty profession to a spiritual liberty of his own, and from this moment he went straight forward to fight for the divine right of individual conscience, and put down, what seemed to him, the hierarchy of sacerdotalism.

As the short pages of the lad's life unfold, we shall be able to trace in it the workings of eternal truth, which brought him out of that early crude and self-assertive monopoly of all right thinking, coupled with a corresponding condemnation of every other shade and colour of thought, to a calm dependence on the immediate revelation to be daily manifested in him, a gentle yet heroic endurance, and a truly Christ-like forgiveness for his own ill-usage.

It would be idle to revive the story of these unremembered and uncanonised saints, who, unknowing, offered up their lives as a gift in the cause of liberty and progress, were it not to