all, we do not know. Sewel, the historian, tells us only the bare fact, and Parnell himself gives the vaguest account, never mentioning Fox's name at all. "I was called for to visit some friends in the North part of England, with whom I had union in spirit before I saw their faces, and afterwards I returned back to my outward dwelling-place." This use of the word "outward," is habitual with him, as distinguishing his temporary abode from that of his soul's abidance.

From the time of their first meeting, his whole heart seems to have gone out to " George," whom he looked upon and loved with a deep and loyal attachment. Nothing is more characteristic of Fox's simplicity than the way in which Parnell, Howgill, Hubberthorn and the other young Quakers, thus speak of him. There was to be no distance between them, but as a younger to an elder brother, he was "George " simply, in their letters one to another.

So the lad became a settled and convinced Friend. Before two years he again sought out his brother, and was present with him at the memorable meeting at Atherstone, in Warwickshire, when Fox stood on a high stool with his

back against the churchyard wall, arguing with, and preaching for hours to, eight clergymen, one of them Nathaniel Stephens, the vicar of his native parish, whom he had known from a child. Fox was then about thirty, a man of settled convictions, with the new society, its discipline and elaborate organisation for philanthropic and communal work, already definitely shaping in his mind.

WHILE

CHAPTER III.

VISITS CAMBRIDGE.

HILE Parnell had been seeking and finding, and Fox travelling from end to end of England to preach his gospel, the country had been convulsed by wars and revolution. Charles Stewart had atoned for his misdoings by a death full of dignity; Oliver had been proclaimed Protector (December, 1653); the Parliament had abolished the Prayer Book and the Star Chamber, executed Laud, and appointed an Assembly of Divines to advise upon Church constitution. The royalist clergy were sequestered, and the benefices of the country given over to the Puritan or Presbyterian parsons. Episcopal power was temporarily broken and eclipsed. But things were no easier for the Quakers. Champion of the people's liberties as Cromwell was, the Quakers' sufferings under his government were as severe as the treatment he

afforded to individual Friends, when they appeared personally before him, was kind. Yet, it is strange to remember, that the very men now in the seat of authority were in their turn dispossessed at the Restoration, and themselves suffered infinite hardships and loss for the same freedom of conscience which they now denied to Fox and his band of preachers.

As Oxford had been the stronghold of Royalists and the great upholder of the monarchy, so, in an almost similar degree, the sister University had favoured the Parliament. In ecclesiastical matters, Cambridge had long been solidly for reform. The Fellows of Caius had carried on a long and tedious animosity against their Master and founder, Dr. Caius, on a wrongful suspicion of popish leanings. From Sir Walter Mildmay's recently founded College of Emanuel was emanating a body of young puritan divines who were to settle over the Eastern Counties, and to find their way across the sea to New England. There, in the name of religion and of loyalty to the motherland, they soon combined to inflict on the unfortunate Quakers who had fled from persecution in England, a more cruel treatment than had ever been experienced at home. The

rancour of religious fanaticism was never more rife than now in the puritan seat of learning.

Missionary fervour had already begun working in James's heart, and he had not long parted from Fox in Leicestershire when he became aware that he must set out to visit a place about fifteen miles southward," possibly Newark. Arrived there, he was moved" to go on to Cambridge, for he had heard of strange sufferings and persecutions of Friends in that town. A few months earlier, in December, 1653, a couple of harmless women had been publicly stripped to the waist and flogged at the whipping post in the market-place till the blood ran down their bodies, by order of William Pickering, the Mayor. The younger of the two, Mary Fisher, a single woman, then aged about thirty, born in Yorkshire, had already spent sixteen months in York Castle for having addressed a congregation at Selby. She became a great missionary evangelist, visiting the West Indies, New England, Syria, Italy, and Constantinople. At Cambridge her offence was preaching in front of Sidney Sussex College. When the undergraduates whom she was addressing began to mock and deride her, she had called their college "a nest of un