As has been indicated, there were many strains of influence which in the
seventeenth century tended to foster mystical thought in England. The
group of Cambridge Platonists, to which Henry More belonged, gave new
expression to the great Neo-platonic ideas, but in addition to this a
strong vein of mysticism had been kept alive in Amsterdam, where the
exiled Separatists had gone in 1593. They flourished there and waxed
strong, and sent back to England during the next century a continual
stream of opinion and literature. To this source can be traced the ideas
which inspired alike the Quakers, the Seekers, the Behmenists, the
Familists, and numberless other sects who all embodied a reaction
against forms and ceremonies, which, in ceasing to be understood, had
become lifeless. These sects were, up to a certain point, mystical in
thought, for they all believed in the "inner light," in the immediate
revelation of God within the soul as the all-important experience.

The persecutions of the Quakers under Charles II. tended to withdraw
them from active philanthropy, and to throw them more in the direction
of a personal and contemplative religion. It was then that the writings
of Madame Bourignon, Madame Guyon, and Fénelon became popular, and were
much read among a certain section of thinkers, while the influence of
the teachings of Jacob Boehme, whose works had been translated into
English between the years 1644 and 1692, can be traced, in diverse ways.
They impressed themselves on the thought of the founders of the Society
of Friends, they produced a distinct "Behmenist" sect, and it would seem
that the idea of the three laws of motion first reached Newton through
his eager study of Boehme. But all this has nothing directly to do with
literature, and would not concern us here were it not that in the
eighteenth century William Law came into touch with many of these
mystical thinkers, and that he has embodied in some of the finest prose