from worldly customs, to a religion which was to consist of spiritual
feeling. I know not how the world will receive the idea, that he
conceived himself to have had a revelation for these purposes. But
nothing is more usual than for pious people, who have succeeded in any
ordinary work of goodness, to say, that they were providentially led to
it, and this expression is usually considered among Christians to be
accurate. But I cannot always find the difference between a man being
providentially led into a course of virtues and successful action, and
his having an internal revelation for it. For if we admit that men may
be providentially led upon such occasions, they must be led by the
impressions upon their minds. But what are these internal impressions,
but the dictates of an internal voice to those who follow them? But if
pious men would believe themselves to have been thus providentially led,
or acted upon, in any ordinary case of virtue, if it had been crowned
with success, George Fox would have had equal reason to believe, from
the success that attended his own particular undertaking, that he had
been called upon to engage in it. For at a very early age he had
confuted many of the professors of religion in public disputations. He
had converted magistrates, priests, and people. Of the clergymen of
those times some had left valuable livings, and followed him. In his
thirtieth year he had seen no less than sixty persons, spreading, as
ministers, his own doctrines. These, and other circumstances which might
be related, would doubtless operate powerfully upon him to make him
believe, that he was a chosen vessel. Now, if to these considerations it
be added, that George Fox was not engaged in any particular or partial
cause of benevolence, or mercy, or justice, but wholly and exclusively
in a religious and spiritual work, and that it was the first of all his
religious doctrines, that the spirit of God, _where men were obedient to
it, guided them in their spiritual concerns_, he must have believed
himself, on the consideration of his unparalleled success, to have been