More than forty years had elapsed since Fox had begun to see
visions and to cast out devils.22 He was then a youth of pure
morals and grave deportment, with a perverse temper, with the
education of a labouring man, and with an intellect in the most
unhappy of all states, that is to say, too much disordered for
liberty, and not sufficiently disordered for Bedlam. The
circumstances in which he was placed were such as could scarcely
fail to bring out in the strongest form the constitutional
diseases of his mind. At the time when his faculties were
ripening, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists,
were striving for mastery, and were, in every corner of the
realm, refuting and reviling each other. He wandered from
congregation to congregation; he heard priests harangue against
Puritans; he heard Puritans harangue against priests; and he in
vain applied for spiritual direction and consolation to doctors
of both parties. One jolly old clergyman of the Anglican
communion told him to smoke tobacco and sing psalms; another
advised him to go and lose some blood.23 The young inquirer
turned in disgust from these advisers to the Dissenters, and
found them also blind guides.24 After some time he came to the
conclusion that no human being was competent to instruct him in
divine things, and that the truth had been communicated to him by
direct inspiration from heaven. He argued that, as the division
of languages began at Babel, and as the persecutors of Christ put
on the cross an inscription in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, the
knowledge of languages, and more especially of Latin, Greek and
Hebrew, must be useless to a Christian minister.25 Indeed, he was
so far from knowing many languages, that he knew none; nor can
the most corrupt passage in Hebrew be more unintelligible to the
unlearned than his English often is to the most acute and