attentive reader.26 One of the precious truths which were
divinely revealed to this new apostle was, that it was falsehood
and adulation to use the second person plural instead of the
second person singular. Another was, that to talk of the month of
March was to worship the bloodthirsty god Mars, and that to talk
of Monday was to pay idolatrous homage to the moon. To say Good
morning or Good evening was highly reprehensible, for those
phrases evidently imported that God had made bad days and bad
nights.27 A Christian was bound to face death itself rather than
touch his hat to the greatest of mankind. When Fox was challenged
to produce any Scriptural authority for this dogma, he cited the
passage in which it is written that Shadrach, Meshech and
Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace with their hats on;
and, if his own narrative may be trusted, the Chief Justice of
England was altogether unable to answer this argument except by
crying out, "Take him away, gaoler."28 Fox insisted much on the
not less weighty argument that the Turks never show their bare
heads to their superiors; and he asked, with great animation,
whether those who bore the noble name of Christians ought not to
surpass Turks in virtue.29 Bowing he strictly prohibited, and,
indeed, seemed to consider it as the effect of Satanical
influence; for, as he observed, the woman in the Gospel, while
she had a spirit of infirmity, was bowed together, and ceased to
bow as soon as Divine power had liberated her from the tyranny of
the Evil One.30 His expositions of the sacred writings were of a
very peculiar kind. Passages, which had been, in the apprehension
of all the readers of the Gospels during sixteen centuries,
figurative, he construed literally. Passages, which no human
being before him had ever understood in any other than a literal
sense, he construed figuratively. Thus, from those rhetorical