genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical
visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted
emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner
life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They
have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas;
and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen
visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are
ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these
pathological features in their career have helped to give them
their religious authority and influence.

If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one
than is furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker
religion which he founded is something which it is impossible to
overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity
rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more
like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in
England. So far as our Christian sects today are evolving into
liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position
which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can
pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and
capacity, Fox's mind was unsound. Everyone who confronted him
personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and
jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet from
the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a
psychopath or detraque of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds
in entries of this sort:--

"As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head and
saw three steeple-house spires, and they struck at my life. I