Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: tion of many in different religious denominations, and exercised a salutary influence in opposition to the deadening effects of empty forms and stated rituals. Many of the spiritual views, which, for many years, the Society maintained single handed, have since been taken up and advocated by those who have not been gathered into the same outward fold, and have had no inconsiderable influence in modifying the opinions of other Christian professors. CHAPTER II. Prior to the year 1654, the religious labors of George Fox, and of such of his fellow believers as had received gifts in the ministry of the gospel, and who had been sent forth by the Lord to proclaim the spirituality of the religion of Jesus Christ, had been very much confined to the northern parts of England. George himself had travelled as far south as Leicestershire; and his earliest female co-laborer in the ministry, Elizabeth Hooten, had preached the gospel and suffered imprisonment therefor in Derbyshire. Towards the close of the year 1653, Elizabeth Williams and Mary Fisher, both from the north, entered Cambridge; and having faithfully reproved some of the vain and rude students there, who sought to entrap them in argument, were taken up on a charge of preaching, and publicly whipt by order of the mayor of that city as vagabonds. The sight of the blood drawn from the bodies of these innocent women, by the lash of the executioner; their patient endurance of the ignominious and unjust punishment thus inflicted on them; their prayers for their persecutors, together with their meek rejoicing, because they were counted worthy to suffer for the name and testimony of the Lord Jesus, had no doubt prepared the minds of some of the spectators to examine with serious attention, the principles of that religion, for wh...