THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Amid the diverse setbacks and persecutions of the latter part of his career Baxter came to recognize the true
quality of the stand taken by the most troublesome of the mid-seventeenth-century ‘sectaries’, the Quakers. In the late
1650s he had seen them merely as Ranters ‘turned from horrid profanenesse and blasphemy to a life of extreme
austerity’. These ‘Friends’, as they were properly called, posed problems for the English magistracy under the regimes
of both Cromwell and the restored Stuarts. To Evelyn in 1657 the humble, imprisoned Friends he visited in Ipswich
seemed merely ‘a new phanatique sect of dangerous Principles’ and ‘a Melancholy proud sort of people, and
exceedingly ignorant’. Pepys describes an encounter between a would-be flippant Charles II and a forthright Quaker
woman who remained determinedly silent until the King was prepared to be serious and then ‘thou’d him
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all along’, making her case by addressing him informally in the intimate second-person singular. The Journal of
George Fox (1624-91), the founder of the Society of Friends and the first to formulate a doctrine of reliance on the
‘Inner Light’ of Christ, most clearly demonstrates why the uncompromising zeal of the early Quakers seemed so
socially disruptive. After long wrackings of conscience, Fox came to recognize the peculiar nature of his calling in
1646. Prompted by the inner voice which he associated with the voice of God, he withdrew from worship in ‘steeplehouses’,
the churches controlled by the ‘priests’ (both Anglican or Presbyterian) of whose teaching he disapproved,
and began his own ministry as an itinerant preacher. The surviving manuscripts of Fox’s Journal, which
retrospectively describe his mission, appear to have been begun during one of his frequent terms of imprisonment in
1673 and were finished after his release in 1675. This self-justifying account of the acts of a latter-day apostle was
published posthumously in 1694. At its opening Fox explains the origin of the nickname ‘Quaker’, a term first used
by a Justice of the Peace at Derby ‘because wee bid them tremble at the Word of God’, but the substance of the work
traces a series of challenges to the world. The account of the year 1651, for example, offers accounts of his preaching
barefoot on market-day in Lichfield and proclaiming the doom of the unrepentant ‘bloody citty’, his berating of a
Catholic who had the temerity to invite him home, and his refusal to speak in a painted church because ‘the painted
beast had a painted house’. In 1654 he writes to Cromwell as a ‘Deare Friend’ advising him to ‘be still, and in the
Councill of God stand ... that thou mayst frustrate mens ends and calme mens spirits, and Crumble men under, and
arise and stand up in the power of the Lord God, and the Lambes Authority’; in 1660 he writes with an equally
presumptuous informality to Charles II, recommending him not to encourage ‘Maygames with Fiddlers, drumms,
trumpetts’ and Maypoles ‘with the Image of a Crowne on topp of them’. In 1669 he ventures to Catholic rural Ireland,
in 1671 to the West Indies, and in 1672 to the eastern seaboard of North America. Throughout he stresses an absolute
rightness of the divine nature of his calling and the new religious order he had introduced. ‘Them that bee in Christ
Jesus’, he insists, ‘are new Creatures: and in him all flesh is silent: but they that have the worde of the Lord and from
the Lord may speake it freely as they are commanded.’
John Bunyan’s autobiographical account of the awakening of his soul to sin, his conversion, and his later ministry
in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: Or a Brief and Faithful Relation of the Exceeding Mercy of God in
Christ, to h is poor Servant (1666) to some degree mirrors Fox’s. Both saw the delineation of their sufferings in the
world, their awareness of their personal election, their vocation to preach the Gospel, and their perception of glory in
the hereafter, not merely as a private process of self examination but as a means of inspiriting the faithful. Both
produced much of their finest work while enduring long terms of imprisonment as a direct result of their principled
law-breaking and the accounts of both suggest a hard, uncompromising, proletarian zeal which is
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quite distinct from the melting, principled gentlemanly moderation of their fellow Puritan visionary, Baxter. Bunyan
(1628-88), who was in fact no friend to Quakers, is intent on offering a picture of ‘the merciful working of God upon
my soul’ and he describes a process of delivery both from worldly delights (such as dancing or bell-ringing) and from
an acute and painful sense of sin (which early manifested itself in the form of nightmares and visions). He also
stresses his conviction that he was called from his despair of salvation by a persistent inner voice: ‘one morning when
I was again at prayer and trembling under the fear of this, that no word of God could help me, that piece of a sentence
darted in upon me, My grace is sufficient ... And, O methought that every word was a mighty word unto me; as my,
and grace, and sufficient, and for thee; they were then, and sometimes are still, far bigger than others be.’ Bunyan is
always careful with words, always alert to the expression of what he sees as the inspired word of God manifested to
the world.
Bunyan’s saturation in the Bible is particularly evident in his greatest and most lastingly influential work, The
Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream Wherein is
Discovered The manner of his setting out, His Dangerous Journey; And safe Arrival at the Desired Country ( 1678,
Part II, 1684). It is a direct development from Grace Abounding in that it objectifies and universalizes what had been