IV.
Fox’s message found instant response from the heart of the most vital religious life of his day. From the midst of the small isolated groups who—surrounded by the institutional and doctrinal confusion following immediately upon the decentralization of authority in the art and science of the religious life, and persisting throughout the post-reformation century—were feeling their own way to God, his followers came forth. They, these friends of truth as they called themselves, were to live out the first phase of the liberation of the religious life. Dispensing with symbols and observances, they strove to sink the whole personal life into the divine life and love they felt stirring within them, to seek this perpetually, to let it flow out and through all the circumstances of their daily commerce, to seek and appeal to this alone, in all mankind.