"For our English races, since there were English races, I count three or four such prophets; for the world of Europe I count perhaps eleven worthy of our gratitude to-day. I mean the gratitude of all mankind. Saint Paul and Saint John are two; Augustine of Hippo is three; Dante and Francis of Assisi are two more; Thomas à Kempis and Jacob Böhme, two more; and, coming across to England, Wiclif, John Milton, George Fox, and John Wesley."—Edward Everett Hale, in an Address at the Wesley Bicentennial Celebration in People's Temple, Boston.
"The three most influential Englishmen of the last three centuries were George Fox, John Wesley and John Henry Newman. Those who wish really to understand those three centuries must read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Fox's Journal, Wesley's Journal, and Newman's Apologia. The entire future of England and the English Empire depends upon the answer to this question: Will Newman defeat Fox and Wesley, or will Fox and Wesley defeat Newman?"
Editorial in "The Methodist Times."
[B] "The Quaker religion which he (George Fox) 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 to-day 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. Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power."
James's "Varieties of Religious Experience," page 6.
[C] At this epoch there were more than two hundred capital offenses.
[D] "Dear friends and brethren that have gone into America and the islands thereaway, stir up the gift of God in you and improve your talents. Let your light shine among the Indians, the blacks and the whites, that ye may answer the truth in them and bring them to the standard and ensign that God hath set up, Jesus Christ. Grow in the faith and grace of Christ that ye be not like dwarfs, for a dwarf shall not come near to offer upon God's altar."
From an Epistle of George Fox written in 1690.
[E] "In 1658 there was not a Quaker living who did not believe Quakerism to be the one only true Church of the living God."
Hancock's "Peculium," page 8.