PREFACE HAVING been asked by my friend, the Editor of this series, to write the life of George Fox, I have completed the work to the best of my ability, though I am aware of the disadvantage under which I labour in not having for some years made that period a subject of special study. The reader will no doubt perceive that I am myself a member of the Society of Friends, to which my ancestors have belonged since its first foundation by George Fox; but I trust that this fact has not caused me to swerve from that absolute fidelity of portraiture which ought to be the aim of every biographer. There are some lines in the portrait which, out of love to Fox's memory, I would gladly have omitted; but loyalty to "the Truth," which has ever been the watchword of the Society of Friends, forbade me to do so. Only I may repeat a remark which has been often made, that his faults (especially his polemic bitterness) were, for the most part, faults characteristic of his age, while his nobler qualities, his courage, his conscientiousness, and his intense love of truth, were emphatically his own. There is an interesting question, into which I have not had space to enter, how far Fox's system was peculiar to himself, and how far it was borrowed from other sects, especially the Baptists and Mennonites. My own impression is that Fox was essentially an original religious thinker, and that few men have ever had less of the Eclectic character than he: but for a careful statement of the other side of the question I may refer my readers to a book frequently quoted in the following pages, Barclay's Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth. It only remains to express my thanks to the following gentlemen, who have helped me in various ways in the composition of this little book-Prof. Gardiner, Mr. C. J. Spence (the possessor of the original MS. of George Fox's Journal), Messrs Jno. Fell, J. S. Rowntree, and Alexr. Gordon. It will be seen that I am under many obligations to Mrs. Webb's Fells of Swarthmoor Hall, which contains several letters of the Fell family and of George Fox not elsewhere published. But, beyond all other books, I have been helped by Prof. Masson's Life of Milton, the most valuable work, as it seems to me, which has been written, not only on the literary but also on the religious history of England during the central years of the seventeenth century. THOS. HODGKIN. |