In New England, the cruelest laws
were pass'd, and put in execution against them. As said, some were
whipt--women the same as men. Some had their ears cut off--others
their tongues pierc'd with hot irons--others their faces branded.
Worse still, a woman and three men had been hang'd, (1660.)--Public
opinion, and the statutes, join'd together, in an odious union,
Quakers, Baptists, Roman Catholics and Witches.--Such a fragmentary
sketch of George Fox and his time--and the advent of "the Society of
Friends" in America.
Strange as it may sound, Shakspere and George Fox, (think of them!
compare them!) were born and bred of similar stock, in much the same
surroundings and station in life--from the same England--and at
a similar period. One to radiate all of art's, all literature's
splendor--a splendor so dazzling that he himself is almost lost in
it, and his contemporaries the same--his fictitious Othello, Romeo,
Hamlet, Lear, as real as any lords of England or Europe then and
there--more real to us, the mind sometimes thinks, than the man
Shakspere himself. Then the other--may we indeed name him the same
day? What is poor plain George Fox compared to William Shakspere--to
fancy's lord, imagination's heir? Yet George Fox stands for something
too--a thought--the thought that wakes in silent hours--perhaps the
deepest, most eternal thought latent in the human soul. This is
the thought of God, merged in the thoughts of moral right and the
immortality of identity.
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