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Book Reviews47 John Bartram, brilliant American botanist, was disowned by Friends because of "his rejection of the miraculous in religion" but "he continued to attend die Friends Meeting." There are references to the convincements of Friends: e.g., "Charles Harford, a soap boiler, who had become a Friend by die ministry of John Camm. . . ." One feels the power of the early Friends' movement. And this chronicle of the exhaustion of that movement in worldly success is a sobering one. As Friends became wealthy, they were conscious that the wealth came to them "unsought" and "in no way based upon die exploitation of their fellow men." "The respect of the world for die Quaker banker and industrialist, based on the virtues of the Quaker character, was the antidote to any possible revolution." "The employer emerged more and more into a world of responsibility and wealth, into which the employee had little or no entry." This very readable book makes available to us a vast amount of historical detail. It will be especially fruitful if it leads us to apply ourselves to the Friends' revolution as effectively as Friends applied diemselves to die Industrial Revolution. Soil Survey Division, Wisconsin GeologicalFrancis D. Hole and Natural History Survey. Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion, with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries. By R. A. Knox. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1950. viii, 622 pages. $6.00. ?G HE EARLY FRIENDS — so we like to diink — were mystics. The term has pleasing connotations: it suggests serenity, purity, gentleness , a seraphic manner and a saintly quality of life. Books have been written to show that George Fox was a spiritual brother of the PseudoDionysius , Eckhart, Boehme, and William Law. The immediate experience of God was, to be sure, the central fact of his life, but for the rest it has always seemed to me that the founder of Quakerism would be singularly ill at ease in that select company of spiritual aristocrats. Along comes Monsignor Ronald A. Knox who, writing with wit, grace, and wide-ranging though curiously selective scholarship, puts him in a different company, lumps him with Montanus and lohn of Leyden, with the fanatical "French Prophets" and the padiological convulsionarles of Saint-Médard, with lohn Wesley and die rag, tag, and bobtail of modern revivalists. Early Quakerism, he says, bore all die marks of an enthusiastic movement. It would not have surprised George Fox to be called an endiusiast, for until a century ago the term enthusiasm meant nothing more or less than inspiration or possession by a divine or supernatural power, and 48Bulletin of Friends Historical Association this is precisely what Fox claimed. But the term, before it became denatured, also carried derogatory overtones: it connoted high pretensions and unseemly behavior, fanaticism and a suspicion of scandalous goings-on; in a word, it was not in good taste. Is Monsignor Knox fair and accurate in describing Fox and the early Friends as enthusiasts? Fair he is not. Despite his protestation diat he is not concerned to expose or discredit entiiusiasm, his book is a polemic, now subtle, now obvious, from beginning to end. Monsignor Knox misses no chance to make his enthusiasts look ridiculous, and although up to a point I relished his donnish wit, I finally came to agree with the reviewer in the London Friend, who observed, in the words of Dr. Johnson , that "this merriment of parsons is mighty offensive." Moreover, he goes out of his way to try to pin the charge of scandalous behavior upon his subjects (I was going to say victims) until he finally gives away the game, when he expresses himself as willing to accord Madame de Guyon the benefit of die doubt, for "scandals are not to be multiplied praeter necessitatemi I came away from the book with the feeling that Knox simply has no sympathy for "the passion for holiness" (to quote the reviewer in die Friend again) diat animated many of the endiusiasts, and the suspicion that, again despite his prefatory disclaimer, his real objection to them is that they were not good Catholics. But if one can overlook the one-sidedness of the...

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