1920 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 287 doings and thinkings : and they left behind them more minute and conscientious records, with a more deliberate eye upon the public, and a more devout determination that their message should not suffer for any failure in making pronouncements or any carelessness in filing them. Even correspondence was religiously preserved, and diaries dutifully kept and treasured. While other sufferers have for the most part hidden their sufferings, either voluntarily or involuntarily, the early Friends were methodical in collecting the details concerning them, and business-like in publishing them. The result, from the historian's point of view, is a very happy one ; for he is enabled to produce a really full and intimate account of the movement. We would give much for similar information about some of the older movements — about Montanism, for example, in order that we might see how the one bears upon the other across an interval of fourteen centuries ; or, again, for other reasons, about Gnosti- cism, or The Everlasting Gospel, or Lollardy in the fifteenth century. The little that we do know of these and kindred movements anterior to, or contemporary with, Quakerism might with advantage have been used to enrich some pages of Mr. Braithwaite's work, or to modify others ; but he has made good use of his ample material here, as he did in the previous volume. Any reader who finds his quotations too lengthy can easily pass on, while to many they will be among the most welcome pages. His comments and links are luminous and adequate, being written not only in full sympathy with the subject, but also in a scholarly detachment from it, which enables him to see things in perspective and so to criticize as well as to expound. The situation in this second period differs markedly from that of the first. Persecution and repression are new features, or figure with a new intensity : and no set of men suffers so much from the timorous intolerance of the houses of commons of the Eestoration period as do the mild but masterful Quakers. One effect produced was perhaps unexpected. The groups of Seekers were bound to develop an organization which was far from their early thoughts and in some sense alien to their fundamental conceptions. The society grew and settled its procedure ; the ministry was increasingly organized ; an internal economy became more than ever necessary, and grooves began to form into which there was an inevit- able danger that the manifestation of the spirit would settle down. But, on the other hand, it was this evolution which ensured a continuity to the society. The discipline had to be formulated, and not without internal troubles ; but the expression of idiosyncracies was necessary to the life of the body. Even the scruples and oddities had either to become corporate scruples and oddities, or else to be disowned. So some of them are canonized and become parts of the Quaker way of life, while others are condemned and excommunicated. It is a very interesting study of the perpetual conflict between individuality and corporate life. Penn is in some respects the protagonist of the period, or at least the most prominent person in the public eye, and not Fox, as in the early days. But Fox is always the power behind the movement, even though he had to pass so much of the time in prison. A figure of special interest is that of John Bellers, to whom five and twenty alluring pages are devoted in the chapter on ' Church
