CHAPTER XVIII 



SAMUEL FOTHERGILL 



Strong servants of great Zeus became they both, 

 These brethren twain. 



HOMER, Odyssey, xi. 254. 



The bond of our friendship is purity, and a joint concern for the 

 honour of God and for the good of mankind. CATHERINE PAYTON to 

 Samuel Fothergill, 1757. 



SAMUEL FOTHERGILL was one of the famous Quaker 

 preachers of .the century. He was born in 1715, and lost 

 his mother when he was three years old. After some 

 years spent at Sedbergh school with his brother, he was 

 apprenticed to a Friend shopkeeper in the town of Stock- 

 port. Here his talents and lively disposition made him 

 a favourite, but mingling with bad companions he led 

 for some years a wayward and dissipated life, to the grief 

 of his relations. Yet he had his times of visitation and 

 of deep inward struggle, and his friends laboured long 

 and not without hope to reclaim him. When Samuel 

 was twenty years of age his father set out on his third 

 religious visit to America. After imparting to his son 

 words of counsel and warning, the austere and afflicted 

 man took leave of him thus : " And now, son Samuel, 

 farewell ! farewell ! and unless it be as a changed man, 

 I cannot say that I have any wish ever to see thee again." 

 These and other words had their influence ; Samuel 

 Fothergill went through a crisis in his inner nature, in 

 which the good Spirit overcame once and for all the evil 

 which had held him down, and turned the current of a 

 highly gifted life into the ways of truth. His friends 

 helped him, especially Susannah Croudson of Warrington, 



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