THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS. 615 



It may mean much or little. Paul nowhere tells us what he did 

 in this direction, and, in his sore need to justify his assumption of 

 apostleship against the sneers of his enemies, it is hardly likely 

 that, if he had any very striking cases to bring forward, he would 

 have neglected evidence so well calculated to put them to shame. 



And, without the slightest impeachment of Paul's veracity, we 

 must further remember that his strongly marked mental charac- 

 teristics, displayed in unmistakable fashion in these Epistles, are 

 anything but those which would justify us in regarding him as a 

 critical witness respecting matters of fact, or as a trustworthy in- 

 terpreter of their significance. When a man testifies to a miracle, 

 he not only states a fact, but he adds an interpretation of the fact. 

 We may admit his evidence as to the former, and yet think his 

 opinion as to the latter worthless. If Eginhard's calm and object- 

 ive narrative of the historical events of his time is no guarantee 

 for the soundness of his judgment where the supernatural is con- 

 cerned, the fervid rhetoric of the Apostle of the Gentiles, his 

 absolute confidence in the " inner light," and the extraordinary 

 conceptions of the nature and requirements of logical proof 

 which he betrays in page after page of his Epistles, afford still 

 less security. 



There is a comparatively modern man who shared to the full 

 Paul's trust in the "inner light," and who, though widely dif- 

 ferent from the fiery evangelist of Tarsus in various obvious par- 

 ticulars, yet, if I am not mistaken, shares his deepest characteris- 

 tics. I speak of George Fox, who separated himself from the 

 current Protestantism of England in the seventeenth century as 

 Paul separated himself from the Judaism of the first century, at 

 the bidding of the "inner light " — who went through persecutions 

 as serious as those which Paul enumerates, who was beaten, 

 stoned, cast out for dead, imprisoned nine times, sometimes for 

 long periods, in perils on land and perils at sea. George Fox was 

 an even more widely traveled missionary, and his success in 

 founding congregations, and his energy in visiting them, not 

 merely in Great Britain and Ireland and the West India Islands, 

 but on the continent of Europe and that of North America, was 

 no less remarkable. A few years after Fox began to preach there 

 were reckoned to be a thousand Friends in prison in the various 

 jails of England ; at his death, less than fifty years after the 

 foundation of the sect, there were seventy thousand of them in 

 the United Kingdom. The cheerfulness with which these people 

 — women as well as men — underwent martyrdom in this country 

 and in the New England States is one of the most remarkable 

 facts in the history of religion. 



No one who reads the voluminous autobiography of " Honest 

 George " can doubt the man's utter truthfulness ; and though, in 



