FOX, (1624-1690), the founder of the “Society
of Friends” or “Quakers,” was born at Drayton, Leicestershire, in July 1624. His father, Christopher Fox, called by the neighbours “Righteous Christer,” was a weaver by occupation; and his mother, Mary Lago, “an upright woman and accomplished above most of her degree,” came of a family that had suffered much in former days of religious persecution. Both were members of the Church of England, and took great pains in the training of their children. George from his childhood “appeared of another frame than the rest of his brethren, being more religious, inward, still, solid, and observing beyond his years;” and he himself declares, “When I came to eleven years of age I knew pureness and righteousness; for while a child I was taught how to walk to be kept pure.” Some of his relations wished that he should be educated for the church; but his father, after he had barely learned to read and write, lost no time in apprenticing him to a certain shoemaker, who also dealt in wool and cattle. In this service he remained till his nineteenth year, and acquired some proficiency in all the branches of his master's somewhat miscellaneous business; according to Penn, “He took most delight in sheep,” but he himself simply says, “A good deal went through my hands. . . . People had generally a love to me for my innocency and honesty.” In 1643, being upon business at a fair, and having accompanied some friends to the village public-house, he was deeply scandalized by a proposal to “drink healths,” and abruptly withdrew in great grief of spirit. “When I had done what business I had to do I returned home, but did not go to bed that night, nor could I sleep, but sometimes walked up and down, and sometimes prayed and cried to the Lord, who said unto me, ‘Thou seest how young people go together into vanity and old people into the earth; thou must forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be a stranger unto all.’ Then, at the command of God, on the ninth day of the seventh month, 1643, I left my relations and broke off all familiarity or fellowship with old or young.” Thus briefly he describes what appears to have been the greatest moral crisis in his life. Of the four years which followed — the “times of the first workings of the Lord in him” — he has left but a confused account. They were on the whole years of great perplexity and distress, though sometimes “I had intermissions, and was sometimes brought into such a heavenly joy that I thought I had been in Abraham's bosom.” He did not continue for many months