Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Reminiscences of a Journalist
The Pilgrim's Progress and in the Diary, less generally known, of George F ox, the proto-quaker. The last work drew from Sir James Mackintosh words of praise which, to cooler minds, may seem a little exaggerated. But there is something delightful about all the Quaker autobiographies. Charles Lamb felt their charm, and was never weary of reading and of praising them. Their' frankness is their fas cination. For there can be nothing more engaging than a fresh and unstudied narration of religious experience, the abandon of conscientious veracity, the unadorned history of an individual soul, in its rise from the depths of despair to the exalted regions of an unquestioningefaith; and a man who, by the nature of his intellectual constitution, is doomed always to grope in the twilight of a lonely scepticism, may well envy these costly consolations of the poor, the unlettered, and the despised. The Quakers, believing in immediate and personal reve lation, thought nothing, in writing of themselves, too mean to be recorded, nothing too insignificant to be set down. One of the most charming of these Quaker autobiographies is that of Thomas Elwood. Honest John Whitehead, who Supervised its publi cation after Elwood's death, begins his Preface with the Scriptural quotation, Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost. I do not know that the title-page of any autobiography could be garnished with a more appropriate motto.
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