The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IX. From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift.
§ 3. The “Behmenites” and the Founders of the Society of Friends
It only needed the release from the crushing hand of Laud, and the upheaval of the civil war, to set free the religious revival which had long been seething, and to distract England, for a time, with religious excitement. Contemporary writers refer with horror to the swarm of “sects, heresies and schisms” which now came into being, and Milton alone seems to have understood that the turmoil was but the outward sign of a great spiritual awakening. Unhappily, there were few who, with him, could perceive that the “opinion of good men is but knowledge in the making,” and that these many sects were but various aspects of one main movement towards freedom and individualism, towards a religion of the heart rather than of the head. The terrible persecutions of the quakers under Charles II tended to withdraw them from active life, and to throw them in the direction of a more personal and introspective religion. It was then that the writings of Antoinette Bourignon, Madame Guyon and Fénelon became popular, and were much read among a certain section of thinkers, while the teachings of Jacob Boehme, whose works had been put into English between the years 1644 and 1692, bore fruit in many ways. Whether directly or indirectly, they permeated the thought of the founders of the Society of Friends, they were widely read both in cottage and study and they produced a distinct Behmenite sect. Their influence can be seen in the writings of Thomas Tryon, John Pordage, George Cheyne, Francis Lee, Jane Lead, Thomas Bromley, Richard Roach and others; in the foundation and transactions of the Philadelphian society; in the gibes of satirists; in forgotten tracts; in the increase of interest in alchemy; in the voluminous MS. commentaries of Freher, or even in Newton’s great discovery; for it is almost certain that the idea of the three laws of motion first reached Newton through his eager study of Boehme.
The tracing of this mystical thought, however, during the period under discussion and later, mainly among obscure sects and little-known thinkers, would not form part of a history of English literature, were it not that our greatest prose mystic lived and wrote in the same age.