his faith in God. In this spiritual condition he received no help from those clergy he consulted. After several years of seeking and great inward crisis, he received the first of many inner, spiritual illuminations, which he referred to as "openings." He wrote of this experience, one that proved to be the turning point in his search:

When all my hopes in them [the clergy] and in all men, were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could I tell what to do, then, O! then I heard a voice which said, "There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition," and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.

This is was first-hand religious experience like Paul's vision and experience of Christ 1,600 years earlier.

Periods of depression still tempted Fox, but less often. His openings led him in a very personal, direct way into a new life. He reported one of these revelations:

I saw the infinite love of God. I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death; and an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love of God.

Another opening showed him

That every man was enlightened by the Divine Light of Christ ... and that they that believed in it came out of con- demnation and came into the Light of Life, and became children of it.

Through these experiences Fox received his life's mission, one centered in the living Christ. In the Old Testament, Fox had read of the prophets' expectation of Christ, and in the New Testament, he had learned of Christ's historical appearance. Now that which he had known by report became his own experience. He knew the Christ Within; he became Christ's disciple. He had come to know the same spirit that those who wrote the Bible had known:

For though I read the Scriptures that spoke of Christ and of God, yet I knew him not, but by revelation, as He who hath the key did open, and as the Father of life drew me to His Son by His Spirit.

This divine spirit, this inward light, was both illumination and inspiration, a voice to be heard and obeyed. Looking back upon his own experience, Fox declared that anyone who has not experienced the light stands in darkness,