Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/613

. 21, 1863.]

hours did in fact change the aspect of everything, and open every inducement to proceed to Exeter. At sunrise, all was stir in Monmouth’s camp; for the country-folk kept arriving in bands, led by ministers, or sent, strange to say, by the Quakers, from far and near. The Quakers could not fight, nor ask anybody to fight: but yet they largely recruited the invading force. They believed that the second coming of Christ was at hand; and, believing it, they now said so. Not a few held forth in the streets of the towns; many more traversed the country in all directions, calling upon the people to watch and observe the promise that popery and prelacy had reached their last term; and that the signs and tokens had begun which were to introduce the reign of the pure gospel, and of Christ himself.

Many more unaccountable mistakes have been made than that of regarding Monmouth as a divine instrument, or even the prophet of a new period. The religious public of England was at that time vexed almost out of its reason. The pillage, the captivity, the torment of body and mind inflicted by the priests and potentates of the two churches made fanatics of the people, as of course. Being made so suspicious as to see enemies in all strangers, they were made sanguine about relief and reward from any new event or influence. The same devout persons who had imagined William Penn to be a Jesuit, and all Quakers a new popish agency, might easily see in the Duke of Monmouth the herald of the retributive age, when the faithful should be exalted, and Babylon should be destroyed. Thus, after every day of fanatics testifying in the streets, and