Today's discussion question

[alice wellintown]

So we return to H.L. Mencken's Book of Prefaces and his scathing,
witty,  and famous definition of Puritanism.

I don't know what Friends or Catholics or Presbyterians or Baptists or
Lutherans know about the history of Christain idea, doctrines, dogmas,
let alone the particular and seperate squables that formed, and often
dismembered these (and the Quakers or Froiends declined in number
because they were so open to the ideas of others, though we see the
Readings Out in M&D....), and I imagine that Quakers or Friends,
though in my experience very knowledgable about history, know less
than their counterparts who attend sermons on a Sunday and are
subjected to the history of the churches at least a few times in the
year.

The Reformation needed, in the minds and hearts of "puritans",
reform. Puritan, term, long before Mencken abused it,  was a term of
derision. Often, as is the case with Shakers and Quakers, co-opted,
but still, as the government continued to hang, jail, and punish, and
as religious toleration was only something prayed for, the number of
Puritans ever increased as the violence visited up their covered heads
increased (How's that for the want of violence?). War, and the fear of
Rome, or anything Papist, and the attempt to force everyone under one
tent only increased the anarchy, as more and more, strange
manifestations of the religion sprang up from the bloody fields. Sects
multiplied  and then multiplied, some died, some split, some gave
birth to children they didn't recognize or disowned, cast into the
river or upon the devil's door. Why Fox's madness spread is hard to
say. I doubt it has anything to do with what you list in your post,
Joseph. Fox was, in modern psychological terms, morbid, melancholic,
over the rainbow, crazy. But the hysterical history that engulfed this
poor suffering soul was, as fortune's wheel turned, grace. Had the
madness of history not met the madness of Fox, he would have died,
probably at his own hand, a Cobbler's hammer to the skull.