RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY

They have often led a discordant inner life and suffered from melancholy during parts of their career. They have known no moderation, been prone to obsessions and fixed ideas, and have frequently fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and displayed all kinds of peculiarities that are ordinarily classified as pathological. Moreover, these pathological features in their lives have often helped to grant them their religious authority and influence.

If you ask for a concrete example, there is none better than George Fox. George Fox (1624–1691), the founder of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers. The Quaker religion he founded is impossible to overpraise. In an age of hypocrisy, it was a religion of truth rooted in spiritual inwardness, representing a return to the original gospel truth more closely than anything men had previously known in England. To the extent that our Christian sects today are becoming more liberal, they are simply reverting in essence to the position that Fox and the early Quakers adopted so long ago. No one can pretend for a moment that Fox’s mind was unsound in terms of spiritual wisdom and capacity. Everyone who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to local magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet, from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or a mentally deranged person original: "détraqué"—a French term for someone who is mentally unstable or "unstrung." of the deepest dye. His Journal abounds in entries of this sort:

"As I was walking with several friends, I lifted up my head and saw three church spires, and they struck at my life. I asked them what place that was? They said, Lichfield. Immediately the word of the Lord came to me, that I must go there. Being arrived at the house we were going to, I asked the friends to walk inside, saying nothing to them of where I was to go. As soon as they were gone, I stepped away,