George Fox was a man made of flint and spirit, a figure who seemed to walk through 17th-century England as if he were carving his own path out of solid stone. To look at him, with his shoulder-length, unkempt hair and his intense, piercing gaze, you would see a man who had long ago ceased to care for the opinions of bishops, kings, or magistrates.
He possessed a character defined by an uncompromising, often abrasive, sincerity. Fox was not a diplomat. He was a religious radical who believed that God was not confined to the gilded walls of a steeple-house or the dry recitations of a liturgy. His core conviction—that there is “that of God in everyone”—was a revolutionary spark that made the entire social hierarchy of his day look like a house of cards.
Physically and temperamentally, he was iron. He survived years in the damp, rat-infested dungeons of Doomsdale and Lancaster Castle, yet he emerged from them with his resolve polished rather than broken. He was known for a physical presence that unnerved his adversaries; even his jailers often seemed to fear his steady, unwavering eye. He walked with a heavy, deliberate tread, and when he spoke, his voice carried the weight of a man who had spent days fasting in the wilderness, listening to what he called the “Inner Light.”
Fox was fundamentally a man of contradictions: he was deeply humble before the Divine, yet he was an absolute titan of ego when confronted by worldly authority. He would refuse to remove his hat for a judge, not out of mere stubbornness, but because he believed that bowing to a man was an act of idolatry that debased the soul. His detractors called him a “mad Quaker,” a fanatic, and a troublemaker. His followers, however, saw in him a man who had simply stripped away the pretense of civilisation to reveal the raw, honest architecture of the human spirit.
He was not a man of comfort. He was restless, constantly travelling, riding through storms and sleeping under hedges, driven by an evangelical fire that could not be banked. He did not seek to build a pleasant institution; he sought to rattle the world awake.
To encounter George Fox in his own time was to experience a profound sense of discomfort. He held up a mirror to the world—to the hypocrisy of the wealthy, the arrogance of the clergy, and the complacency of the common man. He did not ask to be liked, and he certainly did not ask to be understood. He only demanded that you look inward and face the light—or the fire—that he believed burned within every living soul. He was, in essence, a man who refused to blink, and in doing so, he forced an entire nation to stare into the mirror with him.
Worldwide Temple of Aurora 