"they despayrd not of ye gift of tongues," or An incommunicated "Omnisciency and Omnipotency"

Juan de Flandes, 1500/04

"The orthodox Puritan, following Augustinian doctrine, expected the mind of a Saint to be straightened by conversion for practical use in God's service, but Quakers expected men to set reason aside and let the Spirit lead:  'Neither are Omnisciency and Omnipotency themselves[,] as to all those things that are to be known and done [by such,] so altogether incommunicable to spiritual men as our Academical Animals imagine [they are].'  Fortunately, only a few Quakers relied on this completely in practice.  A witty diplomat in 1657 described two Quaker missionaries who, knowing no French, 'past lately by Paris; they were found in the streetes soe starved wth cold & hunger, that one would have thought the Spirit had beene dead in them; the charity of some English gentlemen relieved them, not knowing [yet their] religion; but the fire & a supper revived itt; & would you know their buisenes, they were Ambassadors from the Ld to the Duke of Savoy; wt thr message was is unknowne, but they despayrd not of the gift of tongues [& the Lord had told them they should have successe].'"

     Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, Yale publications in religion 7 (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1964), 151 (original italics re-introduced), citing first p. 575 of the 1679 Testimony of truth exalted of Samuel Fisher, and second "Charles Perrott to Joseph Wilkinson, Paris, January 17, 1656/57" (Extracts from state papers relating to Friends, ed. Penney (1913), 24, which is even more abbreviated than Barbour indicates).