George Fox (1624-1691) was an English dissenting preacher and the principal founder of the Religious Society of Friends, known as the Quakers. Dissatisfied with the established Church of England and other Protestant denominations of his time, he began preaching in the 1640s a doctrine of direct, unmediated spiritual experience of Christ, the 'Inner Light,' available to every person without the need for clergy or formal ritual. His travels and preaching across England and abroad, often met with imprisonment and persecution, built a growing movement that rejected social hierarchy, oath-taking and violence, and the Quaker movement he founded went on to have a lasting influence on religious tolerance and social reform in the English-speaking world.
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