George Fox, a shoemaker's apprentice turned wandering preacher, spent the mid-1640s in spiritual crisis, traveling England and finding no priest or professor able to answer his deepest religious questions. He recorded in his journal that in 1647 he heard an inward voice say, when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, that there was one, even Christ Jesus, who could speak to his condition, an experience he took as direct, unmediated contact with the divine requiring no ordained clergy to reach him.
Fox built a movement around the conviction that this light was available to everyone, not a special gift reserved to him, and that of God, in his own phrase, dwelt in every person waiting to be turned to. Preaching across northern England from 1652, famously atop Pendle Hill in Lancashire, he gathered a following that called itself Friends of the Truth and that opponents nicknamed Quakers, after Fox reportedly told a judge to quake at the word of the Lord.
The doctrine carried immediate practical consequences: since the light needed no ordained minister, Quaker meetings had none; since it needed no liturgy, worship was held in silence until someone felt moved to speak; and since the light was universal, Fox and early Friends preached radical spiritual equality among men and women, rich and poor, that shaped the movement's social witness from its first years.