Quakers affirm the Inner Light, "that of God in everyone", the direct, inward presence of Christ or the Spirit that illumines the conscience, teaches, and guides. Central to the message of the founder George Fox, it holds that every person has access to the divine within and can know God immediately, without dependence on clergy, ritual, or even scripture as an external authority set above the Spirit that inspired it. Quaker worship waits in silence upon this inward light, and any worshipper may speak as moved by it. George Fox dated the doctrine's crystallisation to a vision atop Pendle Hill in Lancashire in 1652, from which he began gathering the movement's first converts, the "Valiant Sixty," to publish the teaching across England.
The claim that an inward light gives direct access to God, without need of ordained clergy or, in the most radical early preaching, even scripture as a final external authority, alarmed Calvinist orthodoxy, which held human nature entirely corrupted by the Fall and grace mediated through the visible church and the written word; Puritan Massachusetts responded with capital laws against Quakers, under which Mary Dyer was hanged on Boston Common in 1660 after repeatedly returning from banishment, one of four Quakers executed there between 1659 and 1661.