As early as 1666 he had many followers on the Continent, and in that
year the _Transcendant Spiritual Treatise_ was translated into
German by a convert who came over to London to confer with the sage.
Except on very rare occasions he never left London, nor indeed the
parish in which he was born. He pursued the trade of a tailor till
late in life, but his books had sold largely, and he managed to get
together a competence, and was at one time worried by his neighbours
and fined for refusing to serve in some parish offices. There was a
fund of sagacity about the man which appears frequently in his later
letters, but an utter absence of all sentiment and all sympathy. He
had no _nerves_. Staid, stern, and curiously insensible to
physical pain, he was absolutely fearless, with a constitution that
could defy any hardships and bear any strain upon it.
When we come to the _teaching_ of Muggleton, we find ourselves
in a tangled maze of nonsense far too inconsequential to allow of any
intelligible account being given of it. Jacob Boehm's mistiest dreams
are clearness itself compared with the English prophet's utterances.
Others might talk of the divine cause or the divine power or the
divine person, "fumbling exceedingly" and falling back in an
intellectual swoon upon the stony bosom of the Unknowable. Muggleton
grimly told you that there was a personal Trinity in the universe--
God, man, and devil--and each had his body.
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