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Title: The Quakers, Past and Present
Author: Richardson, Dorothy M. (Dorothy Miller)
Language: English
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THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
"The Quaker religion ... is something which
it is impossible to overpraise."
WILLIAM JAMES:
_The Varieties of Religious
Experience_
NEW YORK
DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY
214-220 EAST 23RD STREET
FOREWORD
The following chapters are primarily an attempt at showing the position
of the Quakers in the family to which they belong--the family of the
mystics.
In the second place comes a consideration of the method of worship and
of corporate living laid down by the founder of Quakerism, as best
calculated to foster mystical gifts and to strengthen in the community
as a whole that sense of the Divine, indwelling and accessible, to which
some few of his followers had already attained, and of which all those
he had gathered round him had a dawning apprehension.
The famous "peculiarities" of the Quakers fall into place as following
inevitably from their central belief.
The ebb and flow of that belief, as it is found embodied in the history
of the Society of Friends, has been dealt with as fully as space has
allowed.
My thanks are due to Mr. Norman Penney, F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S., Librarian
of the Friends' Reference Library, for a helpful revision of my
manuscript.
D. M. R.
LONDON,
1914.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BIRTH OF QUAKERISM 1
II. THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS 16
III. THE QUAKER CHURCH 33
IV. THE RETREAT OF QUAKERISM 52
V. QUAKERISM IN AMERICA 61
VI. QUAKERISM AND WOMEN 71
VII. THE PRESENT POSITION 81
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 94
BIBLIOGRAPHY 94
NOTE 96
THE QUAKERS PAST AND PRESENT
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF QUAKERISM
The Quakers appeared about a hundred years after the decentralization of
authority in theological science. The Reformers' dream of a remade
church had ended in a Europe where, over against an alienated parent,
four young Protestant communions disputed together as to the doctrinal
interpretation of the scriptures. Within these communions the goal
towards which the breaking away from the Roman centre had been an
unconscious step was already well in view. It was obvious that the
separated churches were helpless against the demands arising in their
midst for the right of individual interpretation where they themselves
drew such widely differing conclusions. The Bible, abroad amongst the
people for the first time, helped on the loosening of the hold of
stereotyped beliefs. Independent groups appeared in every direction.
In England, the first movement towards the goal of "religious liberty"
was made by a body of believers who declared that a national church was
against the will of God. Catholic in ideal, democratic in form, they set
their hope upon a world-wide Christendom of self-governing
congregations. They increased with great rapidity, suffered persecution,
martyrdom, and temporary dispersal.[1]
Following on this first challenge came the earliest stirring of a more
conservative catholicism. Fed by such minds as that of Nicholas Farrer,
grieving in scholarly seclusion over the ravages of the Protestantisms,
it found expression in Laud's effort to restore the broken continuity of
tradition in the English church, to reintroduce beauty into her
services, and, while preserving her identity as a developing national
body, to keep open a rearward window to the light of accumulated
experience and teaching. But hardly-won freedom saw popery in his every
act, and his final absolutism, his demand for executive power
independent of Parliament, wrecked the effort and cost him his life.
[Footnote 1: The Brownists; now represented in the Congregational
Union.]
These characteristic neo-Protestantisms were obscured at the moment of
the appearance of the Quakers by the opening in this country of the full
blossom of the Genevan theology. The fate of the Presbyterian system,
which covered England like a network, and had threatened during the
shifting policies of Charles's long struggle for absolute monarchy to
become the established church of England, was sealed, it is true, when
Cromwell's Independent army checked the proceedings of a Presbyterian
House of Commons; but the Calvinian reading of the scriptures had
prevailed over the popular imagination, and in the Protectorate Church
where Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians held livings side by
side with the clergy of the Protestant Establishment, where the use of
the Prayer-Book was forbidden and the scriptures were at last supreme,
the predominant type of religious culture was what we have since learned
to call Puritanism. In 1648 Puritanism had reached its great moment. Its
poet[2] was growing to manhood, tortured by the uncertainty of election,
half-maddened by his vision of the doom hanging over a sin-stained
world.
But far away beneath the institutional confusions and doctrinal dilemmas
of this post-Reformation century fresh life was welling up. The
unsatisfied religious energy of the maturing Germanic peoples, groping
its own way home, had produced Boehme and his followers, and filled the
by-ways of Europe with mystical sects. Outwards from free Holland--whose
republic on a basis of religious toleration had been founded in
1579--spread the Anabaptists, Mennonites, and others. Coming to England,
they reinforced the native groups--the Baptists, Familists, and
Seekers--who were preaching personal religion up and down the country
under the protection of Cromwell's indulgence for "tender" consciences,
and found their characteristically English epitome and spokesman in
George Fox.
[Footnote 2: Bunyan was born in 1628, four years later than Fox.]
Born in an English village[3] of homely pious parents,[4] who were both
in sympathy with their thoughtful boy, his genius developed harmoniously
and early.
Until his twentieth year he worked with a shoemaker, who was also a
dealer in cattle and wool, and proved his capacity for business life.
Then a crisis came, brought about by an incident meeting him as he went
about his master's affairs. He had been sent on business to a fair, and
had come upon two friends, one of them a relative, who tried to draw him
into a bout of health-drinking. George, who had had his one glass, laid
down a groat and went home in a state of great disturbance, for he knew
both these men to be professors of religion. He grappled with the
difficulty at once. He spent the hours of that night in pacing up and
down his room, in prayer and crying out, in sitting still and
reflecting. In the light of the afternoon's incidents he saw and felt
for the first time the average daily life of the world about him, "how
young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth,"
all that gave meaning to life for him had no existence in their lives,
even in the lives of professing Christians. He was thrown in on himself.
If God was not with those who professed him, where was He?
[Footnote 3: In 1624, at Drayton-in-the-Clay, in Leicestershire.]
[Footnote 4: His father, a weaver by trade, and known as "Righteous
Christer," is described by Fox as a man "with a seed of God in him"; his
mother, Mary Lago, as being "of the stock of the martyrs."]
The labours and gropings of the night simplified before the dawn came to
the single conviction that he must "forsake all, both young and old, and
keep out of all, and be a stranger unto all." There was no hesitating.
He went forth at once and wandered for four years up and down the
Midland counties seeking for light, for truth, for firm ground in the
quicksands of disintegrating faiths, for a common principle where men
seemed to pull every way at once. He sought all the "professors" of
every shade and listened to all, but would associate with none, shunning
those who sought him out: "I was afraid of them, for I was sensible they
did not possess what they professed." He went to hear the great
preachers of the day in London and elsewhere, but found no light in
them. Now and again amongst obscure groups to which hope drew him one
and another were struck by his sayings, and responded to him, but he
shrank from their approval. The clergy of different denominations in the
neighbourhood of his home, where he returned for a while in response to
the disquietude of his parents, could not understand his difficulties.
How should they? He was perfectly sound in every detail of the Calvinian
doctrine. They could make nothing of a distress so unlike that of other
pious young Puritans. Orthodox as he was, there is no sign in his
outpourings of any concern for his soul, not a word of fear, nor any
sense of sin, though he heartily acknowledges temptations, a divided
nature, "two thirsts." He begs the priests to tell him the meaning of
his troubled state--not as one doubting, but rather with the restiveness
of one under a bondage, keeping him from that which he knows to be
accessible.
One minister advised tobacco and psalm-singing, another physic and
bleeding. His family urged him to marry.
His distress grew, amounting sometimes to acute agony of mind: "As I
cannot declare the great misery I was in, it was so great and heavy upon
me, so neither can I set forth the mercies of God unto me in all my
misery." Brief intermissions there were when he was "brought into such a
joy that I thought I had been in Abraham's bosom."
But on the whole his wretchedness steadily increased. None could help.
The written word had ceased to comfort him. He wandered days and nights
in solitary places taking no food.
Illumination came at last--a series of convictions dawning in the mind
that truth cannot be found in outward things, and, finally, the moment
of release--the sense of which he tries to convey to us under the
symbolism of a voice making his heart leap for joy--leaving him remade
in a new world.
Two striking passages from his Journal may serve to illustrate this
period of his experience: "The Lord did gently lead me along, and did
let me see His love, which was endless and eternal, and surpasseth all
the knowledge that men have in the natural state, or can get by history
or books ... and I was afraid of all company, for I saw them perfectly
where they were, through the love of God which let me see myself"; and,
again, as he struggles to express the change that had taken place for
him: "Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the
paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another
smell unto me than before beyond what words can utter."
Two years of intense life followed. He came back to the world with his
message for all men, all churches, with no new creed to preach, but to
call all men to see their creeds in the light of the living experience
which had first produced them, to live themselves in that light shining
pure and original within each one of them, the light which wrote the
scriptures and founded the churches; to refuse to be put off any longer
with "notions," mere doctrines, derivative testimonies obscuring the
immediate communication of life to the man himself.
This message--the message of the inner light of immediate inspiration,
of the existence in every man of some measure of the Spirit of God--the
Quakers laid, as it were, side by side with the doctrines of the
Puritanism amidst which they were born. They did not escape the absolute
dualism of the thought of their day. They believed man to be shut up in
sin, altogether evil, and they declared at the same time that there is
in every man that which will, if he yields to its guidance, lift him
above sin, is able to make him here and now free and sinless. The
essential irreconcilability of the two positions does not appear to have
troubled them.
This belief in the divine light within the individual soul was, of
course, nothing new. The Roman Church had taught it. Instruction as to
the conditions whereby it may have its way with a man was the end of her
less worldly labours.
The Protestants taught it; the acceptance of salvation, the birth of the
light in the darkness of the individual soul was the message of the
Book. But George Fox and his followers claimed that the measure of
divine life, nesting, as it were, within the life of each man, was
universal, was before churches and scriptures, and had always led
mankind. Yet it was not to be confused with the natural light of reason
of the Socinians and Deists, for the first step towards union with it
was a control of all creaturely activities, a total abandonment of each
and every claim of the surface intelligence--"notions," as the Quakers
called them--a process of retirement into the innermost region of being,
into "the light," "the seed," "the ground of the soul," "that which hath
convinced you."
The God of the Quakers, then, was no literary obsession coming to meet
them along the pages of history; no traditional immensity visiting man
once, and silent ever since, to be momentarily invoked from infinite
spatial distance by external means of grace; no "notion," no mere
metaphysical absolute, but a living process, a changing, changeless
absolute, a breath controlling all things, an amazing birth within the
soul. Tradition they valued as a record of God's dealings with man. The
Bible held for them no enfeebling spell. Their controversial writings
have, indeed, anticipated, as has recently been pointed out,[5] the
methods of the higher criticism; they touch on the synoptic problems;
they ask their biblicist opponents whether they are talking of original
autographs, transcribed copies, or translations. They rally them: "Who
was it that said to the Spirit of God, O Spirit, blow no more, inspire
no more men, make no more prophets from Ezra's days downward till
Christ, and from John's days downward for ever? But cease, be silent,
and subject thyself, as well as all evil spirits, to be tried by the
standard that's made up of some of the writings of some of those men
thou hast moved to write already; and let such and such of them as are
bound up in the bibles now used in England be the only means of
measuring all truth for ever."
[Footnote 5: William C. Braithwaite: _The Beginnings of Quakerism._
(Macmillan, 1912.)]
The Incarnation was to them the one instance of a perfect shining of the
light, a perfect realization of the fusion of human and divine, the full
indwelling of the Godhead, which was their goal. The incidents of that
life shone clear to them in the light of what went forward in themselves
in proportion as they struggled to live in the spirit.
But neither was this claim, the assertion of an immediate pathway to
reality within the man himself, anything new in the world. Each nation,
each great period of civilization, has produced individuals, or groups
separated by time and creed, but unanimous in their testimony as to its
existence.
The giants among them stand upon the highest peaks of human
civilization. Their art or method in debased or arrested forms is to be
found in every valley. They have been called "mystics," and it is to the
classical century of European mysticism, to the group (of which Tauler
was the mainstay) calling themselves the "Friends of God," that we must
go for an outbreak of mystical genius akin to that which took place in
seventeenth-century England. Both groups made war on the official
Christianity of their day, and strove to relate Christendom afresh to
its true source of vitality, to re-form the church on a spiritual basis.
The testimony, the end, and the means for the attainment of the end were
the same in both. The immense distinction between them arose from the
difference in the conditions under which the two ventures were made. The
fourteenth-century mystics opened their eyes in a congenial environment,
in a church whose symbolism, teaching, and ordinances, were a coherent
reflection of their own experiences, stood justified by their personal
knowledge of the "law" of spiritual development, the conditions of
advance in the way on which their feet were set.
They owed much to tradition, to their theological studies, to their
familiarity with the recorded experiences of holy men; they recognized
their church as the transmitter of this tradition, as the guardian of
saintly testimony on the subject of their art. They recognized her, not
as an end but as a means, not as a prison, but as a home for all the
human family, keeping open her doors, on the one hand, to the
unconverted, providing, on the other, a suitable medium, the right
atmosphere and opportunities, whereby pilgrims in the spiritual life
might develop, to their full, possibilities in advance of the common
measure of the group. They chid her, they exposed abuses, and called for
reforms; they challenged the "carnal conception" of the sacraments, and
denounced the loose lives of her dignitaries; but they remained in the
church.
The Quakers, on the contrary, appeared when few of those who were in
authority were able to understand what had arisen in their midst. Fox
brought his challenge by the wayside; untrammelled by tradition,
fearless in inexperience, he endowed all men with his own genius, and
called upon the whole world to join him in the venture of faith.
CHAPTER II
THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
I
When Fox came back to the world from his lonely wanderings, he had no
thought of setting up a church in opposition to, or in any sort of
competition with, existing churches. His message was for all,
worshipping under whatever name or form; his sole concern to reveal to
men their own wealth, to wean them to turn from words and ceremonials,
from all merely outward things, to seek first the inner reality. Many of
the Puritan leaders were brought by their contact with Fox to a more
vital attitude with regard to the faith in which they had been brought
up. Several of the magistrates before whom he and his followers were
continually being haled, unable after hours of examination and
discussion not only to find any cause of offence in these men, but
unable, also, to resist the appeal of their strength and sincerity,
espoused their cause with every degree of warmth, from whole-hearted
adherence to lifelong, unflagging interest and sympathy. But the general
attitude, from the panic-stricken behaviour of those who regarded the
Quakers as black magicians, incarnations of the Evil One, or Jesuits in
disguise, to the grave concern of the Calvinist divines, who saw in the
Quaker movement a profane attack upon the foundation-rock of Holy
Scripture, was one of fear--fear based, as is usual, upon
misunderstanding. A concise reasoned formulation of the Quaker
standpoint, though it may be picked out from the writings of Fox and the
early apologists, was to come, and then only imperfectly, when the
scholarly Robert Barclay joined the group; meanwhile, the sometimes
rather amorphous enthusiasm, the "mysterious meetings," the apocalyptic
claims and denunciations--meaningless to those who had no key--stood as
a barrier between the "children of the light" and the religious
fellowship of the Commonwealth church. Fear is clearly visible at the
root of the instant and savage persecution of the Quakers, not only by
the mob, but by official Calvinism, throughout the chapter of its power.
The keynote was struck by the local authorities at Nottingham, who
responded to Fox's plea for the Inner Light during a Sunday morning's
service in the parish church by putting him in prison. It is usually
maintained that his offence was brawling, but it is difficult to
reconcile this reading with the facts of the case. Theological
disputations were the most popular diversions of the day. There were no
newspapers, nor, in the modern sense of the word, either "politics" or
books; popular literature consisted largely of religious pamphlets;
amateur theologians abounded; the public meetings arousing the maximum
of enthusiasm were those gathered for the duels of well-known
controversialists; while speaking in church after the minister had
finished was not only recognized, but far from unusual. In this instance
the minister had preached from the text, "We have also a more sure word
of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light
that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day star arise
in your hearts," and had developed his theme in the sense that the sure
word of prophecy was the record of the Scripture. Fox--whom we may
imagine already much the man William Penn later on described for us as
"no busybody or self-seeker, neither touchy nor critical ... so meek,
contented, modest, easy, steady, tender, it was a pleasure to be in his
company.... I never saw him out of his place or not a match for every
service and occasion; for in all things he acquitted himself like a
man--yea, a strong man, a new and heavenly-minded man--civil beyond all
forms of breeding in his behaviour"--rose with his challenge, threw down
the gauntlet to biblicism, and declared that the Light was not the
Scriptures, but the Spirit of God....
But, as we have seen, religious England was not wholly Puritan. Fox's
world was waiting for him. From every denomination and every rank of
society the Children of the Light came forth. Very many--notably the
nuclear members of small independent groups--had reached the Quaker
experience before he came. The beliefs and customs which have since been
identified with the Society of Friends were already in existence in the
group of Separated Baptists at Mansfield in Nottingham, which formed in
face of the closed doors of official religion the centre of the little
Quaker church. The singleness of type, moreover, in the missionary work
of the early Quakers, extending, as it did, over the whole of
Christendom, carried on independently by widely differing
natures--"narrow" nonconformist ministers, prosperous business men, army
officers and privates, shepherds, cloth-makers, gentlewomen and domestic
servants, under every variety of circumstance, would be enough in itself
to reveal Fox as the child of his time. But as we watch the movement, as
we see it assailed by those dangers arising wherever systems and
doctrines are left behind and reason gets to work upon the facts of a
man's own experience; as we find the fresh life threatening here to
crystallize into formal idealism, there to flow away into pantheism or
antinomianism, again to pour into a dead sea of placid illumination; as
we see the little church surviving these dangers and continually
reviving, we recognize that Fox was more than the liberator of mystical
activity. He was its steersman. His constructive genius cast the mould
which has enabled this experiment to escape the fate overtaking similar
efforts. Seventeenth-century mysticism in France[6] and Spain was
succumbing to Quietism. Molinos, the Spanish monk, a contemporary of
Fox, popularized a debased form of Teresian mysticism, formulating it as
a state "where the soul loses itself in the soft and savoury sleep of
nothingness, and enjoys it knows not what"; while in France the practice
of passive contemplation had gained in the religious life of the time a
popularity which even the mystical genius of Madame Guyon--who herself,
it is true, lays in her writings over-much stress upon this, the first
step of the mystic way--failed to disturb.
[Footnote 6: If we except the doomed Port Royalists.]
For Fox, we cannot keep too clearly in mind, the relationship of the
soul to the Light was a life-process; the "inner" was not in
contradistinction to the outer. For him, the great adventure, the
abstraction from all externality, the purging of the self, the Godward
energizing of the lonely soul, was in the end, as it has been in all the
great "actives" among the mystics, the most practical thing in the
world, and ultimately fruitful in life-ends. He surprises us by the
intensity of his objective vision, by the number of modern movements he
anticipates: popular education; the abolition of slavery; the
substitution of arbitration for warfare amongst nations, and for
litigation between individuals; prison reform, and the revising of
accepted notions as to the status of women. He delights us with the
strong balance of his godliness, his instant suspicion of religiosity
and emotionalism, his dealing with those extremes of physical and mental
disturbance which are apt in unstable natures to accompany any sudden
flooding of the field of consciousness; his discouragement of ranting
and "eloquence," of self-assertion and infallibility--of anything
indicating lack of control, or militating against the full operation of
the light.
But, enormously powerful as was the influence of Fox upon the movement
which he liberated and steered, it was at the same time exceptionally
free--even in relation to the comparatively imitative mass of the Quaker
church--from that limitation which justifies the famous description of
an institution as the lengthened shadow of a man. The partial escape of
the Quaker church from this almost universal fate of institutions
becomes clear when we fix our attention on the essential nature of Fox's
"discovery" and what was involved in his offering it to the laity, when
we note that within the Quaker borders there arose that insistence on
the "originality" of life on all levels that has, at last, in our own
day, made its appearance in official philosophy.
II
The history of the Quaker experiment reveals in England three main
movements: the first corresponding roughly to the life of Fox, and
covering the period of expansion, persecution,[7] and establishment; the
second, which may be called the retreat of Quakerism, the quiet
cultivation of Quaker method; and the third, the modern evangelistic
revival.
The first rapid spreading in the North of England was materially helped
by the establishment, in 1652, of a centre at Swarthmoor Hall, near
Ulverston in Lancashire, the property of Judge Fell and his wife
Margaret, good churchpeople, much given to religious exercises, and
holding open house for travelling ministers of all denominations. The
capture of this stronghold gave the movement a northern headquarters,
and a post-office. Margaret Fell, converted by Fox at the age of
thirty-eight, built the rest of her life into the movement; seventeen
years later--more than ten years after the death of her husband--she
became Fox's wife. Her voluminous and carefully preserved correspondence
with the leading missionaries of the group alone forms almost a journal
of the early years of the Society.[8]
[Footnote 7: Toleration Act passed 1689. Fox died two years later.]
The whole of the countryside at Swarthmoor, whose minister Fox had
repudiated, finding him filled with a ranting spirit, high words and
"notions"--"full of filth," as he tersely notes in his Journal--came out
against him.
He was given up to justice, ordered to be whipped, and then handed over
to the mercy of the mob, who beat him until he fell senseless.
Presently, rising up, he bade them strike again. A mason numbed his arm
with a blow from a staff; the arm recovered instantly under the power of
his outgoing love for his persecutors. Incidents of this kind--of
beatings, stonings, and assaults of a more disgusting nature--are
typical of the treatment received with unvarying sweetness by the Quaker
missionaries, both in England and in America. On several occasions Fox's
life was attempted.
[Footnote 8: The bulk of the "Fell" correspondence is preserved at the
headquarters of the Society of Friends, Devonshire House, Bishopsgate,
E.C.]
Persecutions of all kinds, moreover, fell far more heavily upon the
Quakers than upon other nonconformists, owing to their persistence in
holding their meetings openly--meeting in the street if their premises
were burned down, the children meeting together when the parents were
imprisoned. Fines, flogging, pillory, the loathsomeness of damp and
uncleansed dungeons, the brutality of gaolers, left their serenity
unmoved; the exposure of women in the stocks for seventeen hours on a
November night confirmed their faith. In the Restoration period
particularly, when the strong influence of the religious soldiers of the
Commonwealth--many of whom, including Cromwell, were able to grasp the
tendency of Fox's conception--was removed, persecution became
methodical. Some three thousand odd had suffered before the King came
back, twenty-one dying as a result of cruel treatment. Three hundred
died during the Restoration period, and they were in prison thousands at
a time, for although Charles II., once the leaders had made clear their
lack of political ambition, promised them full freedom from disturbance,
the panic of fear of sectaries of all kinds which followed the Fifth
Monarchy outbreak in London opened an era of persecution and
imprisonment. Enormous sums of money were extracted from them under
various pretexts; the Quaker and Conventicle Acts were used against them
with ingenious brutality, an inducement in the shape of the fine imposed
being held out to informers. The Militia Act was, of course, a
convenient weapon, and their refusal to pay tithes meant a perpetual
series of heavy distraints. It was a common trick with judges and
magistrates when they could find no legitimate ground of complaint, to
tender to Quakers the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and turn them
into law-breakers on the ground of their refusal to swear. Wales offered
the most ferocious persecution suffered by them in these islands, but
the Welsh converts furnished Pennsylvania with a fine group of vigorous,
industrious colonists.
In 1654 the "new doctrine" was brought to the South by some sixty
travelling missionaries. The Universities, inflamed, no doubt, in
advance by the report of the Quaker scorn of wisdom and high
"notions"--having already revenged themselves upon four Quaker girls who
were the first to "publish truth" in the colleges and churches,
Cambridge following up the savagery of the students by public flogging,
Oxford by ducking--had little but rage and evil treatment for the
missionaries. Amongst the few converts made in Oxford, however, was the
man who, in his turn, brought William Penn into the Quaker fold. In
pious London, sunk in theological strife, the obscure Waiters, Ranters,
and Seekers were the most favourable soil.
The Quakers, however, worked everywhere, ploughing up the land, calling
men to cease the strife of words, and to wait before the Lord for living
experience.
They had come down in June, and in August were so far settled as to
undertake expansion east and west. The east, a stronghold of Puritanism,
was less receptive than the western country, where Seekers abounded and
convincements took place by hundreds.
Ireland was broken into by William Edmondson, an ex-Cromwellian soldier.
The country was in process of being "settled" by English colonists, who,
most of them being either Baptists or Independents, were already a
sufficient source of irritation, and the progress of the new message was
slow, and met with a persecution, borrowing much of its bitterness from
the state of nervous fear prevailing amongst the civil and military
authorities. For a time there was an attempt systematically to exclude
Friends from the country, but it gave way before the zeal and simplicity
of the preachers, and Quakerism, gaining most of its early converts from
the army, became in the end a rapidly expanding force.
In Scotland Quaker teaching progressed slowly. By 1656 the Continent had
been attacked, Holland and Germany, Austria and Hungary, Adrianople,
where a young girl who had gone out alone reasoned with the Sultan, and
was told that she spoke truth, and asked to remain in the country;
Rome--where John Love was given up by the Jesuits to the Inquisition,
examined by the Pope, and hanged--the Morea, and Smyrna, and Alexandria
were visited. Many attempts were made to land at the Levantine ports,
most of which were, however, frustrated by English consuls and
merchants; George Robinson reached Jerusalem, and came near to meeting
his death at the hands of the Turks; and the first isolated attempt had
been made in the West Indies and America. These activities and
expansions were helped forward and confirmed by Fox during the intervals
between his many imprisonments. He spent altogether some six years in
prison. For the rest, his life was one long missionary enterprise, and
during his detentions he worked unceasingly.
He early recognized the need of a definite church organization, and
matured a system whose final acceptance by the society as a whole was
helped on by an incident occurring during his eight months' confinement
in Launceston gaol.[9] James Nayler, one of the sweetest and ablest of
Quaker writers and preachers, of an acutely "suggestible" temperament,
and less stable than his followers, unsettled by the success attending
his work both in the north and the south and by the adulations of some
of the more excitable of his fellow-workers, permitted on the occasion
of his entry into Bristol a triumphant procession, the singing of
hosannas, and Messianic worship. It is noteworthy that of the thousand
odd Quakers in Bristol at the time not one took any part in the
outbreak. The matter was taken up by Parliament, a committee was
appointed, and Nayler came near being put to death for blasphemy. He
suffered in the pillory, was whipped through London and Bristol, his
tongue was bored, his forehead branded, and he was kept in prison for
three years. He made full public recantation of his errors, and enjoyed
full communion with the society which had never repudiated him,
recognizing even in his time of aberration the fine spiritual character
of the man. This incident, loaded with publicity, brought much
discouragement to Friends; but it also showed them their need of the
organization and discipline insisted upon by Fox. And so the Quaker
church--the most flexible of all religious organizations--came into
being.
[Footnote 9: Part of which was spent in a dungeon reserved for witches
and murderers, and left uncleansed year after year.]
CHAPTER III
THE QUAKER CHURCH
At the heart of the Quaker church is "meeting"--the silent Quaker
meeting so long a source of misunderstanding to those outside the body,
so clearly illuminated now for all who care to glance that way, by the
light of modern psychology. We have now at our disposal, marked out with
all the wealth of spatial terminology characteristic of that science, a
rough sketch of what takes place in our minds in moments of silent
attention. We are told, for instance, that when in everyday life our
attention is arrested by something standing out from the cinematograph
show of our accustomed surroundings, we fix upon this one point, and
everything else fades away to the "margin" of consciousness. The "thing"
which has had the power of so arresting us, of making a breach in the
normal, unnoticed rhythm of the senses, allows our "real self"--our
larger and deeper being, to which so many names have been given--to flow
up and flood the whole field of the surface intelligence. The typical
instances of this phenomenon are, of course, the effect upon the
individual of beauty on all its levels--the experience known as falling
in love and the experience of "conversion."
With most of us, beyond these more or less universal experiences, the
times of illumination are intermittent, fluctuating, imperfectly
accountable, and uncontrollable. The "artist" lives to a greater or less
degree in a perpetual state of illumination, in perpetual communication
with his larger self. But he remains within the universe constructed for
him by his senses, whose rhythm he never fully transcends. His thoughts
are those which the veil of sense calls into being, and though that veil
for him is woven far thinner above the mystery of life than it is for
most of us, it is there. Imprisoned in beauty, he is content to dwell,
reporting to his fellows the glory that he sees.
The religious genius, as represented pre-eminently by the great
mystics--those in whom the sense of an ultimate and essential goodness,
beauty, and truth, is the dominant characteristic--have consciously bent
all their energies to breaking through the veil of sense, to making a
journey to the heart of reality, to winning the freedom of the very
citadel of Life itself. Their method has invariably included what--again
borrowing from psychology--we must call the deliberate control of all
external stimuli, a swimming, so to say, against the whole tide of the
surface intelligence, and this in no negative sense, no mere sinking
into a state of undifferentiated consciousness, but rather, as we have
seen with Fox, a setting forth to seek something already
found--something whose presence is in some way independent of the normal
thinking and acting creature, something which has already proclaimed
itself in moments of heightened consciousness--in the case of the
religious temperament at "conversion."
Silence, bodily and mental, is necessarily the first step in this
direction. There is no other way of entering upon the difficult
enterprise of transcending the rhythms of sense, and this, and nothing
else, has been invariably the first step taken by the mystic upon his
pilgrimage. Skirting chasms of metaphor, abysses of negation and fear,
he has held along this narrowest of narrow ways.
But the early Quakers and the old-time mystics knew nothing of
scientific psychology. They arrived "naturally" at their method of
seeking in silence what modern thought is calling "the intuitive
principle of action"--"the independent spiritual life fulfilling itself
within humanity"--"the unformulated motive which is the greater part of
mind." Like every seeker, on whatever level, they were led by feeling.
Feeling passed into action. Thought followed in due course, and was
deposited as doctrine. They spoke, groping for symbols, of "the seed,"
"the light," "the true birth." In other words--lest we go too far with
psychology's trinity of thought, feeling, and will as separable
activities "doing the will"--they "knew the doctrine."
From this standpoint of obedience to the "inner light" they found
within, they "understood" what they saw around them, and brought a fresh
revelation to the world. "I was afraid of all company," says Fox during
his early trials, "for I saw them perfectly where they were, through the
love of God which let me see myself." For them the keynote of life is
what an independent uninstructed French mystic, Brother Lawrence,[10]
has called "the practice of the Presence of God," and the man to whom
the practical spade-work of the mystics, the art of introversion and
contemplation, the practice (very variously interpreted) of purgation,
the pathway that leads to "unknowing" and to union with what men have
called God, has not been entered on as a matter of living experience, is
no Quaker, no matter how pious, how philanthropically orthodox, how
"religious" he may be. In a meeting for worship he is a foreign body, an
unconverted person.
Side by side with the meeting for worship is the business meeting--a
monthly meeting which is the executive unit of the society. It is held
under the superintendence of a clerk, whose duty it is to embody the
results of discussions in a series of minutes (voting and applause are
unknown), and to send these up to the larger quarterly meeting of the
district--a group of monthly meetings--delegates being appointed by each
monthly meeting to secure representation. The meetings are open to all
members and to outsiders on application. Most local questions are
settled by the quarterly meetings, whose deliberations are on the same
plan as those of the monthly meetings. Questions affecting the society
as a whole, and matters otherwise of wide importance, go up to Yearly
Meeting--the General Assembly of the Society--where, as in the
subordinate meetings, decisions are reached by means of a taking by the
clerk of the general "sense" of the gathering after free discussion. The
decisions of Yearly Meeting are final. It issues periodically a Book of
Discipline, in which are embodied, in the form of epistles and other
documents, the general attitude of the society as a whole in matters of
belief and conduct. A number of sub-committees are perpetually at work
for special ends--social, philanthropic, etc.--and there is attached to
Yearly Meeting a standing committee known as the Meeting for Sufferings,
established in 1675 in the interest of the victims of persecution. It is
composed of representatives of quarterly meetings and of certain
officers. It is always engaged in the interest, not only of members of
the Quaker body in difficult circumstances, but of sufferers all over
the world. It does an enormous amount of unpublished work. Notorious, of
course, is the history of the party of Quakers who arrived in Paris on
the raising of the siege[11] with food and funds for the famine-stricken
town; less known is the constant quiet assistance, such as that rendered
to famine and plague districts and at the seat of war in various parts
of the world. There are two offices in the Quaker body: that of Elder,
whose duty it is to use discretion in acting as a restraining or
encouraging influence with younger members in their ministry; and that
of Overseer, exercising a general supervision over members of their
meeting, admonishing them, if it should be necessary, as to the payment
of just debts; the friendly settlement of "differences" about outward
things; the discouraging and, as far as possible, restraining legal
proceedings between members; "dealing" with any who may be conducting
themselves, either in business or in private life, in a way such as to
bring discredit upon their profession; caring for the poor, securing
maintenance for them where necessary, and assisting them to educate
their children. When any person has been found to be specially helpful
in a meeting, and his or her ministry is recognized over a considerable
period of time as being a true ministry, exercised "in the spirit," such
a one is, after due deliberation, "acknowledged" or "recorded" as a
"minister." This acknowledgment, however, confers no special status upon
the individual, and implies no kind of appointment to preach or
otherwise to exercise any special function in the society. There is,
apparently, to-day a growing feeling against even this slight
recognition of ministry as also against the custom hitherto prevailing
of the special "bench" for Elders, which is usually on a raised dais,
and facing the meeting. Men and women work, both in government and in
ministry, side by side. Until the year 1907 they held their Yearly
Meeting separately,[12] with occasional joint sittings. Since then all
Yearly Meetings are held jointly, though the women's meetings are still
held for certain purposes.
[Footnote 10: Nicholas Hermann.]
[Footnote 11: 1870.]
The superficial structure of the society has existed, together with its
founder's system of the methodical recording of births, marriages, and
deaths, much as we know it to-day from the beginning.
The distinctive Quaker teaching--with its two main points, the direct
communication of truth to a man's own soul: the presence, in other
words, of a "seed of God" in every man; and the possibility here and now
of complete freedom from sin, together with the many subsidiary
testimonies, such as that against war, oaths, the exclusion of women
from the ministry, etc., depending from these points--has also survived
through many crises, and, in spite of the perpetual danger of being
overwhelmed by the Calvinism amidst which it was born, and which to this
day takes large toll of the society, and perpetually threatens the whole
group, is still represented in its original purity.
[Footnote 12: See chapter on Quakerism and Women.]
The Quakers have never, in spite of their deprecation of the written
word and their insistence on the secondariness of even the highest
"notions" and doctrines, been backward in defending their faith. They
sat at the feet of no man, nor did they desire that any man should sit
at theirs; but when they met, not merely at the hands of the wilder
sectaries, but from sober, godly people, with accusations of blasphemy,
when they were told that they denied Christ and the Scriptures, they
rose up and justified themselves. They were fully equal to those who
attacked them in the savoury vernacular of the period, in apocalyptic
metaphor, in trouncings and denunciations. Bunyan, their relentless
opponent throughout, is thus apostrophized by Burrough: "Alas for thee,
John Bunion! thy several months' travail in grief and pain is a
fruitless birth, and perishes as an untimely fig, and its praise is
blotted out among men, and it's passed away as smoke." But throughout
the vehemence of the Friends' controversial writings runs the sense of
fair play--the fearlessness of truth; the spirit, so to say, of
tolerance of every belief in the midst of their intolerance of an
"unvital" attitude in the believer. Their positive attitude to life,
their grand affirmation, redeems much that on other grounds seems
regrettable.
By the time the classical apologist of Quakerism--Robert Barclay, a
member of an ancient Scottish family, liberally educated at Aberdeen
College and in Paris, who had on his conversion forced himself to ride
through the streets of his city in sackcloth and ashes--had published
his book,[13] any justification of Quakerism had, from the point of view
of the laity at large, ceased to be necessary. They had had some thirty
years' experience of the fruits of the doctrine; they knew the Quakers
as neighbours; had scented something of the sweet fragrance of their
austerity; had wondered at their independence of happenings, their
freedom from fear, their centralized strength, their picking their way,
so to say, amongst the externalities of life with the calm assurance of
those who hold a clue where most men blunder, driven by fear or selfish
desire. They knew them, moreover, as untiringly available outside their
own circle on behalf of every sort of distress. The custodians, amateur
and official, of theology still preyed upon them, though many of these
were, no doubt, disarmed by the Puritan orthodoxy of the background upon
which Barclay's rationale of the Quaker's attitude is wrought.
[Footnote 13: _An Apology for the True Christian Divinity._ 1678.]
There is ample evidence that he was widely read, both in England and
abroad, and the fact that no one took up the challenge, though Baxter
and Bunyan were still living and working, may perhaps be accounted for
by the absence in the _Apology_ of any clear statement of the real
irreconcilability between Quakerism and attitudes that are primarily
doctrinal or institutional.
He accepts the scriptures as a secondary light, saying that they may not
be esteemed the "principal ground of all Truth and Knowledge, nor yet
the adequate primary rule of faith and manners," that they cannot go
before the teaching of the very spirit that makes them intelligible. He
maintains that the closing adjuration in the Book of Revelation refers
only to that particular prophecy, and is not intended to suggest that
prophecy is at an end. The ground of knowledge is immediate revelation,
which may not be "subjected to the examination either of the outward
Testimony of the Scripture or of the Natural Reason of Man as to a more
noble or certain Rule or Touchstone."
He considers that Augustine's doctrine of original sin was called out by
his zeal against the Pelagian exaltation of the natural light of reason.
He admits that man in sin--the natural man--can know no right; that,
therefore, the Socinians and Pelagians are convicted in exalting a
"natural light," but that, nevertheless, God in love gives universal
light, convicting of sin, and teaching if not resisted. He qualifies the
Quaker claim to the possibility of absolute present salvation from sin
by adding that there may be a falling off.
The whole of his argument displays the impossibility of rationalizing
the position to which the Quakers had felt their way in terms of the
absolute dualism of seventeenth-century philosophy. He places the
doctrines of natural sinfulness and of universal light side by side, and
so leaves them.
The logical instability of Quaker formulas due to the limitations of the
scientific philosophy of the day (not until the dawn of our own century
has a claim analogous to theirs been put forward on the intellectual
plane)--due, in other words, to the characteristic lagging of thought
behind life, while comparatively immaterial in the founders and leaders
of the Quaker movement, who were all mystics or mystically minded
persons, a variation of humanity, peculiar people gathered together,
with all their differences, by a common characteristic, seeing their
universe in the same terms urged towards unanimous activity--began to
bear fruit in the second generation. Mystical genius is not hereditary,
and to the comparatively imitative mass making up the later generations
the Inward Light becomes a doctrine, a conception as mechanical and
static as is the infallible Scripture to the imitative mass of the
Protestants.
We may not, of course, apply the term "imitative" in too absolute a
sense. All have the light. We are all mystics. We all live our lives on
our various levels, at first hand. But a full recognition of this fact
need not blind us to the further fact that, while those who have
mystical genius need no chart upon their journey, most of us need a
plain way traced out for us through the desert. Most of us follow the
gleam of doctrine thrown out by first-hand experience, and cling to that
as our guide. But if the Quaker message failed as theology, and the
later generations swung back to the simpler doctrine of Protestantism
and re-enthroned an infallible Scripture, something, nevertheless, had
been done. Within the precincts of Quakerism certain paths backwards
were, so to say, permanently blocked. A fresh type of conduct was
assured. The world, the environment in which the new lives of the group
were to arise, had been changed for ever.
The working out of the logical insecurity of the Quaker position is
interestingly shown in the person of George Keith, intellectually the
richest of the early Quakers, a man whose writings have been
acknowledged by his fellows, and would still stand if he had not left
the group, as amongst the best expositions of the Quaker attitude.
He was a Scotch Presbyterian, and seems to have joined the Quakers while
still a student at Aberdeen University. For nearly thirty years he was
under the spell of the Quaker reading of life, and lived during this
time well in the forefront of public discussion and persecution. We find
him writing books and pamphlets in and out of prison, full of the ardour
and the joy of his discovery that there are to-day immediate
revelations, speaking with delight of the meaning and use of silence,
defending his new faith before Presbyterian divines and University
students, declaring that he found Friends "wiser than all the teachers I
ever formerly had been under."
It was not until after the death of Fox, when the first generation of
"born Friends" was growing up, that he began to express his sense of the
danger he saw ahead. Then we find him accusing Friends of neglecting the
historic evidences of their faith, of sacrificing the outer to the
inner. His main doctrinal divergence from them was his assertion that
salvation is impossible without the knowledge of and belief in the
historic Jesus. But doctrine was not his only difficulty. He went to the
very heart of the situation. He saw that the Quakers could never become
in the world what they hoped to be--a mystical church, a body of men
swayed without let or hindrance by the Divine Spirit, pioneers for the
world upon the upward way--unless they were willing to pay the price of
the saintly office. He begged for the abolition of birthright
membership, for an open confession of faith for incoming members, that
the children of Friends should come and offer themselves as strangers,
their spiritual claims weighed and considered; that marriage should not
be celebrated according to the Quaker rites between those who were not
faithful Friends; that a sort of register should be kept of those who,
in and out of meeting, were live and consistent Christians. His view of
the situation, though put forward with a violence and bitterness which
prejudiced it with his hearers, and brought his own spiritual life under
suspicion, is largely justified by the subsequent experience of the
society. His challenge attracted a large following in America, whither
he had gone as headmaster of a Friends' school. The other leaders of the
society, both in London and Pennsylvania, denied his assertion of the
neglect by Friends of the historical Christ, while protesting that we
must believe that the light of Christ reaches every man, whether he have
heard of him or no.
In 1692 the matter came before the Yearly Meeting, and Keith and his
large body of followers were condemned in writing of the "spirit of
reviling, railing, lying, slandering," and of mischievous and hurtful
separation. So the schism was formed, and a new sect arose, which
established many meetings amidst controversy and bitterness. The
following year London Yearly Meeting, considering his case in sittings
that sometimes lasted for days, finally declared him to have separated
himself from the holy fellowship of the Church of Christ, and disowned
him. His following gradually disappeared. For some years he travelled
about in America, visiting meetings and protesting against his
disownment. Later on he became an Independent, then an Episcopalian. He
died as a minister of the Church of England. There is a story, which
most authorities consider to be well authenticated, representing him as
saying before he died that if God had taken him while he was a Quaker,
it would have been well with him.
CHAPTER IV
THE RETREAT OF QUAKERISM
But the swing-back for the imitative mass to the easily grasped dogma of
an infallible Scripture did not take place at once. It appears as a
clearly accomplished fact at the time of the mid-eighteenth-century
departure of Quakerism on its second missionary effort. Meanwhile, we
must consider the intervening hundred years--the second period of
Quakerism--generally known as the century of Quietism.
The first generation of Quakers had passed away. The great mission--the
going forth to win mankind to live by the Inner Light--had failed.
Better fitted, apparently, than any since the early Christians to
evangelize the world, catholic to the limit of the term, knowing nothing
of "heathen" nor of any "living in darkness"; a body of devotees culled
from all existing groups, hampered by no official church, unhindered by
luxury, undaunted by distance and difficulty, working in the open under
storms of persecution that had driven their companion groups to hiding
or dissolution, the Friends of Truth had failed to bring even the
churches to the acknowledgment of that on which they all ultimately
rested. Passing through European Christendom and beyond, they gathered
in their fellows, retreated to camp, gave up their original enterprise,
and became a separatist sect. The greater number of them were
flourishing tradespeople, owing their success in business largely to the
fact that, whereas trade as a whole was still subject to those passions
which had called forth in old times the law forbidding any transaction
beyond the sum of twenty pennies to be made without the presence of the
port-reeve or other responsible third person, here were men who required
neither bond nor agreement, who were as good as their word, asking one
price for their goods, and refusing to bargain. Their social life at the
beginning of the second period has been described for us by one of the
last of the earlier generation, coming late in life to English Quaker
circles after twenty years of absence. William Bromfield was a medical
man who had followed James II. to Ireland because of his goodness to the
Quakers, had served him for years in Paris as his secretary, and had
suffered imprisonment in the Bastille for conscience' sake. At one
moment we see him visiting a Trappist monastery, explaining to the
Fathers the Quaker faith and manner of living--the Trappists
acknowledging the Quakers as ripe for sainthood--and then we read of his
bitter disillusionment. He finds[14] "riches, pride, arrogancy, and
falling into parties." He notes with grief that onlookers are saying
"that the Quakers, who might have converted the world had they kept
their first faith, are now become apostates and hypocrites, as vain in
their Conversation, Habits, and Dresses, as any other people." Even the
poor tradesmen and mechanics amongst them wore periwigs: "a wicked
covering of Horse-hair and Goats'-hair." Men were "trick'd out in cock'd
Hats, their fine Cloathes with their Cuts _à la mode_ and long cravats."
Women went about with "bare neck, Hoop'd Petticoats, Lac'd Shoes,
Clock't Hose, Gold-chains, Lockets, Jewels, and fine Silks." Seeing in
these characteristics of the main mass of the second generation nothing
but the ravages of laxity, the faithful nucleus of the society
determined on a measure of reform. A missionary party, with full powers
to this end, went forth in 1760 from London Yearly Meeting. In every
separate meeting throughout the country wayward members were dealt with.
Many were reclaimed; those who showed themselves either stubborn or
indifferent were expelled from the society. Disownment for marriage
outside the group dates from this time, and it has been estimated that
by this means alone the membership was reduced by one-third.
[Footnote 14: W. Bromfield: _The Faith of the True Christian and the
Primitive Quaker's Faith._ 1725.]
Amongst the remnant the Quaker testimonies against extravagance in
dress, unprofitable occupations and amusements, and advices as to
simplicity in manners, were stereotyped into a code, and became matters
of strict observance. It is from this middle period that the popular
picture of Quakerism is borrowed. The Quakers went forward from their
great purgation--a strictly closed sect, carefully guarded from outside
influence, the younger generations forced either to conform to the
traditional pattern or to suffer banishment--depleted and decreasing
until the time of the modern revival taking place about the middle of
the nineteenth century.
The deductions made by modern commentators from these data fall into two
groups.
There is the view held generally by those standing outside the body,
whether enemies or friends, that Quakerism comes to an end with its
heroic period. The first recognize its initial catholicity, rejoice in
its successful tilting with Puritan Protestantism, but see it foredoomed
by its heresies, by its neglect of the outward symbols of the
sanctification of human life, and by the deleterious effect of the
admission of women into the ministry. The sympathizers see the early
Quakers either as the glory of seventeenth-century Christianity or the
left wing of a widespread effort to democratize formal religion--a
shifting of the centre of authority from the official custodian to the
man himself. They come regretfully upon the undisciplined ranks of the
second generation. They have no faith in the movement for reform; for
them the little church of the Spirit dwindles, lit with a faint sunset
glow of romance down towards extinction. All, both enemies and friends,
who see Quakerism end with the seventeenth century, dispose of the
modern revival by placing it within the general movement of Protestant
evangelicalism.
The second group of deductions appears to be shared by the Quakers
themselves in so far as their present literary output is representative
of the feelings and opinions of the body. They appear to attribute their
failure to capture the world, on the one hand, to their exclusion from
the main stream of thought and culture, and, on the other, to the
inability of the early protagonists to present a formulation of their
central doctrine free from contradictions, to their subjection to the
dualistic philosophy of the day, which saddles their teaching of the
Inner Light with a tendency to neglect all external means of
enlightenment.
Beyond these two most usual readings of the early history of Quakerism,
we find the more recent apologists of Christian mysticism, while freely
admitting the Quakers into the fellowship of the mystics, dispose
inferentially of the possibility of the "free" mystical church of which
Friends dreamed on the ground of the rarity of the religious--the still
greater rarity of the mystical temperament. In their opinion the art and
science of religion will always be carried on by specialists; the
torch-bearers will be few, though their light illumine the pathway of
the world. A world-church, therefore--a church which must cast her wings
over all in her striving to turn all towards the light--must organize
primarily in the interest of conduct as an end. In this view the Quaker
system, in so far as it invites every man to be his own church, must
always fail.
We may, perhaps, accept something of all these readings; we may
recognize the unsuitability for the daily need of the world at large of
a church neither primarily institutional nor primarily doctrinal. We may
admit, for many minds in a Christendom generally ignorant of its own
history of an episcopally ordained and invested female clergy, the
handicap of recognized feminine ministry; we may see the full unreason
of birthright membership, and the change of base in the modern revival,
without, perhaps, being driven to conclude that England's attempt to
introduce into field and market-place the hitherto cloistered mystical
faith and practice has entirely failed.
For amidst the stereotyped Puritanism of this middle period, with its
fear of beauty, its suspicion of all pursuits not directly utilitarian
or devotional, saints were born. The century which produced John Woolman
and the men and women who initiated and took the lion's share in the
movement for the abolition of slavery; which supplied to the cause of
science and to the medical profession, in spite of exclusion from the
main streams of learning, eminent men[15] in numbers quite out of
proportion to the size of the group; which saw the blossoming of public
education in the form of the fine Quaker schools where girls and boys
were educated side by side,[16] must have been rich in inarticulate and
unrecorded saintly lives.
[Footnote 15: The biographies of Quakers and ex-Quakers amount to about
3 per cent. of the whole of the entries in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_ (1885-1904), reckoning from 1675.]
There must have been in the sober Quaker homes, where affection ruled
without softness, where love was heroic rather than sentimental, many
who followed, not as imitators, but with all the strength of an original
impulse the pathway chosen by those who have been willing to pay the
price of an enhanced spiritual life; the withdrawal, in varying measure,
from the values and standards accepted by the world at large. They kept
watch. They worked amongst their fellows in a dusk between memory and
anticipation. They felt to the uttermost and fought to the uttermost the
weakness of the self. They were faithful, and in due time the society as
a whole felt the breath of revival.
[Footnote 16: Ackworth was founded in 1779, Sidcot remodelled on Quaker
lines in 1808, the present Saffron Walden School opened in Islington in
1811, and several others since both in England and Ireland, all now open
to the general public.]
CHAPTER V
QUAKERISM IN AMERICA
The American colonies seemed to the early leaders of the Quaker movement
to offer at once a field for the free development of their faith and a
base whence they might spread to the ends of the earth. The possibility
of buying land from the Indians was being discussed in the society as
early as 1660. But though, it is true, Quaker influence was decisive in
establishing religious toleration in America, though the relationship
between the native tribes and the colonists was transformed through
their substitution of unarmed treaty parties for the existing methods of
intimidation and of strictly fair dealing for dishonesty and
contract-breaking, though they initiated and took the lion's share in
the abolition of slavery,[17] and established the precedent of a State
founded on brotherly love, although they did more than any other group
of refugees or body of colonists to settle the foundations of the
religious and civil life of the country; yet the texture of the
religious life of the American people is to-day largely Puritan
Protestantism, and of the Quaker influence in government there remains
not a trace.
[Footnote 17: As early as 1657, and before he had come in contact with
slavery, Fox addressed a letter of advice from England to all
slave-holding Friends. In 1671, seeing for himself the system at work in
Barbadoes, he recommended that the holders should free their slaves
after a term of service, and should arrange for their welfare when
freed. The first documentary protest against slavery put forward by any
religious body came from the German Quakers in Philadelphia
(Germantown); they had come as settlers from Kirchheim in Germany, where
Penn's teaching had met with an ardent response. John Woolman spent
twenty years in ceaseless labour on behalf of the slaves. Throughout the
society the work went on; meetings were held, individual protests were
made, slave-holding Friends were visited. By 1755 it was generally
agreed that negroes should be neither bought nor imported by Friends,
and less than thirty years later the society, with the exception of a
few isolated and difficult cases, was free of slavery. Many Friends paid
their slaves for past services, and in all cases provision was made for
their welfare.]
For more than half a century after the savage persecution[18] by the
Puritans--reaching its fullest fury in Boston under Governor
Endicott--had come to an end, Quakerism was a steadily growing power in
America.
The Quakers flourished in Rhode Island, to whom they supplied many
Governors, and where at one time they were continually in office; they
made fair headway in Connecticut. In Long Island their establishment was
finally secured by the advice of the Dutch home Government on the ground
of their excellence as citizens. They achieved a foothold in Virginia in
face of the indignant persecutions of the Episcopalians. Their history
in Maryland is an excellent illustration of the nature of their work on
behalf of religious toleration. When, in 1691, an Act was framed to
secure the establishment of the Protestant church, the Quakers, who were
by this time both numerous and influential in the colony, laboured in
opposition to it until they brought the bill to nought. They supported
the Catholics in their struggle for emancipation, and were largely
instrumental in securing the repeal, in 1695, of the Act against them.
They also joined with Rome to prevent the Episcopalian Church from being
established by law, but in this they were only partially successful. In
the Carolinas they appear to have fared well. For years, though in a
minority, they controlled the government. New Jersey was thrown open to
them by a large purchase of land. William Penn's share in this
transaction was the beginning of his practical interest in America,
finally to express itself in the foundation of the Quaker State of
Pennsylvania,[19] which was very largely his own work. His labours as a
religious apologist, filling some five volumes, and representing in his
graceful, polished style the application to social life of the Puritan
morality upon which the Quakers had grafted their beliefs, are
secondary to his work in America, for which he gave up all he
possessed--influence, the prospect of a brilliant career at home,
friends, fortune, and health.
[Footnote 18: The first Quakers to reach America were two women, Anne
Austin and Mary Fisher. When they arrived at Boston, their luggage was
searched, their books were burned in the market-place by the hangman;
they were stripped and examined for signs of witchcraft, and after five
weeks' imprisonment and cruelty were shipped back to Barbadoes. Then
followed a series of persecutions too horrible to be detailed,
increasing in severity from fines--fireless, bedless, and almost
foodless--imprisonment in chains in the Boston winter, floggings (one
part alone of the punishment of the aged William Brand consisted of 117
blows on his bare back with a barred rope, while two women were stripped
to the waist in the mid-winter snow and lashed at the cart-tail through
eleven towns), ear-croppings, and tongue-borings, to the death penalty
suffered by three men and one woman. The intervention of Charles II.
referred only to the death penalty. Whippings continued until 1677, and
imprisonment for tithes until 1724.]
This colony, bought strip by strip in honest treaty with the Indians,
developed more quickly than any other. It was a home for refugees of
every shade of opinion. Friends at no time formed more than half the
population, but their influence was supreme.
[Footnote 19: It is interesting that Penn did his utmost--even to
attempting to bribe the secretaries when the charter was drawn up--to
abolish the _Penn_ prefixed by James II. to his own original
_Sylvania_.]
Two years after the settlement of the State[20] Penn writes that two
general assemblies had been held with such concord and despatch that
they sat but three weeks, and at least seventy laws were passed without
one dissent in any material thing.
For thirty years there was peace, liberty, and refuge for all, and an
unrivalled prosperity. We may picture Penn, in the days of witch crazes,
holding his one trial of a witch, and establishing the precedent of
finding the woman guilty of the common fame of being a witch, but not
guilty as indicted; and in another characteristically Friendly moment
refusing, when greatly in need of funds, six thousand pounds for a trade
monopoly which would have violated his principle of fairness to the
Indians. Free thought was encouraged, and a little group of
distinguished men appeared in Philadelphia. The final downfall of
Friendly administration in Pennsylvania was the result of the refusal on
the part of the majority of the Quakers to adjust their principles to
the demand sent to the Quaker legislature for means to proceed against
the French and the Indians.
[Footnote 20: In 1683.]
Up to the time of this occurrence it had seemed as if America were on
the way to becoming an autonomous province of the British Empire,
steered by Quaker principles. Privilege after privilege had been quietly
secured by Penn from the home government, and it is not difficult to
believe that if on the eve of the Revolution negotiations had been left
in Friendly hands, the war of separation need not have taken place. When
it broke out, the Quakers retired decisively from legislative and
municipal positions. A Quakerized liberty party carried on the
traditions of civil liberty up to the last moment. The Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians, who despised the Quakers, and treated the Indians as
heathen to be exterminated, formed the main body of the Pennsylvanian
revolutionary party.
Friends suffered under English taxation, and their principles prevented
them from smuggling, yet they opposed not merely warfare, but
revolution, disowning those who supported it, and reiterated their
loyalty to England. They were arrested and imprisoned as friends of the
British, their goodly farms and their meeting-houses were placed at the
mercy of troopers and foragers, whose pay they would not accept. Their
decent streets were demoralized. They went quietly about their business
as best they might, pursuing, even while the war was in progress, their
labours in the aid of drunkards and slaves, their succour of the
uneducated.
They built schools for the negroes, and when, after the revolution was
at an end (whereupon they duly suffered at the hands of the rejoicing
multitude), there came the scandal of the "walking purchase" of land
from the Indians and the fear of a serious outbreak, they formed a
private association and pacified the Indians, preventing warfare at the
cost to themselves of weeks of negotiation and the sum of five thousand
pounds paid by them. Incidents of this type occur again and again in
Quaker history, and are practical proof of the fact that their avoidance
of the spirit of strife, so often present in political life, was no kind
of timidity, of passive resistance, or comfortable retirement from the
business of the world. Least of all was it indifference to what went
forward in the public affairs of the nation.
Apart from its temporary dominion of "affairs," American Quakerism
follows much the same line of development as does the movement at home.
The original impulse tends to be superseded for the imitative mass by a
doctrine embodied in an institution; the dogma of the Inner Light
becomes dangerously absolutist. There is a corresponding return to the
steadying refuge of an infallible scripture, and the modern church,
while still united and distinguishable by the marks of Quaker culture,
of faith and practice, kindling here and there to the older insight and
vision, shows a divided front.
In 1827 a large group--now known as Hicksites--separated under Elias
Hicks, whose repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and insistence on
right living, resulted, in the opinion of "orthodox" Friends, in a wrong
attitude towards Christ and the scriptures. The evangelical reaction in
England, which was, in part, a result of the Hicksite controversy,
brought about a further division in America under John Wilbur, who
protested against Evangelical biblicism, and reasserted the doctrine of
the Inner Light, insisted on plainness of speech and dress, and looked
with suspicion upon "art." The orthodox group, deeply tinged with
Protestant evangelicalism, have largely adopted the pastoral system.
There are now at least four distinct groups in America.[21]
[Footnote 21: "According to recent statistics, the membership of the
fourteen orthodox bodies is upward of 90,000; of Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting, 4,400; of the Conservative Yearly Meeting, about 4,000; and of
seven Hicksite Yearly Meetings, under 19,000--say, 27,500 Friends
belonging to Yearly Meetings in America with which we do not correspond"
(_Facts about Friends._ Headley Bros. 1912).]
CHAPTER VI
QUAKERISM AND WOMEN
Watching pilgrims who pass one by one along the mystic way, we see both
women and men. Teresa, Catharine, Elizabeth, Mechthild, no less than
Francis, Tauler, Boehme, stand as high peaks of human achievement in
entering into direct relationship with the transcendental life. But when
we reach the humbler levels of institution and doctrine, the religious
genius of womanhood tends to be pushed, so to say, into an oblique
relationship. Under organized Christianity, and particularly under
Protestantism, has this been so. Amongst the first Christians, it is
true, women preached and prophesied. There is, moreover, in the history
of the early centuries sound evidence of an ordained and invested female
clergy. Taking that history as a whole, however, women have been, and
are still, excluded from the councils of the churches and from the
responsibilities and privileges of priesthood. Devout churchwomen, and,
in particular, devout Protestants, are nourished on literal
interpretation of records, which assure them of an essential inferiority
to their male companions, and enjoin subjection in all things. At
marriage, they sacramentally renounce individuality. Quakerism stands as
the first form of Christian belief, which has, even in reaching its
doctrinized and institutionized levels, escaped regarding woman as
primarily an appendage to be controlled, guided, and managed by man.
This escape was the result, not of any kind of feminism, any sort of
special solicitude for or belief in women as a class. Nor was it the
result of a protest against any definitely recognized existing attitude.
Such unstable and fluctuating emotions could not have carried through
the Quaker reformation of the relations of the sexes. The recognition of
the public ministry of women was an act of faith. It was a step that
followed from a central belief in the universality of the inner light.
It was taken in the face of difficulties. It hampered the Quakers
enormously in relation to the outside world. It was the occasion of
profound disturbance within the body. Heart-searching and hesitation
rose here and there to an opposition so convinced as to form part of the
programme of the first schismatics.[22] Fox had to fight valiantly. His
central belief once clear, he cut clean through the Pauline tangle of
irreconcilable propositions, and forged from the depths of his
conviction phrases that would, were they but known, do yeoman service in
the present agitation for the release of the artificially inhibited
responsibilities of women. He is never tired of reminding those who
cling to the story of the Fall that the restoration of humanity in the
appearance of Christ took the reproach from woman. He rallies men, often
with delicious humour, on their desire to rule over women, and exhorts
those who despise "the spirit of prophecy in the daughters" to be
"ashamed for ever." But although faith won, it is probable that the
majority took the step only under the urgency of deep-seated
consciousness, the surface intelligence still loudly asserting the
necessary pre-eminence of masculine standards. Even amongst the most
determined advocates of the recognition of a woman's spiritual identity,
amongst those who condemned its suppression as blasphemous, we meet the
suggestion that this recognition need not in any way interfere with her
proper subjection to her husband. Nevertheless, Fox succeeded in
equalizing the marriage covenant.
[Footnote 22: The Perrot Schism, 1661.]
The government of the society, therefore, was for many years carried on
by men alone, a women's meeting coming into existence, as we have seen,
only when obviously imperative--in relation to the care of the women and
children suffering under persecution--and persisting only for special
purposes quite apart from the business of the society as a whole. Men
and women, however, occasionally visited each other's meetings, and
joint sittings were sometimes held.
It was the experience coming to the support of dawning theory, of the
superior working of these joint meetings, that finally enfranchised
Quaker womanhood.
It is interesting to note that one of the most striking features of the
technique of Quaker meetings, whether for business or worship, is the
working out of the distinctive characteristics of the sexes. Their
contradiction, and the tendency psychology has roughly summarized of
women, as a class, to control thought by feeling, and of men, as a
class, to allow "reason" the first place, is here at its height.
The two rival and ever-competing definitions of reality both find
expression. Each must tolerate the other. Reaction takes place without
bitterness. Again and again there is revealed the fruitfulness of that
spirit which believes in and seeks goodness, beauty, and truth--these
alone, and these in all. Recent statistics have shown[23] that women,
though always numerically superior in the society, have supplied a
comparatively small number of both officers and ministers, and of clerks
relatively none, and that, moreover, this deficit is gradually
increasing, and is not made good by any sufficiently compensating output
of public work outside the society.
[Footnote 23: _The Friend_, March, 1912: "Woman in the Church."]
It has been suggested that we may presume, in consideration of these
facts, that women Friends have by this time availed themselves of their
opportunity to the full extent of their capacities, and that the result,
as far as government is concerned, is that the conduct of large public
meetings is almost entirely entrusted to men.
In the correspondence that followed the publication of the statistics
certain modifying statements were made. It was suggested that of late
years the increasing membership had brought in women who were without
the Quaker tradition--a fact which would account for the growing deficit
of feminine activities. Attention was also drawn to the unseen mass of
feminine initiative, the result of which is credited to men.
It is, of course, evident that if we begin by assuming that equality of
opportunity shall result in identity of function, if we believe,
moreover, that government is merely a matter of machinery, and ministry
can be estimated by the counting of heads and of syllables, we shall be
led to the conclusion that, while the more obvious results of the Quaker
experiment may do something towards disarming haunting fears as to the
safety of acknowledging the full spiritual and temporal fellowship of
women, it does comparatively little to justify the claims and
expectations of the feminists in general.
But whatever standard we apply, however we may choose to approach the
question of the public ministry of women; however, further, we may
estimate the value of the fact that all the practical business of the
society is talked out in their hearing, that measures are sometimes
initiated, sometimes abolished, invariably commented on, modified and
steered by them, we cannot form any idea of what Quakerism has done for
women or women for Quakerism without some consideration of an aspect of
the matter hitherto almost entirely neglected by historians and
commentators, which yet, in the opinion of the present writer, may be
claimed not only as giving some part of the explanation of the relative
inactivity of women in the more obvious transactions of the society, but
as being a very substantial part of the clue to the rapid development
and the healthy persistence of Quaker culture--and that is the profound
reaction upon women of the changed conditions of home-life; for amongst
the Quakers the particularized home, with its isolated woman cut off
from any responsible share in the life of "the world" and associating
mainly with other equally isolated women, is unknown. A woman born into
a Quaker family inherits the tradition of a faith which is of the heart
rather than of the head, of intuition rather than intellectation, of
life primarily rather than of doctrine; and, therefore, it would seem
particularly suited to the development of her religious consciousness;
and she comes, moreover, into an atmosphere where her natural sense of
direct relationship to life, her instinctive individual aspiration and
sense of responsibility, instead of being either cancelled or left
dormant, or thwarted and trained to run, so to say, indirectly, is
immediately confirmed and fostered.
She is in touch with, has, as we have seen, her stake and her
responsibility in regard to every single activity of the meeting of
which she is a member. Through every meeting and through every home,
moreover, there is the cleansing and ventilating ebb and flow of the
life of the whole society, and this not merely by means of the
circulation of matter relating to the deliberations and the work of the
society, but also in the form of personal contact. Beyond the exchange
of hospitality in connection with monthly and quarterly meetings for
worship and for business, there is a constant flow of itinerating
ministers and others of both sexes between meetings either on special
individual concerns or in the interest of some single branch of the
society's work.
Simple easy intercourse between family and family, meeting and meeting,
is part of the fabric of Quaker home-life. Perhaps for this reason,
perhaps just because amongst the Quakers, in a very true and deep sense,
the world is home and home is the world, because, in other words, the
inner is able without obstruction to flow out and realize itself in the
outer, the sense of family-life, of home, and fireside, is particularly
sweet and strong. The breaking of family ties is rare. The failure that
leads to the divorce court is practically unknown.
We may look with wonder and admiration at the great figures amongst
Quaker women, upon those who built their lives into the first spreadings
of the message; upon those who went, under the urgency of their faith,
alone into strange lands, where means of communication were the
scantiest; upon the persecuted and martyred women, the women of
initiative and organizing genius; upon Anne Knight of Chelmsford
pioneering female suffrage in England, founding the first political
association for women; upon Elizabeth Fry, after a full career as
house-keeper, mother, and social worker, turning, late in life, to the
prisons of England, and transforming them, so to say, with her own
hands. But, perhaps, it is in the daily home-life of the society that
the distinctively feminine side of doctrinized and organized Quakerism
reaches its fairest development.
CHAPTER VII
THE PRESENT POSITION
The counter-agitation[24] brought forth in England by the American
Hicksite movement, ended, after prolonged discussion and stress, in a
decisive readjustment of the Society of Friends. There were numerous
secessions into the Evangelical church and the Plymouth Brotherhood.
There were separations of those who followed Elias Hicks in his
repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and of those who favoured Wilbur in
protesting against "book religion," reasserting the doctrines of the
Quaker fathers, and insisting on simplicity of life; but the society as
a whole was swept forward, under the leadership of Joseph John Gurney
(brother of Elizabeth Fry), by the invading wave of Protestant
evangelicalism. Gurney, coming of old Quaker stock, though religious and
pious and full of zeal for the salvation of the world, never grasped the
essentials of Quakerism. He had no touch of the intuitive genius which
makes the mystic. Every line he has written betrays the Protestant
biblicist, the man who puts the verbal revelation before any other
whatsoever. He did not repudiate the Fathers, but he denied that they
had ever questioned the supreme authority of the scriptures as the guide
of mankind.
[Footnote 24: The Beacon Controversy, so named from Isaac Crewdson's
publication in 1835, expressing Evangelical views of an advanced type.]
His strong persuasive personality revived the enthusiasm of the
imitative mass of the society, and once more the Quakers faced the
world. It was a new world. The religious liberty Friends had prophesied
and worked towards had come at last. The Test Act had been repealed.
Nonconformists were admitted to Parliament and to the Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge. The London University had been established. The
emerging Quakers, on their side, began to break down the barriers they
had erected between themselves and the world by their peculiarities of
speech and of dress, and showed a tendency to relax their hostility
towards "art."
They were a little band, tempered and disciplined by their century of
quiet cultivation of the Quaker faith and method, and they were at once
available for a share, strikingly disproportionate to their numbers, in
the evangelical work of an awakening Christendom. From the time of their
emergence their missionary labours have been unremitting. They engaged
in prison reform and the reform of the penal code. They initiated the
reform of the lunacy laws, working for the substitution of kindly
treatment in special institutions[25] for the orthodox method of chains
and imprisonment. They began to educate the poor. The foundation of
their Foreign Missions dates from this period of revival.
They have widening centres of missionary work in India, Madagascar,
Syria, China, and Ceylon. They have been the main movers in the work of
abolishing the opium traffic, and are engaged, both at home and abroad,
in all the many well-known efforts towards social amelioration, amongst
which, perhaps, the leading part they have taken in experimental
philanthropy, in educational method (their co-education schools
scattered over the country are models of method, standing for common
sense, humanity, and a wise use of modern resources), in the housing and
betterment of the lot of the working classes, and in the establishment
of garden suburbs, are particularly worthy of mention.
[Footnote 25: The Friends' Retreat at York, established in 1796, was the
beginning of humane treatment of the insane in this country.]
From their Sunday-school work, begun in Bristol in 1810, and gradually
spreading over the country, has arisen what is perhaps the most widely
influential of the present activities in which Friends are interested on
behalf of the working classes--the Adult School Movement. Originally
initiated[26] in the interest of loafers at street corners, it has now
become a national movement, with a complete organization, upwards of a
thousand schools, and a membership in its ninetieth thousand. It is
spreading on the Continent and in America. At the meetings of its weekly
classes, which are open to all who care to attend (the men's and women's
classes are held independently), led by an elected president, who may be
an adherent of any creed or of none, part of the time is devoted to the
consideration of religious questions and part to lecturettes, debates,
readings, and so on. Each school develops secondary interests and
engages in special work.
[Footnote 26: In 1845 by Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham.]
Within the society from which this perpetual stream of evangelical work
flows forth we must distinguish two distinct types of religious culture.
There is, first of all, the main mass, differing only in its method of
worship from the main body of Protestant nonconformity--taking, as we
have said, its stand first and foremost upon the scriptures. In most
Quaker meetings to-day this typically "Protestant" attitude predominates
numerically. But while we recognize this state of affairs as one of the
inevitable consequences of any endeavour to found an "open" church upon
a mystical basis, it is, nevertheless, amongst the Quakers, modified, to
a certain extent, in two ways: first, by its subjection to its
environment, the framework of the old Quaker culture, the training
implied in Fox's method both of private and public worship, in the
expectation of unmediated Divine leadership in all the circumstances of
life, the training in freedom from the domination of formulæ and
deductions, the insistence on the important meaning of the individual
soul.
It is modified, in the second place, by the nucleus of genuine mystical
endowment, which has persisted through the centuries at the heart of the
Quaker church, both handed down in the direct line and coming in from
without; the remnant whose influence has so often made this little
church the sorting-house, so to say, amongst the sects for mystically
minded persons. And during the last ten years--the years which have seen
such a striking revival of the interest in mysticism, have felt a
clearing and a growth of the recognition of the importance to the race
as a whole of mystical genius, have produced a mass of seriously
undertaken studies of this phenomenon from every point of approach--the
Quaker church has continued increasingly to fulfil this function. Not
only from the sects, but from the older establishments, and from the
ranks of religiously unclassified "philosophy" and "culture," there is a
steady migration towards the Quaker fold.
The vitality of this modern Quaker group is expressing itself at the
present time in a twofold activity over and above the home and foreign
missionary work we have already noted. This activity is visible
throughout the society, both in England and in America. There is, on the
one hand, an effort emanating from the more intellectual section of the
group, to express Quakerism in terms of modern thought, to reach, as far
as may be, with the help of modern psychology, a philosophical
"description" of the doctrine of the "inner light"--a description which
is thought to be much more possible to-day than it was at the time of
George Fox. This effort, which includes the rewriting in detail and from
original documents of the history of the Society of Friends, is embodied
in the work of a little group of Quaker writers, prominent amongst whom
are the late John Wilhelm Rowntree, the late Miss Caroline E. Stephen,
Dr. Rufus M. Jones, Mr. William C. Braithwaite, Mr. Edward Grubb, and
Miss Joan M. Fry. Mr. Edward Grubb,[27] perhaps one of the most
illuminating of the Quaker writers upon the doctrine of the Inner Light,
realizes with perfect clearness that the dogma of the Infallible Spirit
presents at least as many difficulties as that of an infallible Church
or Bible; that in the case of either of these infallibilities the
question immediately arises as to "_who_" is the infallible interpreter?
Fox, he points out, trusted urgency and unaccountability by mere thought
processes for the sign of the higher source. He adds to this that "the
spirit in one man must be tested by the spirit in many men. The
individual must read his inward state in the light of the social
spiritual group," ... and thus reaches a sort of spiritual democracy. On
the whole, however, his appeal is to idealism as the supplanter of
materialism; he claims thought as the _prius_ of knowledge, and
identifies consciousness with thought. He leaves us with the "notional"
God of transcendental idealism, who is just as far off as the
corresponding matter-and-force God of consistent materialism.
[Footnote 27: _Authority and the Light Within._]
Mr. William C. Braithwaite is, perhaps, happier. "The consciousness," he
says in _Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience_,[28] "that our
subjective impression of guidance needs correction to allow for the
personal factor, and the sense that truth of all kinds and in all ages
is harmoniously related, naturally point to the great advantage of
co-ordinating the light that has come to our souls with the light that
has come to others in our own day or in past ages. This is not the same
thing as merely relying on tradition or accepting an experience
second-hand; nor does it mean that we refuse to accept any guidance
which goes beyond the experience of others--it means simply that over
the country we have to traverse there are many paths already trodden
along which we may have safe and speedy passage."
[Footnote 28: Swarthmoor Lecture. Headley Bros., 1909.]
Professor Rufus Jones, who has done much in relation to the psychology
of Quakerism, also voices the corporate idea in declaring that the
Friend must test his light by the larger revelation of his co-believers,
and they, again, by the larger revelation which has come to prophets and
apostles, saints and martyrs; but here, again, we seem to find ourselves
within a circle of ideas. In place of the simple homely imagery of Fox,
"the seed," "the light," the "new birth," "that which hath convinced
you," we have in these modern descriptions, it is true, all the rich and
intricate spatial terminology of modern science; but, so far, the most
successful efforts in the direction of "description" of mystical
religion in modern terms have not come from the society, where the
belief in, and the attempt to live in sole dependence upon, the
indwelling spirit is still, for very many of its members, the single
aim, where there are still many with whom "knowing" is more important
than "knowing about."
The boldest and clearest sighted, the most comprehensive and lucid
descriptions of the mystic type, of his distinctive genius, his aim and
method, his kinship with his fellows throughout the ages, the world-old
record of his search and its justification, are to be found
elsewhere.[29]
Side by side with the attempt to rationalize and restate in terms of
modern thought the faith that is in them is a movement enrolling growing
numbers, particularly of younger Friends, in both continents, in the
direction of expressing Quakerism in terms of modern life.
Home life, social life, business life, every modern development, is
brought to the test of Quaker principles. There is a spirit abroad
declaring that Quakerism has become devitalized; that the religious life
is stereotyped and perfunctory; that the joyous, all-conquering zeal of
the early Friends was the outcome of a secret unknown to their
followers; that the way to the fount at which they were sustained is
lost--that it may be found again if the daily life is brought under
Divine control. A call has gone forth to sacrifice, to scale the heights
of right living in that purer air, that the sight may grow clear.
[Footnote 29: In the work, for example, of Miss Evelyn Underhill, author
of _Mysticism_ (Macmillan, 1911), _The Mystic Way_ (Macmillan, 1913).]
Everywhere in Quakerdom we meet this question as to the secret of the
early Quakers. Do we read in this outcry an admission of the failure of
group mysticism as it has so far been attempted by the Society of
Friends? The little church of the spirit seems to be at the turning of
the ways.
All barriers are down. The rationale of primitive Quakerism is fully
established. The Quakers no longer stand facing an outraged or
indifferent Christendom. The principles "discovered" by their founder
are conceded in theory by the religious world as a whole.
Will they remain in their present position, which may be described as
that of a Protestant Ethical Society, with mystical traditions and
methods, part of an organized and nationalized world-church, suffering
the necessary limitations of a body thrown open to all, converted and
unconverted, committed to the necessity of teaching doctrinal
"half-truths," organizing necessarily in the interest of conduct as an
end? or will they constitute themselves an order within, and
co-operating with, the church--an order of lay mystics, held together
externally by the sane and simple discipline laid down by Fox, and
guarded thus from the dangers to which mysticism is perennially open; an
order of men and women willing corporately to fulfil, while living in
the daily life of the world, the conditions of revelation, and admitting
to membership only those similarly willing; a "free" group of mystics
ready to pay the price, ready to travel along the way trodden by all
their predecessors, by all who have truly yearned for the uncreated
Light?
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1624. Birth of George Fox.
1647. Fox's public ministry begins.
1650. Friends nicknamed Quakers by a Derby magistrate.
1652. Acquisition of headquarters at Swarthmoor Hall.
1654. Missions to the South and East.
1656. First Quakers in America.
1657. Fox appeals to Friends on behalf of their slaves.
1678. Barclay's apology published in English.
1681. Pennsylvania founded.
1689. Toleration Act passed.
1691. Death of George Fox.
1760. Reform of Society of Friends.
1835. Modern Evangelical Revival.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GEORGE FOX: Journal. Edited by Norman Penney. Cambridge University
Press, 1911.
GEORGE FOX: Journal. Bi-centenary edition in two volumes. Headley.
GEORGE FOX: Works. Eight volumes. Philadelphia, 1831.
ROBERT BARCLAY: An Apology for the True Christian Divinity. In English,
1678.
WILLIAM PENN: No Cross, No Crown.
JOHN WOOLMAN: Journal.
CAROLINE E. STEPHEN: Quaker Strongholds. Headley, 1907.
JOHN WILHELM ROWNTREE: Essays and Addresses. Headley, 1905.
T. EDMUND HARVEY: The Rise of the Quakers. Headley, 1905.
ELIZABETH B. EMMOTT: The Story of Quakerism. Headley, 1908.
ALLEN C. THOMAS: The History of the Society of Friends in America.
RUFUS M. JONES: The Quakers in the American Colonies. Macmillan, 1912.
RUFUS M. JONES: Social Law in the Spiritual World. Headley, 1905.
RUFUS M. JONES: Studies in Mystical Religion. Macmillan, 1909.
RUFUS M. JONES: Children of the Light (Anthology of Quaker Mystics).
Headley, 1909.
EVELYN UNDERHILL: Mysticism. Macmillan, 1911.
WILLIAM C. BRAITHWAITE: The Beginnings of Quakerism. Macmillan, 1912.
WILLIAM C. BRAITHWAITE: Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience.
Headley, 1909.
EDWARD GRUBB: Authority and the Light Within. Clarke, 1908.
The Book of Discipline. Successive editions from 1783.
The Society of Friends. Encyclopædia Britannica. Eleventh edition.
NOTE
The bulk of Quaker literature falls into two main groups: (1) The
voluminous writings of the early Quakers--journals, epistles, doctrinal
works, and controversial matter--most of which were issued under the
censorship of a body of Friends meeting in London, while a large mass of
unprinted manuscripts and transcripts of manuscripts, admirably
classified and indexed, is available at the headquarters of the Society,
Devonshire House, Bishopsgate, whose library contains also the largest
collection of books relating to the Society; (2) the modern output of
history, commentary, expository, apology, and evangelistic writing.
Most of the printed works of George Fox have been collected in the eight
volumes of the Philadelphia edition. A considerable quantity is still in
manuscript. The Cambridge edition of his Journal is particularly
interesting in having been printed unaltered from the original
manuscript. It is incomplete, and is best supplemented by the
bi-centenary edition (see Bibliography).
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
Transcriber's Notes
The original spelling and punctuation were mostly preserved. A few
obvious typographical and formatting errors were silently corrected.
Further corrections are listed here (before/after):
[p. 54]:
... that the Quakers, who might have converted ...
... "that the Quakers, who might have converted ...
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