There are mysterious moments in the early life of the individual which
we call "budding periods." They are incubation crises, when some
new power or function is coming into being. The budding tendency to creep,
to walk, to imitate, or to speak, is an indication that the psychological
moment has come for learning the special operation.
There are, too, similar periods in the history of the race, mysterious times
of gestation, when something new is coming to be, however dimly the age
itself comprehends the significance of its travail. These racial "budding
periods," like those others, have organic connection with the past.
They are life-events which the previous history of humanity has made possible,
and so they cannot be understood by themselves.
The most notable characteristic of such times is the simultaneous outbreaking
of new aspects of truth in sundered places and through diverse lives, as
though the breath of a new Pentecost were abroad. This dawning time is generally
followed by the appearance of some person who proves to be able to be the
exponent of what others have dimly or subconsciously felt, and yet could
not explicitly set forth. Such a person becomes by a certain divine right
the prophet of the period because he knows how to interpret its ideas with
such compelling force that he organizes men, either for action or for perpetuating
the truth.
In the life history of the Anglo-Saxon people few periods are more significant
than that which is commonly called the Commonwealth period, though the term
must be used loosely to cover the span from 1640 to 1660. It was in high
degree one of these incubation epochs when something new came to consciousness,
and things equally new came to deed. This is not the place to describe the
political struggles which finally produced tremendous constitutional changes,
nor to tell how those who formed the pith and marrow of a nation rose against
an antiquated conception of kingship and established principles of self-government.
The civil and political commotion was the outcome of a still deeper commotion.
For a century the burning questions had been religious questions. The Church
of that time was the result of compromise. It had inherited a large stock
of medižval thought, and had absorbed a mass of medižval traditions. The
men of moral and religious earnestness were bent on some measure of fresh
reform. A spirit was abroad which could not be put down, and which would
not be quiet. The old idea of an authoritative Church was outgrown, and
yet no religious system had come in its place which provided for a free
personal approach to God Himself. It has, in fact, always been a peculiarly
difficult problem to discover some form of organization which will conserve
the inherited truth and guarantee the stability of the whole, while at the
same time it promotes the personal freedom of the individual.
The long struggle for religious reforms in England followed two lines of
development. There was on the one hand a well-defined movement toward Presbyterianism,
and on the other a somewhat chaotic search for freer religious life -- a
movement towards Independency. The rapid spread of Presbyterianism increased
rather than diminished the general religious commotion. It soon became clear
that this was another form of ecclesiastical authority, as inflexible as
the old, and lacking the sacred sanction of custom. Then, too, the Calvinistic
theology of the time did violence to human nature as a whole. Its linked
logic might compel intellectual assent, but there is something in a man
as real as his intellect, which is not satisfied with this clamping of eternal
truth into inflexible propositions. Personal soul-hunger, and the necessity
which many individuals feel for spiritual quest, must always be reckoned
with. It should not be forgotten that George Fox came to his spiritual crisis
under this theology.
Thus while theology was stiffening into fixed form with one group, it was
becoming ever more fluid among great masses of people throughout the nation.
Religious authority ceased to count as it had in the past. Existing religious
conditions were no longer accepted as final. There was a widespread restlessness
which gradually produced a host of curious sects. Fox came directly in contact
with at least four of the leading sectarian movements of the time and there
can be no question that they exerted an influence upon him both positively
and negatively. The first "sect" in importance, and the first
to touch the life of George Fox, was the Baptist -- at that time often called
Anabaptist. His uncle Pickering was a member of this sect, and, though George
seems to have been rather afraid of the Baptists, he must have learned something
from them. They already had a long history, reaching back on the continent
to the time of Luther, and their entire career had been marked by persecution
and suffering. They were "Independents," i. e., they believed
that Church and State should be separate, and that each local church should
have its own independent life. They stoutly objected to infant baptism,
maintaining that no act could have a religious value unless it were an act
of will and of faith. Edwards, in his "Gangržna," 1646, reports
a doctrine then afloat to the intent that "it is as lawful to baptize
a cat, or a dog, or a chicken as to baptize an infant." Their views
on ministry were novel and must surely have interested Fox. They encouraged
a lay ministry, and they actually had cobblers, leather-sellers, tailors,
weavers and at least one brewer, preaching in their meetings. John Bunyan,
who was of them, proved to general satisfaction that "Oxford and Cambridge
were not necessary to fit men to preach." Still stranger, they had
what their enemies scornfully called "She-preachers." Edwards
has recorded this dreadful error in his list of one hundred and ninety-nine
"distinct errors, heresies and blasphemies": "Some say that
'tis lawful for women to preach, that they have gifts as well as men; and
some of them do actually preach, having great resort to them"!
Furthermore, they held that all tithes and all set stipends were unlawful.
They maintained that preachers should work with their own hands and not
"go in black clothes." This sad error appears in Edwards's chaotic
list: "It is said that all settled certain maintenance for ministers
of the gospel is unlawful." Finally many of the Baptists opposed the
use of "steeple houses" and held the view that no person is fitted
to preach or prophesy unless the Spirit moves him.
The "Seekers" are occasionally mentioned in the Journal and were
widely scattered throughout England during the Commonwealth. They were serious-minded
people who saw nowhere in the world any adequate embodiment of religion.
They held that there was no true Church, and that there had been none since
the days of the apostles. They did not celebrate any sacraments, for they
held that there was nobody in the world who possessed an anointing clearly,
certainly and infallibly enough to perform such rites. They had no "heads"
to their assemblies, for they had none among them who had "the power
or the gift to go before one another in the way of eminency or authority."
William Penn says that they met together "not in their own wills"
and "waited together in silence, and as anything arose in one of their
minds that they thought favored with a divine spring, so they sometimes
spoke."
We are able to pick out a few of their characteristic "errors"
from Edwards's list in the "Gangržna." "That to read the
Scriptures to a mixed congregation is dangerous." "That we did
look for great matters from One crucified in Jerusalem 1600 years ago, but
that does no good; it must be a Christ formed in us." "That
men ought to preach and exercise their gifts without study and premeditation
and not to think what they are to say till they speak, because it shall
be given them in that hour and the Spirit shall teach them." "That
there is no need of human learning or reading of authors for preachers,
but all books and learning must go down. It comes from want of the Spirit
that men write such great volumes."
The "Seekers" expected that the light was soon to break, the days
of apostasy would end and the Spirit would make new revelations. In the
light of this expectation a peculiar significance attaches to the frequent
assertion of Fox that he and his followers were living in the same Spirit
which gave forth the Scriptures, and received direct commands as did the
apostles. "I told him," says Fox of a "priest," "that
to receive and go with a message, and to have a word from the Lord, as the
prophets and apostles had and did, and as I had done," was quite
another thing from ordinary experience. A much more chaotic "sect"
was that of the "Ranters." There was probably a small seed of
truth in their doctrines, but under the excitement of religious enthusiasm
they went to wild and perilous extremes, and in some cases even fell over
the edge of sanity. They started with the belief that God is in everything,
that every man is a manifestation of God, and they ended with the conclusion
which their bad logic gave them that therefore what the man does God
does. They were above all authority and actually said: "Have not
we the Spirit, and why may not we write scriptures as well
as Paul?" They believed the Scriptures "not because such and such
writ it," but because they could affirm "God saith so in me."
What Christ did was for them only a temporal figure, and nothing external
was of consequence, since they had God Himself in them. As the law had been
fulfilled they held that they were free from all law, and might without
sin do what they were prompted to do. Richard Baxter says that "the
horrid villainies of the sect did speedily extinguish it." Judge Hotham
told Fox in 1651 that "if God had not raised up the principle of Light
and Life which he (Fox) preached, the nation had been overrun with Ranterism."
Many of the Ranters became Friends, some of them becoming substantial persons
in the new Society, though there were for a time some serious Ranter influences
at work within the Society, and a strenuous opposition was made to the establishment
of discipline, order and system. The uprising of the "Fifth-monarchy
men" is the only other movement which calls for special allusion. They
were literal interpreters of Scripture, and had discovered grounds for believing
in the near approach of the millennium. By some system of calculation they
had concluded that the last of the four world monarchies -- the Assyrian,
Persian, Greek and Roman -- was tottering toward its fall, and the Fifth
universal monarchy -- Christ's -- was about to be set up. The saints were
to reign. The new monarchy was so slow in coming that they thought they
might hasten it with carnal weapons. Perhaps a miracle would be granted
if they acted on their faith. The miracle did not come, but the uprising
brought serious trouble to Fox, who had before told these visionaries in
beautifully plain language that "Christ has come and has dashed
to pieces the four monarchies."
The person of genius discovers in the great mass of things about him just
that which is vital and essential. He seizes the eternal in the temporal,
and all that he borrows, he fuses with creative power into a new whole.
This creative power belonged to George Fox. There was hardly a single truth
in the Quaker message which had not been held by some one of the many sects
of the time. He saw the spiritual and eternal element which was almost lost
in the chaos of half truths and errors. In his message these scattered truths
and ideas were fused into a new whole and received new life from his living
central idea.
It is a strange fact that, though England had been facing religious problems
of a most complex sort since the oncoming of the Reformation, it had produced
no religious genius. No one had appeared who saw truth on a new level, or
who possessed a personality and a personal message which compelled the attention
of the nation. There had been long years of ingenious, patchwork compromise,
but no distinct prophet. George Fox is the first real prophet of the English
Reformation, for he saw what was involved in this great religious movement.
Perhaps the most convincing proof of this is not the remarkable immediate
results of his labors, though these are significant enough, but rather the
easily-verified fact that the progress of religious truth during the last
hundred years has been toward the truth which he made central in his message.
However his age misunderstood him, he would to-day find a goodly fellowship
of believers.
The purpose of this book is to have him tell his own story, which in the
main he knows how to do. It will, however, be of some service to the reader
to develop in advance the principle of which he was the exponent. The first
period of his life is occupied with a most painful quest for something which
would satisfy his heart. His celebrated contemporary, Bunyan, possessed
much greater power of describing inward states and experiences, but one
is led to believe on comparing the two autobiographical passages that the
sufferings of Fox, in his years of spiritual desolation, were even more
severe than were those of Bunyan, though it is to be noted that the former
does not suffer from the awful sense of personal sin as the latter does.
"When I came to eleven years of age, I knew pureness and righteousness,"
is Fox's report of his own early deliverance from the sense of sin. His
"despair," from which he could find no comfort, was caused by
the extreme sensitiveness of his soul. The discovery that the world, and
even the Church, was full of wickedness and sin crushed him. "I looked
upon the great professors of the city [London, 1643], and I saw all was
dark and under the chain of darkness." This settled upon him with a
weight, deep almost as death. Nothing in the whole world seemed to him so
real as the world's wickedness. "I could have wished," he cries
out, "I had never been born, or that I had been born blind that I might
never have seen wickedness or vanity; and deaf that I might never have heard
vain and wicked words, or the Lord's name blasphemed."
He was overwhelmed, however, not merely because he discovered that the world
was wicked, but much more because he discovered that priests were "empty
hollow casks," and that religion, as far as he could discover any in
England, was weak and ineffective, with no dynamic message which moved with
the living power of God behind it. He could find theology enough and theories
enough, but he missed everywhere the direct evidence that men about him
had found God. Religion seemed to him to be reduced to a system of clever
substitutes for God, while his own soul could not rest until it found the
Life itself.
The turning point of his life is the discovery -- through what he beautifully
calls an "opening" -- that Christ is not merely an historic person
who once came to the world and then forever withdrew, but that He is the
continuous Divine Presence, God manifested humanly, and that this Christ
can "speak to his condition."
At first sight, there appears to be nothing epoch-making in these simple
words. But it soon develops that what he really means is that he has discovered
within the deeps of his own personality a meeting place of the human spirit
with the Divine Spirit. He had never had any doubts about the historical
Christ. All that the Christians of his time believed about Christ,
he, too, believed. His long search had not been to find out something about
Christ, but to find Him. The Christ of the theological systems was
too remote and unreal to be dynamic for him. Assent to all the propositions
about Him left one still in the power of sin. He emerges from the struggle
with an absolute certainty in his own mind that he has discovered a way
by which his soul has immediate dealings with the living God. The larger
truth involved in his experience soon becomes plain to him, namely, that
he has found a universal principle, that the Spirit of God reaches every
man. He finds this divine-human relation taught everywhere in Scripture,
but he challenges everybody to find the primary evidence of it in his own
consciousness. He points out that every hunger of the heart, every dissatisfaction
with self, every act of self-condemnation, every sense of shortcoming shows
that the soul is not unvisited by the Divine Spirit. To want God at all
implies some acquaintance with Him. The ability to appreciate the right,
to discriminate light from darkness, the possibility of being anything more
than a creature of sense, living for the moment, means that our personal
life is in contact at some point with the Infinite Life, and that all things
are possible to him who believes and obeys.
To all sorts and conditions of men, Fox continually makes appeal to "that
of God" within them. At other times he calls it indiscriminately the
"Light," or the "Seed," or the "Principle"
of God within the man. Frequently it is the "Christ within." In
every instance he means that the Divine Being operates directly upon the
human life, and the new birth, the real spiritual life, begins when the
individual becomes aware of Him and sets himself to obey Him. He may have
been living along with no more explicit consciousness of a Divine presence
than the bubble has of the ocean on which it rests and out of which it came;
but even so, God is as near him as is the beating of his own heart, and
only needs to be found and obeyed.
Instead of making him undervalue the historic revelations of God, the discovery
of this principle of truth gave him a new insight into the revelations of
the past and the supreme manifestations of the Divine Life and Love. He
could interpret his own inward experience in the light of the gathered revelation
of the ages. His contemporaries used to say that, though the Bible were
lost, it might be found in the mouth of George Fox, and there is not a line
in the Journal to indicate that he undervalued either the Holy Scriptures
or the historic work of Christ for human salvation. Entirely the contrary.
As soon as he realized that the same God who spoke directly to men in earlier
ages still speaks directly, and that to be a man means to have a "seed
of God" within, he saw that there were no limits to the possibilities
of a human life. It becomes possible to live entirely in the power of the
Spirit and to have one's life made a free and victorious spiritual life.
So to live is to be a "man" -- for sin and disobedience reduce
a man. The normal person, then, is the one who has discovered the infinite
Divine resources, and is turning them into the actual stuff of a human life.
That it happens now and then is no mystery; that it happens so seldom is
the real mystery. "I asked them if they were living in the power of
the Spirit that gave forth the Scriptures" is his frequent and somewhat
naive question, as though everybody ought to be doing it.
The consciousness of the presence of God is the characteristic thing in
George Fox's religious life. His own life is in immediate contact with the
Divine Life. It is this conviction which unifies and gives direction to
all his activities. God has found him and he has found God. It is this experience
which puts him among the mystics.
But here we must not overlook the distinction in types of mysticism. There
is a great group of mystics who have painfully striven to find God by a
path of negation. They believe that everything finite is a shadow, an illusion
-- nothing real. To find God, then, every vestige of the finite must be
given up. The infinite can be reached only by wiping out all marks of the
finite. The Absolute can be attained only when every "thing" and
every "thought" have been reduced to zero. But the difficulty
is that this kind of an Absolute becomes absolutely unknowable. From the
nature of the case He could not be found, for to have any consciousness
of Him at all would be to have a finite and illusory thought.
George Fox belongs rather among the positive mystics, who seek to
realize the presence of God in this finite human life. That He transcends
all finite experiences they fully realize, but the reality of any finite
experience lies just in this fact, that the living God is in it and expresses
some divine purpose through it, so that a man may, as George Fox's friend,
Isaac Penington says, "become an organ of the life and power of God,"
and "propagate God's life in the world." The mystic of this type
may feel the light break within him and know that God is there, or he may
equally well discover Him as he performs some clear, plain duty which lies
across his path. His whole mystical insight is in his discovery that God
is near, and not beyond the reach of the ladders which He has given us.
But no one has found the true George Fox when he stops with an analysis
of the views which he held. Almost more remarkable than the truth which
he proclaimed was the fervor, the enthusiasm, the glowing passion of the
man. He was of the genuine apostolic type. He had come through years of
despair over the wickedness of the world, but as soon as the Light really
broke, and he knew that he had a message for the world in its sin and ignorance,
there was after that nothing but the grave itself which could keep him quiet.
He preached in cathedrals, on hay stacks, on cliffs of rock, from hill tops,
under apple trees and elm trees, in barns and in city squares, while he
sent epistles from every prison in which he was shut up. Wherever he could
find men who had souls to save he told them of the Life and Truth which
he had found.
Whether one is in sympathy with Fox's mystical view of life or not, it is
impossible not to be impressed with the practical way in which he wrought
out his faith. After all, the view that God and man are not isolated was
not new; the really new thing was the appearance of a man who genuinely
practiced the Divine presence and lived as though he knew that his
life was in a Divine environment.
We have dwelt upon the fundamental religious principle of Fox at some length,
because his great work as a social reformer and as the organizer of a new
system of Church government proceeds from this root principle. One central
idea moves through all he did. His originality lies, however, not so much
in the discovery, or the rediscovery, of the principle as in the fearless
application of it. Other men had believed in Divine guidance; other Christians
had proclaimed the impenetration of God in the lives of men. But George
Fox had the courage to carry his conviction to its logical conclusions.
He knew that there were difficulties entailed in calling men everywhere
to trust the Light and to follow the Voice, but he believed that there were
more serious difficulties to be faced by those who put some external authority
in the place of the soul's own sight. He was ready for the consequences
and he proceeded to carry out both in the social and in the religious life
of his time the experiment of obeying the Light within. It is this courageous
fidelity to his insight that made him a social reformer and a religious
organizer. He belongs, in this respect, in the same list with St. Francis
of Assisi. They both attempted the difficult task of bringing religion from
heaven to earth.
- In the light of his religious discovery Fox reinterpreted man as a
member of society. If man has direct intercourse with God he
is to be treated with noble respect. He met the doctrine of the divine
right of kings with the conviction of the divine right of man.
Every man is to be treated as a man. He was a leveler, but he
leveled up, not down. Every man was to be read in terms of his possibilities
-- if not of royal descent, certainly of royal destiny. This view made
Fox an unparalleled optimist. He believed that a mighty transformation
would come as soon as men were made aware of this divine relationship
which he had discovered. They would go to living as he had done, in
the power of this conviction.
He began at once to put in practice his principle of equality -- i.
e., equality of privilege. He cut straight through the elaborate web
of social custom which hid man's true nature from himself. Human life
had become sicklied o'er with a cast of sham, until man had half forgotten
to act as man. Fox rejected for himself every social custom which
seemed to him to be hollow and to belittle man himself. The honor which
belonged to God he would give to no man, and the honor which belonged
to any man he gave to every man. This was the reason for his "thee"
and "thou." The plural form had been introduced to give distinction.
He would not use it. The Lord Protector and the humble cotter were addressed
alike. He had an eye for the person of great gifts and he never wished
to reduce men to indistinguishable atoms of society, but he was resolved
to guard the jewel of personality in every individual -- man or woman.
- His estimate of the worth of man made him a reformer. In society as
he found it men were often treated more as things than as persons. For
petty offenses they were hung, and if they escaped this fate they were
put into prisons where no touch of man's humanity was in evidence. In
the never-ending wars the common people were hardly more than human
dice. Their worth as men was well nigh forgotten. Trade was conducted
on a system of sliding prices -- high for this man, low for some other.
Dealers were honest where they had to be; dishonest where thy could
be. The courts of justice were extremely uncertain and irregular, as
the pages of this journal continually show. Against every such crooked
system which failed to recognize the divine right of man George Fox
set himself. He himself had large opportunities of observing the courts
of justice and the inhuman pens which by courtesy were called jails.
But he became a reformer, not to secure his own rights or to get a better
jail to lie in, but to establish the principle of human rights for all
men. He went calmly to work to carry an out-and-out honesty into all
trade relations, to establish a fixed price for goods of every sort,
to make principles of business square with principles of religion. By
voice or by epistle he called every judge in the realm to "mind
that of God" within him. He refused ever to take an oath, because
he was resolved to make a plain man's "yea" weigh as heavy
as an oath. He was always in the lists against the barbarity of the
penal system, the iniquity of enslaving men, the wickedness of war,
the wastefulness of fashion and the evils of drunkenness, and by argument
and deed he undertook to lead the way to a new heroism, better than
the heroism of battlefields.
- The logic of his principle compelled him to value education. If all
men are to count as men, it is a man's primal duty to be all he can
be. To be a poor organ of God when one was meant for a good one belongs
among the high sins. If it was "opened" to him that Oxford
and Cambridge could not make men ministers, his own reason taught him
that it is not safe to call all men to obey the voice and follow the
light without broad-basing them at the same time in the established
facts of history and nature. Fox himself very early set up schools for
boys and girls alike in which "everything civil and useful in creation"
was to be taught. It is, however, quite possible that he undervalued
the aesthetic side of man, and that he suffered by his attempt to starve
it. In this particular he shared the puritan tendency, and had not learned
how to hold all things in proportion, and to make the culture of the
senses at the same time beautify the inner man.
- On the distinctive religious side his discovery of a direct divine-human
relationship led to a new interpretation of worship and ministry. God
is not far off. He needs no vicar, no person of any sort between Himself
and the worshipper. Grace no more needs a special channel than the dew
does. There is no special holy place, as though God were more there
than here. He does not come from somewhere else. He is Spirit,
needs only a responsive soul, an open heart, to be found. Worship
properly begins when the soul discovers Him and enjoys His presence
-- in the simplest words it is the soul's appreciation of God. With
his usual optimism, he believed that all men and women were capable
of this stupendous attainment. He threw away all crutches at the start
and called upon everybody to walk in the Spirit, to live in the Light.
His house of worship was bare of everything but seats. It had no shrine,
for the shekinah was to be in the hearts of those who worshipped. It
had no altar, for God needed no appeasing, seeing that He Himself had
made the sacrifice for sin. It had no baptismal font, for baptism was
in his belief nothing short of immersion into the life of the Father,
Son and Holy Spirit -- a going down into the significance of Christ's
death and a coming up in newness of life with Him. There was no communion
table, because he believed that the true communion consisted in partaking
directly of the soul's spiritual bread -- the living Christ. There were
no confessionals, for in the silence, with the noise and din of the
outer life hushed, the soul was to unveil itself to its Maker and let
His light lay bare its true condition. There was no organ or choir,
for each forgiven soul was to give praise in the glad notes that were
natural to it. No censer was swung, for he believed God wanted only
the fragrance of sincere and prayerful spirits. There was no priestly
mitre, because each member of the true Church was to be a priest unto
God. No official robes were in evidence, because the entire business
of life, in meeting and outside, was to be the putting on of the white
garments of a saintly life. From beginning to end worship was the immediate
appreciation of God, and the appropriate activity of the whole being
in response to Him.
William Penn says of him: "The most awful, living, reverent frame I
ever felt or beheld was his in prayer." And this was because he realized
that he was in the presence of God when he prayed. He believed that the
ministry of truth is limited to no class of men and to no sex. As fast and
as far as any man discovers God it becomes his business to make Him known
to others. His ability to do this effectively is a gift from God, and makes
him a minister. The only thing the Church does is to recognize the gift.
This idea carried with it perfect freedom of utterance to all who felt a
call to speak, a principle which has worked out better than the reader
would guess, though it has been often sorely tested.
In the Society which he founded there was no distinction of clergy and laity.
He undertook the difficult task of organizing a Christian body in which
the priesthood of believers should be an actual fact, and in which the ordinary
religious exercises of the Church should be under the directing and controlling
power of the Holy Spirit manifesting itself through the congregation.
Not the least service of Fox to his age was the important part which he
took in breaking down the intolerable doctrine of predestination, which
hung like an incubus over men's lives. It threw a gloom upon every person
who found himself forced by his logic to believe it, and its effect upon
sensitive souls was simply dreadful. Fox met this doctrine with argument,
but he met it also with something better than argument -- he set over against
it two facts: that Divine grace and light are free, and that an inward certainty
of God's favor and acceptance is possible for every believer. Wherever Quakerism
went this inward assurance went with it. The shadow of dread uncertainty
gave place to sunlight and joy. This was the beginning of a spiritual emancipation
which is still growing, and peaceful faces and fragrant lives are the result.
No reader of the Journal can fail to be impressed with the fact that George
Fox believed himself to be an instrument for the manifestation of miraculous
power. Diseases were cured through him; he foretold coming events; he often
penetrated states and conditions of mind and heart; he occasionally had
a sense of what was happening in distant parts, and he himself underwent
on at least three occasions striking bodily changes, so that he seemed,
for days at a time, like one dead, and was in one of these times incapable
of being bled. These passages need trouble no one, nor need their truthfulness
be questioned. He possessed an unusual psychical nature, delicately organized,
capable of experiences of a novel sort, but such as are today very familiar
to the student of psychical phenomena. The marvel is that with such a mental
organization he was so sane and practical, and so steadily kept his balance
throughout a life which furnished numerous chances for shipwreck.
It is very noticeable -- rather more so in the complete Journal than in
this Autobiography -- that "judgments" came upon almost everybody
who was a malicious opposer of him or his work. "God cut him off soon
after," is a not infrequent phrase. It is manifestly impossible to
investigate these cases now, and to verify the facts, but the well-tested
honesty of the early Friends leaves little ground for doubting that the
facts were substantially as they are reported. Fox's own inference that
all these persons had misfortune as a direct "judgment" for having
harmed him and hindered his cause will naturally seem to us a too hasty
conclusion. It is not at all strange that in this eventful period many persons
who had dealings with him should have suffered swift changes of fortune,
and of course he failed to note how many there were who did not receive
judgment in this direct manner. One regrets, of course, that this kindly
spiritual man should have come so near enjoying what seemed to him a divine
vengeance upon his enemies, but we must remember that he believed in his
soul that his work was God's work, and hence to frustrate it was serious
business.
He founded a Society, as he called it, which he evidently hoped, and probably
believed, would sometime become universal. The organization in every aspect
recognized the fundamentally spiritual nature of man. Every individual was
to be a vital, organic part of the whole; free, but possessed of a freedom
which had always to be exercised with a view to the interests and edification
of the whole. It was modelled exactly on the conception of Paul's universal
Church of many members, made a unity not from without, but by the
living presence of the One Spirit. All this work of organization was effected
while Fox himself was in the saddle, carrying his message to town after
town, interrupted by long absences in jail and dungeon, and steadily opposed
by the fanatical antinomian elements which had flocked to his standard.
It is not the least mark of his genius that in the face of an almost unparalleled
persecution he left his fifty thousand followers in Great Britain and Ireland
formed into a working and growing body, with equally well-organized meetings
in Holland, New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and
the Carolinas. His personality and his message had won men from every station
of life, and if the rank and file were from the humbler walks, there were
also men and women of scholarship and fame. Robert Barclay, from the schools
of Paris, gave the new faith its permanent expression in his Apology. William
Penn worked its principles out in a holy experiment in a Christian Commonwealth,
and Isaac Penington, in his brief essays, set forth in rich and varied phrase
the mystical truth which was at the heart of the doctrine.
This is the place for exposition, not for criticism. It requires no searchlight
to reveal in this man the limitations and imperfections which his age and
his own personal peculiarities fixed upon him. He saw in part and he prophesied
in part. But, like his great contemporary, Cromwell, he had a brave sincerity,
a soul absolutely loyal to the highest he saw. The testimony of the Scarborough
jailer is as true as it is unstudied -- "as stiff as a tree and as
pure as a bell." It is fitting that this study of him should close
with the words of the man who knew him best -- William Penn: "I write
my knowledge and not report, and my witness is true, having been with him
for weeks and months together on diverse occasions, and those of the nearest
and most exercising nature, by sea and land, in this country and in foreign
countries; and I can say I never saw him out of his place, or not a match
for every service or occasion. For in all things he acquitted himself like
a man, yea, a strong man, a new and heavenly-minded man; a divine and a
naturalist, and all of God Almighty's making." |