THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT

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

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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).

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Brownists; now represented in the Congregational Union.

[2] Bunyan was born in 1628, four years later than Fox.

[3] In 1624, at Drayton-in-the-Clay, in Leicestershire.

[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.”

[5] William C. Braithwaite: The Beginnings of Quakerism. (Macmillan, 1912.)

[6] If we except the doomed Port Royalists.

[7] Toleration Act passed 1689. Fox died two years later.

[8] The bulk of the “Fell” correspondence is preserved at the headquarters of the Society of Friends, Devonshire House, Bishopsgate, E.C.

[9] Part of which was spent in a dungeon reserved for witches and murderers, and left uncleansed year after year.

[10] Nicholas Hermann.

[11] 1870.

[12] See chapter on Quakerism and Women.

[13] An Apology for the True Christian Divinity. 1678.

[14] W. Bromfield: The Faith of the True Christian and the Primitive Quaker’s Faith. 1725.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[20] In 1683.

[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).

[22] The Perrot Schism, 1661.

[23] The Friend, March, 1912: “Woman in the Church.”

[24] The Beacon Controversy, so named from Isaac Crewdson’s publication in 1835, expressing Evangelical views of an advanced type.

[25] The Friends’ Retreat at York, established in 1796, was the beginning of humane treatment of the insane in this country.

[26] In 1845 by Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham.

[27] Authority and the Light Within.

[28] Swarthmoor Lecture. Headley Bros., 1909.

[29] In the work, for example, of Miss Evelyn Underhill, author of Mysticism (Macmillan, 1911), The Mystic Way (Macmillan, 1913).

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