THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
I
When Fox came back to the world from his lonely wanderings, he had no
thought of setting up a church in opposition to, or in any sort of
competition with, existing churches. His message was for all,
worshipping under whatever name or form; his sole concern to reveal to
men their own wealth, to wean them to turn from words and ceremonials,
from all merely outward things, to seek first the inner reality. Many of
the Puritan leaders were brought by their contact with Fox to a more
vital attitude with regard to the faith in which they had been brought
up. Several of the magistrates before whom he and his followers were
continually being haled, unable after hours of examination and
discussion not only to find any cause of offence in these men, but
unable, also, to resist the appeal of their strength and sincerity,
espoused their cause with every degree of warmth, from whole-hearted
adherence to lifelong, unflagging interest and sympathy. But the general
attitude, from the panic-stricken behaviour of those who regarded the
Quakers as black magicians, incarnations of the Evil One, or Jesuits in
disguise, to the grave concern of the Calvinist divines, who saw in the
Quaker movement a profane attack upon the foundation-rock of Holy
Scripture, was one of fear--fear based, as is usual, upon
misunderstanding. A concise reasoned formulation of the Quaker
standpoint, though it may be picked out from the writings of Fox and the
early apologists, was to come, and then only imperfectly, when the
scholarly Robert Barclay joined the group; meanwhile, the sometimes
rather amorphous enthusiasm, the "mysterious meetings," the apocalyptic
claims and denunciations--meaningless to those who had no key--stood as
a barrier between the "children of the light" and the religious
fellowship of the Commonwealth church. Fear is clearly visible at the
root of the instant and savage persecution of the Quakers, not only by
the mob, but by official Calvinism, throughout the chapter of its power.
The keynote was struck by the local authorities at Nottingham, who
responded to Fox's plea for the Inner Light during a Sunday morning's
service in the parish church by putting him in prison. It is usually
maintained that his offence was brawling, but it is difficult to
reconcile this reading with the facts of the case. Theological
disputations were the most popular diversions of the day. There were no
newspapers, nor, in the modern sense of the word, either "politics" or
books; popular literature consisted largely of religious pamphlets;
amateur theologians abounded; the public meetings arousing the maximum
of enthusiasm were those gathered for the duels of well-known
controversialists; while speaking in church after the minister had
finished was not only recognized, but far from unusual. In this instance
the minister had preached from the text, "We have also a more sure word
of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light
that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day star arise
in your hearts," and had developed his theme in the sense that the sure
word of prophecy was the record of the Scripture. Fox--whom we may
imagine already much the man William Penn later on described for us as
"no busybody or self-seeker, neither touchy nor critical ... so meek,
contented, modest, easy, steady, tender, it was a pleasure to be in his
company.... I never saw him out of his place or not a match for every
service and occasion; for in all things he acquitted himself like a
man--yea, a strong man, a new and heavenly-minded man--civil beyond all
forms of breeding in his behaviour"--rose with his challenge, threw down
the gauntlet to biblicism, and declared that the Light was not the
Scriptures, but the Spirit of God....
But, as we have seen, religious England was not wholly Puritan. Fox's
world was waiting for him. From every denomination and every rank of
society the Children of the Light came forth. Very many--notably the
nuclear members of small independent groups--had reached the Quaker
experience before he came. The beliefs and customs which have since been
identified with the Society of Friends were already in existence in the
group of Separated Baptists at Mansfield in Nottingham, which formed in
face of the closed doors of official religion the centre of the little
Quaker church. The singleness of type, moreover, in the missionary work
of the early Quakers, extending, as it did, over the whole of
Christendom, carried on independently by widely differing
natures--"narrow" nonconformist ministers, prosperous business men, army
officers and privates, shepherds, cloth-makers, gentlewomen and domestic
servants, under every variety of circumstance, would be enough in itself
to reveal Fox as the child of his time. But as we watch the movement, as
we see it assailed by those dangers arising wherever systems and
doctrines are left behind and reason gets to work upon the facts of a
man's own experience; as we find the fresh life threatening here to
crystallize into formal idealism, there to flow away into pantheism or
antinomianism, again to pour into a dead sea of placid illumination; as
we see the little church surviving these dangers and continually
reviving, we recognize that Fox was more than the liberator of mystical
activity. He was its steersman. His constructive genius cast the mould
which has enabled this experiment to escape the fate overtaking similar
efforts. Seventeenth-century mysticism in France[6] and Spain was
succumbing to Quietism. Molinos, the Spanish monk, a contemporary of
Fox, popularized a debased form of Teresian mysticism, formulating it as
a state "where the soul loses itself in the soft and savoury sleep of
nothingness, and enjoys it knows not what"; while in France the practice
of passive contemplation had gained in the religious life of the time a
popularity which even the mystical genius of Madame Guyon--who herself,
it is true, lays in her writings over-much stress upon this, the first
step of the mystic way--failed to disturb.
[Footnote 6: If we except the doomed Port Royalists.]
For Fox, we cannot keep too clearly in mind, the relationship of the
soul to the Light was a life-process; the "inner" was not in
contradistinction to the outer. For him, the great adventure, the
abstraction from all externality, the purging of the self, the Godward
energizing of the lonely soul, was in the end, as it has been in all the
great "actives" among the mystics, the most practical thing in the
world, and ultimately fruitful in life-ends. He surprises us by the
intensity of his objective vision, by the number of modern movements he
anticipates: popular education; the abolition of slavery; the
substitution of arbitration for warfare amongst nations, and for
litigation between individuals; prison reform, and the revising of
accepted notions as to the status of women. He delights us with the
strong balance of his godliness, his instant suspicion of religiosity
and emotionalism, his dealing with those extremes of physical and mental
disturbance which are apt in unstable natures to accompany any sudden
flooding of the field of consciousness; his discouragement of ranting
and "eloquence," of self-assertion and infallibility--of anything
indicating lack of control, or militating against the full operation of
the light.
But, enormously powerful as was the influence of Fox upon the movement
which he liberated and steered, it was at the same time exceptionally
free--even in relation to the comparatively imitative mass of the Quaker
church--from that limitation which justifies the famous description of
an institution as the lengthened shadow of a man. The partial escape of
the Quaker church from this almost universal fate of institutions
becomes clear when we fix our attention on the essential nature of Fox's
"discovery" and what was involved in his offering it to the laity, when
we note that within the Quaker borders there arose that insistence on
the "originality" of life on all levels that has, at last, in our own
day, made its appearance in official philosophy.
II
The history of the Quaker experiment reveals in England three main
movements: the first corresponding roughly to the life of Fox, and
covering the period of expansion, persecution,[7] and establishment; the
second, which may be called the retreat of Quakerism, the quiet
cultivation of Quaker method; and the third, the modern evangelistic
revival.
The first rapid spreading in the North of England was materially helped
by the establishment, in 1652, of a centre at Swarthmoor Hall, near
Ulverston in Lancashire, the property of Judge Fell and his wife
Margaret, good churchpeople, much given to religious exercises, and
holding open house for travelling ministers of all denominations. The
capture of this stronghold gave the movement a northern headquarters,
and a post-office. Margaret Fell, converted by Fox at the age of
thirty-eight, built the rest of her life into the movement; seventeen
years later--more than ten years after the death of her husband--she
became Fox's wife. Her voluminous and carefully preserved correspondence
with the leading missionaries of the group alone forms almost a journal
of the early years of the Society.[8]
[Footnote 7: Toleration Act passed 1689. Fox died two years later.]
The whole of the countryside at Swarthmoor, whose minister Fox had
repudiated, finding him filled with a ranting spirit, high words and
"notions"--"full of filth," as he tersely notes in his Journal--came out
against him.
He was given up to justice, ordered to be whipped, and then handed over
to the mercy of the mob, who beat him until he fell senseless.
Presently, rising up, he bade them strike again. A mason numbed his arm
with a blow from a staff; the arm recovered instantly under the power of
his outgoing love for his persecutors. Incidents of this kind--of
beatings, stonings, and assaults of a more disgusting nature--are
typical of the treatment received with unvarying sweetness by the Quaker
missionaries, both in England and in America. On several occasions Fox's
life was attempted.
[Footnote 8: The bulk of the "Fell" correspondence is preserved at the
headquarters of the Society of Friends, Devonshire House, Bishopsgate,
E.C.]
Persecutions of all kinds, moreover, fell far more heavily upon the
Quakers than upon other nonconformists, owing to their persistence in
holding their meetings openly--meeting in the street if their premises
were burned down, the children meeting together when the parents were
imprisoned. Fines, flogging, pillory, the loathsomeness of damp and
uncleansed dungeons, the brutality of gaolers, left their serenity
unmoved; the exposure of women in the stocks for seventeen hours on a
November night confirmed their faith. In the Restoration period
particularly, when the strong influence of the religious soldiers of the
Commonwealth--many of whom, including Cromwell, were able to grasp the
tendency of Fox's conception--was removed, persecution became
methodical. Some three thousand odd had suffered before the King came
back, twenty-one dying as a result of cruel treatment. Three hundred
died during the Restoration period, and they were in prison thousands at
a time, for although Charles II., once the leaders had made clear their
lack of political ambition, promised them full freedom from disturbance,
the panic of fear of sectaries of all kinds which followed the Fifth
Monarchy outbreak in London opened an era of persecution and
imprisonment. Enormous sums of money were extracted from them under
various pretexts; the Quaker and Conventicle Acts were used against them
with ingenious brutality, an inducement in the shape of the fine imposed
being held out to informers. The Militia Act was, of course, a
convenient weapon, and their refusal to pay tithes meant a perpetual
series of heavy distraints. It was a common trick with judges and
magistrates when they could find no legitimate ground of complaint, to
tender to Quakers the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and turn them
into law-breakers on the ground of their refusal to swear. Wales offered
the most ferocious persecution suffered by them in these islands, but
the Welsh converts furnished Pennsylvania with a fine group of vigorous,
industrious colonists.
In 1654 the "new doctrine" was brought to the South by some sixty
travelling missionaries. The Universities, inflamed, no doubt, in
advance by the report of the Quaker scorn of wisdom and high
"notions"--having already revenged themselves upon four Quaker girls who
were the first to "publish truth" in the colleges and churches,
Cambridge following up the savagery of the students by public flogging,
Oxford by ducking--had little but rage and evil treatment for the
missionaries. Amongst the few converts made in Oxford, however, was the
man who, in his turn, brought William Penn into the Quaker fold. In
pious London, sunk in theological strife, the obscure Waiters, Ranters,
and Seekers were the most favourable soil.
The Quakers, however, worked everywhere, ploughing up the land, calling
men to cease the strife of words, and to wait before the Lord for living
experience.
They had come down in June, and in August were so far settled as to
undertake expansion east and west. The east, a stronghold of Puritanism,
was less receptive than the western country, where Seekers abounded and
convincements took place by hundreds.
Ireland was broken into by William Edmondson, an ex-Cromwellian soldier.
The country was in process of being "settled" by English colonists, who,
most of them being either Baptists or Independents, were already a
sufficient source of irritation, and the progress of the new message was
slow, and met with a persecution, borrowing much of its bitterness from
the state of nervous fear prevailing amongst the civil and military
authorities. For a time there was an attempt systematically to exclude
Friends from the country, but it gave way before the zeal and simplicity
of the preachers, and Quakerism, gaining most of its early converts from
the army, became in the end a rapidly expanding force.
In Scotland Quaker teaching progressed slowly. By 1656 the Continent had
been attacked, Holland and Germany, Austria and Hungary, Adrianople,
where a young girl who had gone out alone reasoned with the Sultan, and
was told that she spoke truth, and asked to remain in the country;
Rome--where John Love was given up by the Jesuits to the Inquisition,
examined by the Pope, and hanged--the Morea, and Smyrna, and Alexandria
were visited. Many attempts were made to land at the Levantine ports,
most of which were, however, frustrated by English consuls and
merchants; George Robinson reached Jerusalem, and came near to meeting
his death at the hands of the Turks; and the first isolated attempt had
been made in the West Indies and America. These activities and
expansions were helped forward and confirmed by Fox during the intervals
between his many imprisonments. He spent altogether some six years in
prison. For the rest, his life was one long missionary enterprise, and
during his detentions he worked unceasingly.
He early recognized the need of a definite church organization, and
matured a system whose final acceptance by the society as a whole was
helped on by an incident occurring during his eight months' confinement
in Launceston gaol.[9] James Nayler, one of the sweetest and ablest of
Quaker writers and preachers, of an acutely "suggestible" temperament,
and less stable than his followers, unsettled by the success attending
his work both in the north and the south and by the adulations of some
of the more excitable of his fellow-workers, permitted on the occasion
of his entry into Bristol a triumphant procession, the singing of
hosannas, and Messianic worship. It is noteworthy that of the thousand
odd Quakers in Bristol at the time not one took any part in the
outbreak. The matter was taken up by Parliament, a committee was
appointed, and Nayler came near being put to death for blasphemy. He
suffered in the pillory, was whipped through London and Bristol, his
tongue was bored, his forehead branded, and he was kept in prison for
three years. He made full public recantation of his errors, and enjoyed
full communion with the society which had never repudiated him,
recognizing even in his time of aberration the fine spiritual character
of the man. This incident, loaded with publicity, brought much
discouragement to Friends; but it also showed them their need of the
organization and discipline insisted upon by Fox. And so the Quaker
church--the most flexible of all religious organizations--came into
being.
[Footnote 9: Part of which was spent in a dungeon reserved for witches
and murderers, and left uncleansed year after year.]