THE QUAKER CHURCH
At the heart of the Quaker church is "meeting"--the silent Quaker
meeting so long a source of misunderstanding to those outside the body,
so clearly illuminated now for all who care to glance that way, by the
light of modern psychology. We have now at our disposal, marked out with
all the wealth of spatial terminology characteristic of that science, a
rough sketch of what takes place in our minds in moments of silent
attention. We are told, for instance, that when in everyday life our
attention is arrested by something standing out from the cinematograph
show of our accustomed surroundings, we fix upon this one point, and
everything else fades away to the "margin" of consciousness. The "thing"
which has had the power of so arresting us, of making a breach in the
normal, unnoticed rhythm of the senses, allows our "real self"--our
larger and deeper being, to which so many names have been given--to flow
up and flood the whole field of the surface intelligence. The typical
instances of this phenomenon are, of course, the effect upon the
individual of beauty on all its levels--the experience known as falling
in love and the experience of "conversion."
With most of us, beyond these more or less universal experiences, the
times of illumination are intermittent, fluctuating, imperfectly
accountable, and uncontrollable. The "artist" lives to a greater or less
degree in a perpetual state of illumination, in perpetual communication
with his larger self. But he remains within the universe constructed for
him by his senses, whose rhythm he never fully transcends. His thoughts
are those which the veil of sense calls into being, and though that veil
for him is woven far thinner above the mystery of life than it is for
most of us, it is there. Imprisoned in beauty, he is content to dwell,
reporting to his fellows the glory that he sees.
The religious genius, as represented pre-eminently by the great
mystics--those in whom the sense of an ultimate and essential goodness,
beauty, and truth, is the dominant characteristic--have consciously bent
all their energies to breaking through the veil of sense, to making a
journey to the heart of reality, to winning the freedom of the very
citadel of Life itself. Their method has invariably included what--again
borrowing from psychology--we must call the deliberate control of all
external stimuli, a swimming, so to say, against the whole tide of the
surface intelligence, and this in no negative sense, no mere sinking
into a state of undifferentiated consciousness, but rather, as we have
seen with Fox, a setting forth to seek something already
found--something whose presence is in some way independent of the normal
thinking and acting creature, something which has already proclaimed
itself in moments of heightened consciousness--in the case of the
religious temperament at "conversion."
Silence, bodily and mental, is necessarily the first step in this
direction. There is no other way of entering upon the difficult
enterprise of transcending the rhythms of sense, and this, and nothing
else, has been invariably the first step taken by the mystic upon his
pilgrimage. Skirting chasms of metaphor, abysses of negation and fear,
he has held along this narrowest of narrow ways.
But the early Quakers and the old-time mystics knew nothing of
scientific psychology. They arrived "naturally" at their method of
seeking in silence what modern thought is calling "the intuitive
principle of action"--"the independent spiritual life fulfilling itself
within humanity"--"the unformulated motive which is the greater part of
mind." Like every seeker, on whatever level, they were led by feeling.
Feeling passed into action. Thought followed in due course, and was
deposited as doctrine. They spoke, groping for symbols, of "the seed,"
"the light," "the true birth." In other words--lest we go too far with
psychology's trinity of thought, feeling, and will as separable
activities "doing the will"--they "knew the doctrine."
From this standpoint of obedience to the "inner light" they found
within, they "understood" what they saw around them, and brought a fresh
revelation to the world. "I was afraid of all company," says Fox during
his early trials, "for I saw them perfectly where they were, through the
love of God which let me see myself." For them the keynote of life is
what an independent uninstructed French mystic, Brother Lawrence,[10]
has called "the practice of the Presence of God," and the man to whom
the practical spade-work of the mystics, the art of introversion and
contemplation, the practice (very variously interpreted) of purgation,
the pathway that leads to "unknowing" and to union with what men have
called God, has not been entered on as a matter of living experience, is
no Quaker, no matter how pious, how philanthropically orthodox, how
"religious" he may be. In a meeting for worship he is a foreign body, an
unconverted person.
Side by side with the meeting for worship is the business meeting--a
monthly meeting which is the executive unit of the society. It is held
under the superintendence of a clerk, whose duty it is to embody the
results of discussions in a series of minutes (voting and applause are
unknown), and to send these up to the larger quarterly meeting of the
district--a group of monthly meetings--delegates being appointed by each
monthly meeting to secure representation. The meetings are open to all
members and to outsiders on application. Most local questions are
settled by the quarterly meetings, whose deliberations are on the same
plan as those of the monthly meetings. Questions affecting the society
as a whole, and matters otherwise of wide importance, go up to Yearly
Meeting--the General Assembly of the Society--where, as in the
subordinate meetings, decisions are reached by means of a taking by the
clerk of the general "sense" of the gathering after free discussion. The
decisions of Yearly Meeting are final. It issues periodically a Book of
Discipline, in which are embodied, in the form of epistles and other
documents, the general attitude of the society as a whole in matters of
belief and conduct. A number of sub-committees are perpetually at work
for special ends--social, philanthropic, etc.--and there is attached to
Yearly Meeting a standing committee known as the Meeting for Sufferings,
established in 1675 in the interest of the victims of persecution. It is
composed of representatives of quarterly meetings and of certain
officers. It is always engaged in the interest, not only of members of
the Quaker body in difficult circumstances, but of sufferers all over
the world. It does an enormous amount of unpublished work. Notorious, of
course, is the history of the party of Quakers who arrived in Paris on
the raising of the siege[11] with food and funds for the famine-stricken
town; less known is the constant quiet assistance, such as that rendered
to famine and plague districts and at the seat of war in various parts
of the world. There are two offices in the Quaker body: that of Elder,
whose duty it is to use discretion in acting as a restraining or
encouraging influence with younger members in their ministry; and that
of Overseer, exercising a general supervision over members of their
meeting, admonishing them, if it should be necessary, as to the payment
of just debts; the friendly settlement of "differences" about outward
things; the discouraging and, as far as possible, restraining legal
proceedings between members; "dealing" with any who may be conducting
themselves, either in business or in private life, in a way such as to
bring discredit upon their profession; caring for the poor, securing
maintenance for them where necessary, and assisting them to educate
their children. When any person has been found to be specially helpful
in a meeting, and his or her ministry is recognized over a considerable
period of time as being a true ministry, exercised "in the spirit," such
a one is, after due deliberation, "acknowledged" or "recorded" as a
"minister." This acknowledgment, however, confers no special status upon
the individual, and implies no kind of appointment to preach or
otherwise to exercise any special function in the society. There is,
apparently, to-day a growing feeling against even this slight
recognition of ministry as also against the custom hitherto prevailing
of the special "bench" for Elders, which is usually on a raised dais,
and facing the meeting. Men and women work, both in government and in
ministry, side by side. Until the year 1907 they held their Yearly
Meeting separately,[12] with occasional joint sittings. Since then all
Yearly Meetings are held jointly, though the women's meetings are still
held for certain purposes.
[Footnote 10: Nicholas Hermann.]
[Footnote 11: 1870.]
The superficial structure of the society has existed, together with its
founder's system of the methodical recording of births, marriages, and
deaths, much as we know it to-day from the beginning.
The distinctive Quaker teaching--with its two main points, the direct
communication of truth to a man's own soul: the presence, in other
words, of a "seed of God" in every man; and the possibility here and now
of complete freedom from sin, together with the many subsidiary
testimonies, such as that against war, oaths, the exclusion of women
from the ministry, etc., depending from these points--has also survived
through many crises, and, in spite of the perpetual danger of being
overwhelmed by the Calvinism amidst which it was born, and which to this
day takes large toll of the society, and perpetually threatens the whole
group, is still represented in its original purity.
[Footnote 12: See chapter on Quakerism and Women.]
The Quakers have never, in spite of their deprecation of the written
word and their insistence on the secondariness of even the highest
"notions" and doctrines, been backward in defending their faith. They
sat at the feet of no man, nor did they desire that any man should sit
at theirs; but when they met, not merely at the hands of the wilder
sectaries, but from sober, godly people, with accusations of blasphemy,
when they were told that they denied Christ and the Scriptures, they
rose up and justified themselves. They were fully equal to those who
attacked them in the savoury vernacular of the period, in apocalyptic
metaphor, in trouncings and denunciations. Bunyan, their relentless
opponent throughout, is thus apostrophized by Burrough: "Alas for thee,
John Bunion! thy several months' travail in grief and pain is a
fruitless birth, and perishes as an untimely fig, and its praise is
blotted out among men, and it's passed away as smoke." But throughout
the vehemence of the Friends' controversial writings runs the sense of
fair play--the fearlessness of truth; the spirit, so to say, of
tolerance of every belief in the midst of their intolerance of an
"unvital" attitude in the believer. Their positive attitude to life,
their grand affirmation, redeems much that on other grounds seems
regrettable.
By the time the classical apologist of Quakerism--Robert Barclay, a
member of an ancient Scottish family, liberally educated at Aberdeen
College and in Paris, who had on his conversion forced himself to ride
through the streets of his city in sackcloth and ashes--had published
his book,[13] any justification of Quakerism had, from the point of view
of the laity at large, ceased to be necessary. They had had some thirty
years' experience of the fruits of the doctrine; they knew the Quakers
as neighbours; had scented something of the sweet fragrance of their
austerity; had wondered at their independence of happenings, their
freedom from fear, their centralized strength, their picking their way,
so to say, amongst the externalities of life with the calm assurance of
those who hold a clue where most men blunder, driven by fear or selfish
desire. They knew them, moreover, as untiringly available outside their
own circle on behalf of every sort of distress. The custodians, amateur
and official, of theology still preyed upon them, though many of these
were, no doubt, disarmed by the Puritan orthodoxy of the background upon
which Barclay's rationale of the Quaker's attitude is wrought.
[Footnote 13: _An Apology for the True Christian Divinity._ 1678.]
There is ample evidence that he was widely read, both in England and
abroad, and the fact that no one took up the challenge, though Baxter
and Bunyan were still living and working, may perhaps be accounted for
by the absence in the _Apology_ of any clear statement of the real
irreconcilability between Quakerism and attitudes that are primarily
doctrinal or institutional.
He accepts the scriptures as a secondary light, saying that they may not
be esteemed the "principal ground of all Truth and Knowledge, nor yet
the adequate primary rule of faith and manners," that they cannot go
before the teaching of the very spirit that makes them intelligible. He
maintains that the closing adjuration in the Book of Revelation refers
only to that particular prophecy, and is not intended to suggest that
prophecy is at an end. The ground of knowledge is immediate revelation,
which may not be "subjected to the examination either of the outward
Testimony of the Scripture or of the Natural Reason of Man as to a more
noble or certain Rule or Touchstone."
He considers that Augustine's doctrine of original sin was called out by
his zeal against the Pelagian exaltation of the natural light of reason.
He admits that man in sin--the natural man--can know no right; that,
therefore, the Socinians and Pelagians are convicted in exalting a
"natural light," but that, nevertheless, God in love gives universal
light, convicting of sin, and teaching if not resisted. He qualifies the
Quaker claim to the possibility of absolute present salvation from sin
by adding that there may be a falling off.
The whole of his argument displays the impossibility of rationalizing
the position to which the Quakers had felt their way in terms of the
absolute dualism of seventeenth-century philosophy. He places the
doctrines of natural sinfulness and of universal light side by side, and
so leaves them.
The logical instability of Quaker formulas due to the limitations of the
scientific philosophy of the day (not until the dawn of our own century
has a claim analogous to theirs been put forward on the intellectual
plane)--due, in other words, to the characteristic lagging of thought
behind life, while comparatively immaterial in the founders and leaders
of the Quaker movement, who were all mystics or mystically minded
persons, a variation of humanity, peculiar people gathered together,
with all their differences, by a common characteristic, seeing their
universe in the same terms urged towards unanimous activity--began to
bear fruit in the second generation. Mystical genius is not hereditary,
and to the comparatively imitative mass making up the later generations
the Inward Light becomes a doctrine, a conception as mechanical and
static as is the infallible Scripture to the imitative mass of the
Protestants.
We may not, of course, apply the term "imitative" in too absolute a
sense. All have the light. We are all mystics. We all live our lives on
our various levels, at first hand. But a full recognition of this fact
need not blind us to the further fact that, while those who have
mystical genius need no chart upon their journey, most of us need a
plain way traced out for us through the desert. Most of us follow the
gleam of doctrine thrown out by first-hand experience, and cling to that
as our guide. But if the Quaker message failed as theology, and the
later generations swung back to the simpler doctrine of Protestantism
and re-enthroned an infallible Scripture, something, nevertheless, had
been done. Within the precincts of Quakerism certain paths backwards
were, so to say, permanently blocked. A fresh type of conduct was
assured. The world, the environment in which the new lives of the group
were to arise, had been changed for ever.
The working out of the logical insecurity of the Quaker position is
interestingly shown in the person of George Keith, intellectually the
richest of the early Quakers, a man whose writings have been
acknowledged by his fellows, and would still stand if he had not left
the group, as amongst the best expositions of the Quaker attitude.
He was a Scotch Presbyterian, and seems to have joined the Quakers while
still a student at Aberdeen University. For nearly thirty years he was
under the spell of the Quaker reading of life, and lived during this
time well in the forefront of public discussion and persecution. We find
him writing books and pamphlets in and out of prison, full of the ardour
and the joy of his discovery that there are to-day immediate
revelations, speaking with delight of the meaning and use of silence,
defending his new faith before Presbyterian divines and University
students, declaring that he found Friends "wiser than all the teachers I
ever formerly had been under."
It was not until after the death of Fox, when the first generation of
"born Friends" was growing up, that he began to express his sense of the
danger he saw ahead. Then we find him accusing Friends of neglecting the
historic evidences of their faith, of sacrificing the outer to the
inner. His main doctrinal divergence from them was his assertion that
salvation is impossible without the knowledge of and belief in the
historic Jesus. But doctrine was not his only difficulty. He went to the
very heart of the situation. He saw that the Quakers could never become
in the world what they hoped to be--a mystical church, a body of men
swayed without let or hindrance by the Divine Spirit, pioneers for the
world upon the upward way--unless they were willing to pay the price of
the saintly office. He begged for the abolition of birthright
membership, for an open confession of faith for incoming members, that
the children of Friends should come and offer themselves as strangers,
their spiritual claims weighed and considered; that marriage should not
be celebrated according to the Quaker rites between those who were not
faithful Friends; that a sort of register should be kept of those who,
in and out of meeting, were live and consistent Christians. His view of
the situation, though put forward with a violence and bitterness which
prejudiced it with his hearers, and brought his own spiritual life under
suspicion, is largely justified by the subsequent experience of the
society. His challenge attracted a large following in America, whither
he had gone as headmaster of a Friends' school. The other leaders of the
society, both in London and Pennsylvania, denied his assertion of the
neglect by Friends of the historical Christ, while protesting that we
must believe that the light of Christ reaches every man, whether he have
heard of him or no.
In 1692 the matter came before the Yearly Meeting, and Keith and his
large body of followers were condemned in writing of the "spirit of
reviling, railing, lying, slandering," and of mischievous and hurtful
separation. So the schism was formed, and a new sect arose, which
established many meetings amidst controversy and bitterness. The
following year London Yearly Meeting, considering his case in sittings
that sometimes lasted for days, finally declared him to have separated
himself from the holy fellowship of the Church of Christ, and disowned
him. His following gradually disappeared. For some years he travelled
about in America, visiting meetings and protesting against his
disownment. Later on he became an Independent, then an Episcopalian. He
died as a minister of the Church of England. There is a story, which
most authorities consider to be well authenticated, representing him as
saying before he died that if God had taken him while he was a Quaker,
it would have been well with him.