THE PRESENT POSITION
The counter-agitation[24] brought forth in England by the American
Hicksite movement, ended, after prolonged discussion and stress, in a
decisive readjustment of the Society of Friends. There were numerous
secessions into the Evangelical church and the Plymouth Brotherhood.
There were separations of those who followed Elias Hicks in his
repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and of those who favoured Wilbur in
protesting against "book religion," reasserting the doctrines of the
Quaker fathers, and insisting on simplicity of life; but the society as
a whole was swept forward, under the leadership of Joseph John Gurney
(brother of Elizabeth Fry), by the invading wave of Protestant
evangelicalism. Gurney, coming of old Quaker stock, though religious and
pious and full of zeal for the salvation of the world, never grasped the
essentials of Quakerism. He had no touch of the intuitive genius which
makes the mystic. Every line he has written betrays the Protestant
biblicist, the man who puts the verbal revelation before any other
whatsoever. He did not repudiate the Fathers, but he denied that they
had ever questioned the supreme authority of the scriptures as the guide
of mankind.
[Footnote 24: The Beacon Controversy, so named from Isaac Crewdson's
publication in 1835, expressing Evangelical views of an advanced type.]
His strong persuasive personality revived the enthusiasm of the
imitative mass of the society, and once more the Quakers faced the
world. It was a new world. The religious liberty Friends had prophesied
and worked towards had come at last. The Test Act had been repealed.
Nonconformists were admitted to Parliament and to the Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge. The London University had been established. The
emerging Quakers, on their side, began to break down the barriers they
had erected between themselves and the world by their peculiarities of
speech and of dress, and showed a tendency to relax their hostility
towards "art."
They were a little band, tempered and disciplined by their century of
quiet cultivation of the Quaker faith and method, and they were at once
available for a share, strikingly disproportionate to their numbers, in
the evangelical work of an awakening Christendom. From the time of their
emergence their missionary labours have been unremitting. They engaged
in prison reform and the reform of the penal code. They initiated the
reform of the lunacy laws, working for the substitution of kindly
treatment in special institutions[25] for the orthodox method of chains
and imprisonment. They began to educate the poor. The foundation of
their Foreign Missions dates from this period of revival.
They have widening centres of missionary work in India, Madagascar,
Syria, China, and Ceylon. They have been the main movers in the work of
abolishing the opium traffic, and are engaged, both at home and abroad,
in all the many well-known efforts towards social amelioration, amongst
which, perhaps, the leading part they have taken in experimental
philanthropy, in educational method (their co-education schools
scattered over the country are models of method, standing for common
sense, humanity, and a wise use of modern resources), in the housing and
betterment of the lot of the working classes, and in the establishment
of garden suburbs, are particularly worthy of mention.
[Footnote 25: The Friends' Retreat at York, established in 1796, was the
beginning of humane treatment of the insane in this country.]
From their Sunday-school work, begun in Bristol in 1810, and gradually
spreading over the country, has arisen what is perhaps the most widely
influential of the present activities in which Friends are interested on
behalf of the working classes--the Adult School Movement. Originally
initiated[26] in the interest of loafers at street corners, it has now
become a national movement, with a complete organization, upwards of a
thousand schools, and a membership in its ninetieth thousand. It is
spreading on the Continent and in America. At the meetings of its weekly
classes, which are open to all who care to attend (the men's and women's
classes are held independently), led by an elected president, who may be
an adherent of any creed or of none, part of the time is devoted to the
consideration of religious questions and part to lecturettes, debates,
readings, and so on. Each school develops secondary interests and
engages in special work.
[Footnote 26: In 1845 by Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham.]
Within the society from which this perpetual stream of evangelical work
flows forth we must distinguish two distinct types of religious culture.
There is, first of all, the main mass, differing only in its method of
worship from the main body of Protestant nonconformity--taking, as we
have said, its stand first and foremost upon the scriptures. In most
Quaker meetings to-day this typically "Protestant" attitude predominates
numerically. But while we recognize this state of affairs as one of the
inevitable consequences of any endeavour to found an "open" church upon
a mystical basis, it is, nevertheless, amongst the Quakers, modified, to
a certain extent, in two ways: first, by its subjection to its
environment, the framework of the old Quaker culture, the training
implied in Fox's method both of private and public worship, in the
expectation of unmediated Divine leadership in all the circumstances of
life, the training in freedom from the domination of formulæ and
deductions, the insistence on the important meaning of the individual
soul.
It is modified, in the second place, by the nucleus of genuine mystical
endowment, which has persisted through the centuries at the heart of the
Quaker church, both handed down in the direct line and coming in from
without; the remnant whose influence has so often made this little
church the sorting-house, so to say, amongst the sects for mystically
minded persons. And during the last ten years--the years which have seen
such a striking revival of the interest in mysticism, have felt a
clearing and a growth of the recognition of the importance to the race
as a whole of mystical genius, have produced a mass of seriously
undertaken studies of this phenomenon from every point of approach--the
Quaker church has continued increasingly to fulfil this function. Not
only from the sects, but from the older establishments, and from the
ranks of religiously unclassified "philosophy" and "culture," there is a
steady migration towards the Quaker fold.
The vitality of this modern Quaker group is expressing itself at the
present time in a twofold activity over and above the home and foreign
missionary work we have already noted. This activity is visible
throughout the society, both in England and in America. There is, on the
one hand, an effort emanating from the more intellectual section of the
group, to express Quakerism in terms of modern thought, to reach, as far
as may be, with the help of modern psychology, a philosophical
"description" of the doctrine of the "inner light"--a description which
is thought to be much more possible to-day than it was at the time of
George Fox. This effort, which includes the rewriting in detail and from
original documents of the history of the Society of Friends, is embodied
in the work of a little group of Quaker writers, prominent amongst whom
are the late John Wilhelm Rowntree, the late Miss Caroline E. Stephen,
Dr. Rufus M. Jones, Mr. William C. Braithwaite, Mr. Edward Grubb, and
Miss Joan M. Fry. Mr. Edward Grubb,[27] perhaps one of the most
illuminating of the Quaker writers upon the doctrine of the Inner Light,
realizes with perfect clearness that the dogma of the Infallible Spirit
presents at least as many difficulties as that of an infallible Church
or Bible; that in the case of either of these infallibilities the
question immediately arises as to "_who_" is the infallible interpreter?
Fox, he points out, trusted urgency and unaccountability by mere thought
processes for the sign of the higher source. He adds to this that "the
spirit in one man must be tested by the spirit in many men. The
individual must read his inward state in the light of the social
spiritual group," ... and thus reaches a sort of spiritual democracy. On
the whole, however, his appeal is to idealism as the supplanter of
materialism; he claims thought as the _prius_ of knowledge, and
identifies consciousness with thought. He leaves us with the "notional"
God of transcendental idealism, who is just as far off as the
corresponding matter-and-force God of consistent materialism.
[Footnote 27: _Authority and the Light Within._]
Mr. William C. Braithwaite is, perhaps, happier. "The consciousness," he
says in _Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience_,[28] "that our
subjective impression of guidance needs correction to allow for the
personal factor, and the sense that truth of all kinds and in all ages
is harmoniously related, naturally point to the great advantage of
co-ordinating the light that has come to our souls with the light that
has come to others in our own day or in past ages. This is not the same
thing as merely relying on tradition or accepting an experience
second-hand; nor does it mean that we refuse to accept any guidance
which goes beyond the experience of others--it means simply that over
the country we have to traverse there are many paths already trodden
along which we may have safe and speedy passage."
[Footnote 28: Swarthmoor Lecture. Headley Bros., 1909.]
Professor Rufus Jones, who has done much in relation to the psychology
of Quakerism, also voices the corporate idea in declaring that the
Friend must test his light by the larger revelation of his co-believers,
and they, again, by the larger revelation which has come to prophets and
apostles, saints and martyrs; but here, again, we seem to find ourselves
within a circle of ideas. In place of the simple homely imagery of Fox,
"the seed," "the light," the "new birth," "that which hath convinced
you," we have in these modern descriptions, it is true, all the rich and
intricate spatial terminology of modern science; but, so far, the most
successful efforts in the direction of "description" of mystical
religion in modern terms have not come from the society, where the
belief in, and the attempt to live in sole dependence upon, the
indwelling spirit is still, for very many of its members, the single
aim, where there are still many with whom "knowing" is more important
than "knowing about."
The boldest and clearest sighted, the most comprehensive and lucid
descriptions of the mystic type, of his distinctive genius, his aim and
method, his kinship with his fellows throughout the ages, the world-old
record of his search and its justification, are to be found
elsewhere.[29]
Side by side with the attempt to rationalize and restate in terms of
modern thought the faith that is in them is a movement enrolling growing
numbers, particularly of younger Friends, in both continents, in the
direction of expressing Quakerism in terms of modern life.
Home life, social life, business life, every modern development, is
brought to the test of Quaker principles. There is a spirit abroad
declaring that Quakerism has become devitalized; that the religious life
is stereotyped and perfunctory; that the joyous, all-conquering zeal of
the early Friends was the outcome of a secret unknown to their
followers; that the way to the fount at which they were sustained is
lost--that it may be found again if the daily life is brought under
Divine control. A call has gone forth to sacrifice, to scale the heights
of right living in that purer air, that the sight may grow clear.
[Footnote 29: In the work, for example, of Miss Evelyn Underhill, author
of _Mysticism_ (Macmillan, 1911), _The Mystic Way_ (Macmillan, 1913).]
Everywhere in Quakerdom we meet this question as to the secret of the
early Quakers. Do we read in this outcry an admission of the failure of
group mysticism as it has so far been attempted by the Society of
Friends? The little church of the spirit seems to be at the turning of
the ways.
All barriers are down. The rationale of primitive Quakerism is fully
established. The Quakers no longer stand facing an outraged or
indifferent Christendom. The principles "discovered" by their founder
are conceded in theory by the religious world as a whole.
Will they remain in their present position, which may be described as
that of a Protestant Ethical Society, with mystical traditions and
methods, part of an organized and nationalized world-church, suffering
the necessary limitations of a body thrown open to all, converted and
unconverted, committed to the necessity of teaching doctrinal
"half-truths," organizing necessarily in the interest of conduct as an
end? or will they constitute themselves an order within, and
co-operating with, the church--an order of lay mystics, held together
externally by the sane and simple discipline laid down by Fox, and
guarded thus from the dangers to which mysticism is perennially open; an
order of men and women willing corporately to fulfil, while living in
the daily life of the world, the conditions of revelation, and admitting
to membership only those similarly willing; a "free" group of mystics
ready to pay the price, ready to travel along the way trodden by all
their predecessors, by all who have truly yearned for the uncreated
Light?
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
1624. Birth of George Fox.
1647. Fox's public ministry begins.
1650. Friends nicknamed Quakers by a Derby magistrate.
1652. Acquisition of headquarters at Swarthmoor Hall.
1654. Missions to the South and East.
1656. First Quakers in America.
1657. Fox appeals to Friends on behalf of their slaves.
1678. Barclay's apology published in English.
1681. Pennsylvania founded.
1689. Toleration Act passed.
1691. Death of George Fox.
1760. Reform of Society of Friends.
1835. Modern Evangelical Revival.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GEORGE FOX: Journal. Edited by Norman Penney. Cambridge University
Press, 1911.
GEORGE FOX: Journal. Bi-centenary edition in two volumes. Headley.
GEORGE FOX: Works. Eight volumes. Philadelphia, 1831.
ROBERT BARCLAY: An Apology for the True Christian Divinity. In English,
1678.
WILLIAM PENN: No Cross, No Crown.
JOHN WOOLMAN: Journal.
CAROLINE E. STEPHEN: Quaker Strongholds. Headley, 1907.
JOHN WILHELM ROWNTREE: Essays and Addresses. Headley, 1905.
T. EDMUND HARVEY: The Rise of the Quakers. Headley, 1905.
ELIZABETH B. EMMOTT: The Story of Quakerism. Headley, 1908.
ALLEN C. THOMAS: The History of the Society of Friends in America.
RUFUS M. JONES: The Quakers in the American Colonies. Macmillan, 1912.
RUFUS M. JONES: Social Law in the Spiritual World. Headley, 1905.
RUFUS M. JONES: Studies in Mystical Religion. Macmillan, 1909.
RUFUS M. JONES: Children of the Light (Anthology of Quaker Mystics).
Headley, 1909.
EVELYN UNDERHILL: Mysticism. Macmillan, 1911.
WILLIAM C. BRAITHWAITE: The Beginnings of Quakerism. Macmillan, 1912.
WILLIAM C. BRAITHWAITE: Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience.
Headley, 1909.
EDWARD GRUBB: Authority and the Light Within. Clarke, 1908.
The Book of Discipline. Successive editions from 1783.
The Society of Friends. Encyclopædia Britannica. Eleventh edition.
NOTE
The bulk of Quaker literature falls into two main groups: (1) The
voluminous writings of the early Quakers--journals, epistles, doctrinal
works, and controversial matter--most of which were issued under the
censorship of a body of Friends meeting in London, while a large mass of
unprinted manuscripts and transcripts of manuscripts, admirably
classified and indexed, is available at the headquarters of the Society,
Devonshire House, Bishopsgate, whose library contains also the largest
collection of books relating to the Society; (2) the modern output of
history, commentary, expository, apology, and evangelistic writing.
Most of the printed works of George Fox have been collected in the eight
volumes of the Philadelphia edition. A considerable quantity is still in
manuscript. The Cambridge edition of his Journal is particularly
interesting in having been printed unaltered from the original
manuscript. It is incomplete, and is best supplemented by the
bi-centenary edition (see Bibliography).
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
Transcriber's Notes
The original spelling and punctuation were mostly preserved. A few
obvious typographical and formatting errors were silently corrected.
Further corrections are listed here (before/after):
[p. 54]:
... that the Quakers, who might have converted ...
... "that the Quakers, who might have converted ...