It was a few days later, and Whitsun Eve. The same traveller who had
climbed to the top of old Pendle Hill 'with much ado, it was so
steep,' was coming down now on the far side of the Yorkshire dales.
'A lusty strong man of body' but 'of a grave look or countenance,' he
'travelled much on foot through rough and untrodden paths.' 'As he
passed through Wensleydale he advised the people as he met or passed
through them' 'to fear God,' 'which ... did much alarm the people, it
being a time that many people were filled with zeal.'[3]
At sunset he passed through a village of flax-weavers whose
settlements lay in the low flatts that bordered the rushing river
Rawthey a mile or two outside of Sedbergh Town.
'I came through the Dales,' says George Fox in his Journal, 'and as I
was passing along the way, I asked a man which was Richard Robinson's,
and he asked me from whence I came, and I told him "From the Lord."'
This must have been a rather unexpected answer from a traveller on the
high road. Can you not see the countryman's surprised face as he turns
round and stares at the speaker, and wonders whatever he means?
'So when I came to Richard Robinson's I declared the Everlasting Truth
to him, and yet a dark jealousy rose up in him after I had gone to
bed, that I might be somebody that was come to rob his house, and he
locked all his doors fast. And the next day I went to a separate
meeting at Justice Benson's where the people generally was convinced,
and this was the place that I had seen a people coming forth in white
raiment; and a mighty meeting there was and is to this day near
Sedbarr which I gathered in the name of Jesus.'
These flax-weavers of Brigflatts were a company of 'Seekers,'
unsatisfied souls who had strayed away like lost sheep from all the
sects and Churches, and were longing for a spiritual Shepherd to come
and find them again and bring them home to the fold.
George Fox was a weaver's son himself. Directly he heard it, the whirr
of the looms beside the rushing Rawthey must have been a homelike
sound in his ears. But more than that, his spirit was immediately at
home among the little colony of weavers of snowy linen; for he
recognised at once that these were the riverside people 'in white
raiment,' whom he had seen in his vision, and to whom he had been
sent.
Not only the flax-weavers, but also some of the 'considerable people'
of the neighbourhood accepted the message of the wandering preacher,
who came to them over the dales that memorable Whitsuntide. The master
of the house where the meeting was held, Colonel Gervase Benson
himself, and his good wife Dorothy also, were 'convinced of Truth,'
and faithfully did they adhere thereafter to their new faith, through
fair weather and foul. In later years, men noted that this same
Colonel Benson, following his teacher's love of simplicity, and hatred
of high-sounding titles, generally styled himself merely a
'husbandman,' notwithstanding 'the height and glory of the world that
he had a great share of,'[4] seeing that 'he had been a Colonel, a
Justice of the Peace, Mayor of Kendal, and Commissary in the
Archdeaconry of Richmond before the late domestic wars. Yet, as an
humble servant of Christ, he downed those things.'[5] His wife,
Mistress Dorothy, also, was to prove herself a faithful friend to her
teacher in after years, when his turn, and her turn too, came to
suffer for 'Truth's sake.'
But in these opening summer days of 1652, no shadows fell on the
sunrise of enthusiasm and of hope, as, in the good Justice's house
beside the rushing Rawthey, the gathering of the 'great people' began.
The day was Whitsunday, the anniversary of that other gathering in the
upper room at Jerusalem, when the Apostles being all 'in one place,
with one accord, of one mind,' the rushing mighty Wind came and shook
all the place where they were sitting, followed by the cloven tongues
'like as of fire, that sat upon each of them.'
The gift given at Pentecost has never been recalled. Throughout the
ages the Spirit waits to take possession of human hearts, ready to
fill even the humblest lives with Its Own Power of breath and flame.
This was the Truth that had grown dusty and neglected in England in
this seventeenth century. The 'still, small Voice' had been drowned in
the clash of arms and in the almost worse clamour of a thousand
different sects. Now that, after his own long search in loneliness and
darkness, George Fox had at length found the Voice speaking to him
unmistakably in the depths of his own heart, the whole object of his
life was to persuade others to listen also to 'the true Teacher that
is within,' and to convince them that He was always waiting to speak
not only in their hearts, but also through their lives. 'My message
unto them from the Lord was,' he says, 'that they should all come
together again and wait to feel the Lord's power and spirit in
themselves, to gather them together to Christ, that they might be
taught of Him who says "Learn of Me."'
This was the Truth--an actual, living Truth--that not only the
flax-weavers of Brigflatts, but many other companies of 'Seekers'
scattered through the dales of Yorkshire and Westmorland, as well as
in many other places, had been longing to hear proclaimed. 'Thirsty
Souls that hunger' was one of the names by which they called
themselves. It was to these thirsty, hungering Souls that George Fox
had been led at the very moment when he was burning to share with
others the vision of the 'wide horizons of the future' that had been
unfolded to him on the top of old Pendle Hill.
No wonder that the Seekers welcomed him and flocked round him,
drinking in his words as if their thirsty souls could never have
enough. No wonder that he welcomed them with equal gladness, rejoicing
not only in their joy, but yet more in that he saw his vision's
fulfilment beginning. Here in these secluded villages he had been led
unmistakably to the 'Great People,' whom he had seen afar off, waiting
to be gathered.
Within a fortnight from that assembly on Whit-Sunday at Justice
Benson's house George Fox was no longer a solitary, wandering teacher,
trying to convince scattered people here and there of the Truths he
had discovered. Within a fortnight--a wonderful fortnight truly--he
had become the leader of a mighty movement that gathered adherents and
grew of itself, spreading with an irresistible impulse until, only a
few years later, one Englishman out of every ninety was a member of
the SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.