While we are about it, we must almost Inevitably go back to the origin
of the Society of which Elias Hicks has so far prov'd to be the most
mark'd individual result. We must revert to the latter part of the
16th, and all, or nearly all of that 17th century, crowded with so many
important historical events, changes, and personages. Throughout Europe,
and especially in what we call our Mother Country, men were unusually
arous'd--(some would say demented.) It was a special age of the insanity
of witch-trials and witch-hangings. In one year 60 were hung for
witchcraft in one English county alone. It was peculiarly an age
of military-religious conflict. Protestantism and Catholicism were
wrestling like giants for the mastery, straining every nerve. Only to
think of it--that age! its events, persons--Shakspere just dead, (his
folios publish'd, complete)--Charles 1st, the shadowy spirit and the
solid block! To sum up all, it was the age of Cromwell!
As indispensable foreground, indeed, for Elias Hicks, and perhaps sine
qua non to an estimate of the kind of man, we must briefly transport
ourselves back to the England of that period. As I say, it is the time
of tremendous moral and political agitation; ideas of conflicting forms,
governments, theologies, seethe and dash like ocean storms, and ebb and
flow like mighty tides. It was, or had been, the time of the long feud
between the Parliament and the Crown. In the midst of the sprouts, began
George Fox--born eight years after the death of Shakspere. He was the
son of a weaver, himself a shoemaker, and was "converted" before the age
of 20. But O the sufferings, mental and physical, through which those
years of the strange youth pass'd! He claim'd to be sent by God to
fulfill a mission. "I come," he said, "to direct people to the spirit
that gave forth the Scriptures." The range of his thought, even then,
cover'd almost every important subject of after times, anti-slavery,
women's rights, &c. Though in a low sphere, and among the masses, he
forms a mark'd feature in the age.
And how, indeed, beyond all any, that stormy and perturb'd age! The
foundations of the old, the superstitious, the conventionally poetic,
the credulous, all breaking--the light of the new, and of science and
democracy, definitely beginning--a mad, fierce, almost crazy age!
The political struggles of the reigns of the Charleses, and of the
Protectorate of Cromwell, heated to frenzy by theological struggles.
Those were the years following the advent and practical working of the
Reformation--but Catholicism is yet strong, and yet seeks supremacy. We
think our age full of the flush of men and doings, and culminations of
war and peace; and so it is. But there could hardly be a grander and
more picturesque and varied age than that.
Born out of and in this age, when Milton, Bunyan, Dryden and John Locke
were still living--amid the memories of Queen Elizabeth and James First,
and the events of their reigns--when the radiance of that galaxy
of poets, warriors, statesmen, captains, lords, explorers, wits and
gentlemen, that crowded the courts and times of those sovereigns still
fill'd the atmosphere--when America commencing to be explor'd and
settled commenc'd also to be suspected as destin'd to overthrow the old
standards and calculations--when Feudalism, like a sunset, seem'd
to gather all its glories, reminiscences, personalisms, in one last
gorgeous effort, before the advance of a new day, a new incipient
genius--amid the social and domestic circles of that period--indifferent
to reverberations that seem'd enough to wake the dead, and in a sphere
far from the pageants of the court, the awe of any personal rank
or charm of intellect, or literature, or the varying excitement of
Parliamentarian or Royalist fortunes--this curious young rustic goes
wandering up and down England.
George Fox, born 1624, was of decent stock, in ordinary lower life--as
he grew along toward manhood, work'd at shoemaking, also at farm
labors--loved to be much by himself, half-hidden in the woods,
reading the Bible--went about from town to town, dress'd in leather
clothes--walk'd much at night, solitary, deeply troubled ("the inward
divine teaching of the Lord")--sometimes goes among the ecclesiastical
gatherings of the great professors, and though a mere youth bears
bold testimony--goes to and fro disputing--(must have had great
personality)--heard the voice of the Lord speaking articulately to
him, as he walk'd in the fields--feels resistless commands not to be
explain'd, but follow'd, to abstain from taking off his hat, to say
_Thee_ and _Thou_, and not bid others Good morning or Good evening-was
illiterate, could just read and write-testifies against shows, games,
and frivolous pleasures--enters the courts and warns the judges that
they see to doing justice--goes into public houses and market-places,
with denunciations of drunkenness and money-making--rises in the midst
of the church-services, and gives his own explanations of the ministers'
explanations, and of Bible passages and texts--sometimes for such things
put in prison, sometimes struck fiercely on the mouth on the spot, or
knock'd down, and lying there beaten and bloody--was of keen wit, ready
to any question with the most apropos of answers--was sometimes press'd
for a soldier, (_him_ for a soldier!)--was indeed terribly buffeted;
but goes, goes, goes--often sleeping out-doors, under hedges, or
hay stacks--forever taken before justices--improving such, and all
occasions, to _bear testimony_, and give good advice--still enters the
"steeple-houses," (as he calls churches,) and though often dragg'd
out and whipt till he faints away, and lies like one dead, when he
comes-to--stands up again, and offering himself all bruis'd and bloody,
cries out to his tormenters, "Strike--strike again, here where you have
not yet touch'd! my arms, my head, my cheeks,"--Is at length arrested
and sent up to London, confers with the Protector, Cromwell,--is set at
liberty, and holds great meetings in London.
Thus going on, there is something in him that fascinates one or two
here, and three or four there, until gradually there were others who
went about in the same spirit, and by degrees the Society of Friends
took shape, and stood among the thousand religious sects of the world.
Women also catch the contagion, and go round, often shamefully misused.
By such contagion these ministerings, by scores, almost hundreds of poor
travelling men and women, keep on year after year, through ridicule,
whipping, imprisonment, &c.--some of the Friend-ministers emigrate to
New England--where their treatment makes the blackest part of the early
annals of the New World. Some were executed, others maim'd, par-burnt,
and scourg'd--two hundred die in prison--some on the gallows, or at the
stake.
George Fox himself visited America, and found a refuge and hearers, and
preach'd many times on Long Island, New York State. In the village
of Oysterbay they will show you the rock on which he stood, (1672,)
addressing the multitude, in the open air--thus rigidly following the
fashion of apostolic times.--(I have heard myself many reminiscences of
him.) Flushing also contains (or contain'd--I have seen them) memorials
of Fox, and his son, in two aged white-oak trees, that shaded him while
he bore his testimony to people gather'd in the highway.--Yes, the
American Quakers were much persecuted--almost as much, by a sort of
consent of all the other sects, as the Jews were in Europe in the
middle ages. In New England, the cruelest laws were pass'd, and put in
execution against them. As said, some were whipt--women the same as
men. Some had their ears cut off--others their tongues pierc'd with hot
irons--others their faces branded. Worse still, a woman and three men
had been hang'd, (1660.)--Public opinion, and the statutes, join'd
together, in an odious union, Quakers, Baptists, Roman Catholics and
Witches.--Such a fragmentary sketch of George Fox and his time--and the
advent of "the Society of Friends" in America.
Strange as it may sound, Shakspere and George Fox, (think of them!
compare them!) were born and bred of similar stock, in much the same
surroundings and station in life--from the same England--and at
a similar period. One to radiate all of art's, all literature's
splendor--a splendor so dazzling that he himself is almost lost in it,
and his contemporaries the same--his fictitious Othello, Romeo, Hamlet,
Lear, as real as any lords of England or Europe then and there--more
real to us, the mind sometimes thinks, than the man Shakspere himself.
Then the other--may we indeed name him the same day? What is poor plain
George Fox compared to William Shakspere--to fancy's lord, imagination's
heir? Yet George Fox stands for something too--a thought--the thought
that wakes in silent hours--perhaps the deepest, most eternal thought
latent in the human soul. This is the thought of God, merged in the
thoughts of moral right and the immortality of identity. Great, great is
this thought--aye, greater than all else. When the gorgeous pageant of
Art, refulgent in the sunshine, color'd with roses and gold--with all
the richest mere poetry, old or new, (even Shakespere's) with all that
statue, play, painting, music, architecture, oratory, can effect, ceases
to satisfy and please--When the eager chase after wealth flags, and
beauty itself becomes a loathing--and when all worldly or carnal or
esthetic, or even scientific values, having done their office to the
human character, and minister'd their part to its development--then,
if not before, comes forward this over-arching thought, and brings its
eligibilities, germinations. Most neglected in life of all humanity's
attributes, easily cover'd with crust, deluded and abused, rejected, yet
the only certain source of what all are seeking, but few or none finding
it I for myself clearly see the first, the last, the deepest depths and
highest heights of art, of literature, and of the purposes of life. I
say whoever labors here, makes contributions here, or best of all
sets an incarnated example here, of life or death, is dearest to
humanity--remains after the rest are gone. And here, for these purposes,
and up to the light that was in him, the man Elias Hicks--as the man
George Fox had done years before him--lived long, and died, faithful in
life, and faithful in death.