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RELIGION OF LIFE SERIES.
GLEANINGS FROM GEORGE FOX.
UNIFORM VOLUMES IN
Religion of Life Series.
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA.
ISAAC PENINGTON.
GEORGE FOX.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE.
THE CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT.
WILLIAM PENN.
Cloth, 1s. net. Leather, 2s.
net.
GLEANINGS
FROM THE WORKS OF
GEORGE FOX
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
AUTHOR OF
"THE QUAKERS: PAST & PRESENT."
LONDON:
HEADLEY BROTHERS,
BISHOPSGATE, E.C.
Contents.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 7-14
PART I.
NARRATIVE PASSAGES 17-28
PART II.
SPECIAL TESTIMONIES 31-90
1. BUSINESS LIFE 31
2. THE INWARD LIGHT 35
3. JUSTICE 41
4. MEETINGS AND MINISTRY 46
5. OATHS 64
6. RESPECTING PERSONS 66
7. THE SCRIPTURES 69
8. SIN 74
9. SLAVERY 81
10. WAR 82
11. WOMEN 84
PART III.
SOCIAL LIFE 93-109
1. SOCIAL LIFE 93
2. GENERAL EXHORTATIONS 103
Introduction.
I.
George Fox may be variously described. If we look at him from the
standpoint of orthodox Catholicism we shall see a heretical genius, a
man who tried to re-organise the church and succeeded in establishing a
sect--in defiance of the fact of the rarity of the religious and the
still greater rarity of the mystical temperament--upon a basis of
mystical opportunism, in a condition of divorce from sacraments, culture
and tradition.
From the Protestant point of view he becomes the man who made a
temporarily successful attempt to undermine the authority of the
Scriptures; his failure being attested by the return of the majority of
the Quakers, from the third generation onwards, to biblicism--their
tacit throwing up of their earlier position with regard to the inward
light.
The "free" churches find in Fox the collector and organizer of a type of
Christian believers whose shining record has so fully justified his
essential soundness and unity with the main purpose of Christendom that
minor differences may be ignored.
Students of mysticism, Christian mysticism in particular, seeing Fox as
one in the long line of those who have adventured into the undivided
truth they find stirring within their own souls, have placed him amongst
the grand "actives" of European mysticism.
Here and there an attempt has been made to disentangle the essential
distinction of the man himself from his relation to groups and abstract
ideas, and to show that distinctive character working itself out in his
life and writings, and in the varying history of the church he founded.
II.
To the present writer George Fox appeals not only by the inherent
strength of his mystical genius, not only because amongst his fellows in
the mystical family he is, characteristically, the practical western
layman, the market-place witness for the spiritual consciousness in
every man, but also because he is, essentially, the English
mystic--because he represents, at the height of its first blossoming,
the peculiar genius of the English "temperament." He is English
particularism, English independency and individualism expressed in terms
of religion, and offering its challenge, for the first time, in the open
to all the world. This is his unique contribution to the evolution of
Christendom.
His fellows and predecessors, the German mystics of the fourteenth and
seventeenth centuries, brought, it is true, the same message, the same
account of the pathway to reality as did Fox, but they brought it in a
restricted form. They were largely dominated by tradition, they
remained, most of them, within the official church, and those who did
not met secretly and laboured behind closed doors. It was in George Fox
that religious particularism, the outcome of the civilization whose
cradle was the little isolated homesteads upon the Scandinavian fiords,
reached its full flower. With him there re-appears in the form of an
experiment in everyday life, in the heart of the modern state, the truth
that dawned in Palestine sixteen hundred years before, the truth that
was side-tracked but never quite lost amidst the policies, expediencies
and jealousies of the official church, that has been clearing and
elaborating itself with increasing steadiness ever since the seventeenth
century, the truth that only in individuality carried to its full term
can we find the basis of unity. Unity amongst Fox and his followers is
the fruit and fulfilment of separateness. In order truly to love his
neighbour, a man must first love himself. He must achieve singleness of
soul, must discover that within him which is of God; that which "speaks"
with him only in the solitude of his inner being.
The unit, with Fox, is never, except incidentally, the group; never,
except incidentally, the family; but the single human soul faced with
its individual consciousness, the germ of truth, goodness, beauty,
light, love, God, it bears within itself, the seed of God present in all
human kind.
He stands for liberty, for trust and toleration in a day of unchallenged
religious and civil antagonisms and authoritarianisms. He stands for
love, for the essential harmony of the creation in a day when warfare
was the unquestioned and "divinely-appointed" method of settling
international differences, and litigation and debate the accepted
steersmen of private relationships.
III.
This particularist genius and his fellows represent the keenest moment
in one of those periods in its religious experience when humanity
becomes aware of the wider life to which it belongs, when working on,
God-led and God-inspired, part blind, part seeing, making in dark and
desert places the uttermost venture of faith, suddenly, on an instant,
it finds God.
A subsequent enormously enhanced fruitfulness, the amazing development
of "thought" and "science," our long sojourn amidst the great desert of
"facts," the final well-nigh despairing state of spiritual aridity that
synchronised with the neo-Darwinian mechanistic definitions of life, is
now once more in our day giving place to a home-coming, a new phase of
spiritual realization.
It is just at this turning moment, in the dawn-light of this new
liberating contact, world-wide this time, free altogether from the
swathing bands of cloister and cult that we begin to have a clearer
understanding of the message of the mystics in general and in particular
of the challenge of our own George Fox.
IV.
Fox's message found instant response from the heart of the most vital
religious life of his day. From the midst of the small isolated groups
who--surrounded by the institutional and doctrinal confusion following
immediately upon the decentralization of authority in the art and
science of the religious life, and persisting throughout the
post-reformation century--were feeling their own way to God, his
followers came forth. They, these friends of truth as they called
themselves, were to live out the first phase of the liberation of the
religious life. Dispensing with symbols and observances, they strove to
sink the whole personal life into the divine life and love they felt
stirring within them, to seek this perpetually, to let it flow out and
through all the circumstances of their daily commerce, to seek and
appeal to this alone, in all mankind.
V.
If Fox had been only the liberator of the mystical forces moving and
quickening under the drying crust of official and authoritarian
theology, he would have left on the outward form of the religious life
of his country as little mark as did his great brother Boehme on his.
But he was more than liberator. He was also steersman. It was his
organizing genius that laid the foundation of a new religious culture; a
culture in which sacraments and symbols, politics and authoritarianism
should play no part--a culture which took no account of "persons,"
"notions," or "theories," which put being before "knowing," intuition
before intellection, which dared to trust in and enquire of women, not
in name only, but in fact.
The vitality of the society he founded is the test of the organizing
genius of this "madman."
It has had its critical period. At the beginning of the eighteenth
century it sank into Quietism, and thence back to a pre-Quaker pietist
biblicism, in which the nature of Fox's contribution to religion--his
restatement, both in life and in church method of the immediacy, the
"originality" of the Christ-life, the life of God in man--was almost
lost to view. But the culture-ground, the means of grace, the Quaker
"method" of quiet waiting on God, the unflinching faith, remained
untouched, the little church survived and in due time revival took
place. To-day, in spite of the strong leaven of biblicism, the Quaker
church serves (as I have pointed out elsewhere)[1] as a sorting-house
for mystics and persons of the mystical type, and lies a radiating
centre of divine common-sense, of practical loving wisdom at the heart
of English religious life.
VI.
What Fox did with the unconsciousness of genius, modern thought is
elaborating and explaining. "Experts" in all departments of knowledge
are at the confessional declaring their bankruptcy. Science admits her
helplessness to do more than collect and describe phenomena, and begs
implicitly to rank as a servant rather than a guide (thereby,
incidentally coming for the first time to her full height and value).
[Footnote 1: "The Quakers; Past and Present." Constable & Co.]
Metaphysic, come out at last from her academic seclusion to the light of
common day, points the way to the threshold of reality, declares that we
may possess and be possessed by it, not _via_ the intellect, but
directly by intuition. This reality that we ignorantly worship the
mystics have declared to us as goodness, beauty and truth. Fox called it
God in man, the life, the seed, the divine light latent in every son of
man, and once in the life of this planet fully and completely informing
a human frame.
PART I.
NARRATIVE PASSAGES.
NOTE.
The reference "C.J." indicates the Cambridge edition of
Fox's _Journal_, compiled from original MSS. (Cambs.
Univ. Press. 1911); "Works," refer to the Philadelphia
edition of Fox's printed works. Punctuation, which
varies in the different editions and is almost lacking
in MSS. and of course in literal transcripts, has been
altered or inserted by the compiler, as seemed needful.
Narrative Passages.
Self-Revelation.
Then the Lord gently led me along, and let me see His love, which was
endless and eternal, surpassing all the knowledge men have in the
natural state or can obtain from history or books, and that love let me
see myself as I was without him. I was afraid of all company, for I saw
them perfectly where they were, through the love of God which let me see
myself. I had not fellowship with any people, priests or professors or
any sort of separated people, but with Christ, who hath the key, and
opened the door of Light and Life unto me. I was afraid of all carnal
talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but corruptions and the life
lay under the burthen of corruptions. When I myself was in the deep,
shut up under all, I could not believe that I should ever overcome, my
troubles, my sorrows, and my temptations were so great, that I thought
many times I should have despaired I was so tempted.
(_Journal_, 8th ed., Vol. I, p. 12.)
The Inner Light.
Now the Lord opened to me by His invisible power that every man was
enlightened by the divine light of Christ; and I saw it shine through
all; and that they that believed in it came out of condemnation to the
light of life and became the children of it; but they that hated it and
did not believe in it were condemned by it, though they made a
profession of Christ. This I saw in the pure openings of the light
without the help of any man; neither did I then know where to find it in
the Scriptures, though afterwards searching the Scriptures I found it.
For I saw in that light and spirit which was before the Scriptures were
given forth and which led the holy men of God to give them forth, that
all must come to that Spirit, if they would know God or Christ or the
Scripture aright which they that gave him forth were led and taught by.
(_Journal_, 8th ed., Vol. I., p. 35.)
A New Creation.
Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise
of God. All things were new and all the creation gave another smell unto
me beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness and
innocency and righteousness.
(_Journal_, 8th ed., Vol. I, p. 28.)
The Vision from the Hill-top.
And so we passed on warning people as we met them of the day of the Lord
that was coming upon them, and as we went I spied a great hill called
Pendle Hill, and I went on the top of it with much ado it was so steep.
But I was moved of the Lord to get atop of it. And when I came atop of
it I saw Lancashire sea (and there atop of the hill I was moved to sound
the day of the Lord), and the Lord let me see atop of the hill in what
places he had a great people, and so on the hill's side I found a spring
of water and refreshed myself, for I had eaten little and drunk little
for several days.
(C. J., 1652, p. 40.)
A Blow from a Bible.
And I went out of the meeting to the steeple-house and the priest and
most of the heads of the parish was got up into the chancel and so I
went up to them and when I began to speak they fell upon me and the
clerk up with his Bible as I was speaking and hit me in the face that my
face gushed out with blood, that I bled exceedingly in the
steeple-house, and so the people cried, "Let's have him out of the
church" (as they called it) and when they had me out they exceedingly
beat me and threw me down and threw me over a hedge and after dragged me
through a house into the street stoning and beating me, and they got my
hat from me which I never got again and I was all over besmeared with
blood.
(C. J., 1652, p. 36.)
A Mobbing.
A company of rude fellows as fishermen and the like with their fishing
poles and the like fell upon me as soon as I was come to land, and beat
me down to the ground and bruised my body and head and all over my
shoulders and back that when I was sensible again I looked up and a man
was lying over my shoulders and a woman was throwing stones at my face
so I got up and I could hardly tell whether my head was cloven to pieces
it was so bruised. Nevertheless I was raised up by the power of God and
they beat me with their fishing-poles into the sea and thrust me into
the sea a great depth and thought to have sunk me down into the water;
and so I thrust up amongst them again and then they tumbled me in a
boat, and James Lancaster went with me and carried me over the water and
when I came to the town where the man had bound himself with an oath to
shoot me all the town rose up against me, some with muck forks and some
with flayles and forks and cried knock him on the head, I should not go
through the town and they called for a cart to carry me to the graveyard
and cried, Knock him on the head, but they did not, but guarded me a
great way with their weapons but did not much abuse me and after a while
left me, so when I came to some water I washed me. I was very dirty and
much bruised.
(_Short Journal_, pp. 41, 42.)
A Night Among the Furze Bushes.
And after a while I went to an inn and desired them to let me have a
lodging and they would not, and desired them to let me have a little
meat and milk and I would pay them for it but they would not. So I
walked out of the town and a company of fellows followed me and asked me
what news, and I bid them repent and fear the Lord. And after I was
passed a pretty way out of the town I came to another house and desired
them to let me have a little meat and drink and lodging for my money but
they would not neither, but denied me. And I came to another house and
desired the same, but they refused me also, and then it grew so dark
that I could not see the high way and I discovered a ditch and got a
little water and refreshed myself and got over the ditch and sat amongst
the furze bushes, being weary with travelling, till it was day.
(C. J., (I.), p. 30.)
A Long Cold Winter.
And so they committed me again to close prison, and Colonel Kirby gave
order to the goaler that no flesh alive must come at me for I was not
fit to be discoursed with by men. So I was put up in a smoky tower where
the smoke of the other rooms came up and stood as a dew upon the walls,
where it rained in also upon my bed. And the smoke was so thick as I
could hardly see a candle sometimes, and many times locked under three
locks. And the under-goaler would hardly come up to unlock one of the
upper doors; the smoke was so thick that I almost smothered with smoke
and so starved with cold and rain that my body was almost numbed, and my
body swelled with the cold.
(C. J., II, p. 83.)
A Tortured Body.
And I went to bed but I was so weak with bruises I was not able to turn
me and the next day they hearing of it at Swarthmore they sent a horse
for me and as I was riding the horse knocked his foot against a stone
and stumbled that it shook me and pained me as it seemed worse to me
than all my blows my body was so tortured; so I came to Swarthmore and
my body was exceedingly bruised....
And Judge Fell asked me to give him a relation of my persecution and I
told him they could do no otherwise they were in such a spirit, and they
manifested their priests fruits and profession and religion.
(C. J., I., p. 61.)
A Meeting in a Steeple-house.
He began to oppose me, and I told him his glass was gone, his time was
out, the place was as free for me as for him, and he accused me that I
had broken the law in speaking to him in his time in the morning and I
told him he had broken the law, then, in speaking in my time. And so I
called all people to the true teacher out of the hirelings, such as
teach for the fleece and makes a prey upon the people, for the Lord was
come to teach his people himself by his spirit and Christ saith, Learn
of me I am the way which doth enlighten every man that cometh into the
world, that all through him might believe, and so to learn of him who
had enlightened them, who was the light, and so had a brave meeting in
the steeple-house and the priest of the parish foamed like a pig through
rage and madness but the truth and the power of the Lord came over all
their heads.
(_Short Journal_, p. 45.)
A Vision.
And I saw a vision a man and two mastiff dogs and a bear and I passed by
them and they smiled upon me.
(_Short Journal_, p. 71).
The Power of Truth.
The justices whispered together and bid the goaler take us away and so
the goaler brought us away and almost all the people followed us out of
the court and it was a mighty day for the truth. And so when I came into
the goaler's house the goaler said, Gentlemen, you are all set at
liberty and you know I must have my fees, but give me what you will,
which a great service to the truth it was. And the sessions was just
like a meeting, truth had such an operation in people's hearts.
(_Short Journal_, p. 106.)
A Consistent Sheriff.
In the evening I was brought to the sheriff's house and the sheriff's
wife said that salvation was come to her house and all their family was
wrought upon by the power of the Lord and they believed in the truth and
this being the first day of the week the next seventh day the sheriff
himself spake the truth in a pair of slippers in the market amongst the
people.
(_Short Journal_, p. 2.)
Unity with the Creation.
And so after the meeting was done I passed away to John Audlands and
there came John Story to me and lighted his pipe of tobacco and, said
he, will you take a pipe of tobacco saying come, all is ours. And I
looked upon him to be a forward bold lad and tobacco I did not take, but
it came into my mind that the lad might think I had not unity with the
creation. For I saw he had a flashy empty notion of religion. So I took
his pipe and put it to my mouth and gave it to him again to stop him
lest his rude tongue should say I had not unity with the creation....
One Cocks met me in the street and would have given me a roll of tobacco
... so I accepted of his love but denied it.
(C. J., I., pp. 44-45.)
An Airy Damsel.
And the next morning there was a lady sent for me and she had a teacher
at her house.
And they was both very light, airy, people and was too light to receive
the weighty things of God. And in her lightness she came and asked me
whether she should cut my hair. And I was moved to reprove her and bid
her cut down the corruptions in her with the sword of the spirit of God.
And so after I had admonished her we passed away; and, after, she made
her boast in her frothy mind that she came behind me and cut off a lock
of my hair, which was a lie.
(C. J., p. 285.)
A Fat and Merry Captain.
And this captain was the fattest, merriest, cheerfullest man and the
most given to laughter that I ever met with so that I several times was
moved of the Lord to speak to him in the dreadful power of the Lord and
yet still he would presently after laugh at anything that he saw; and I
still admonished him to sobriety and the fear of the Lord and sincerity.
And we lay at an inn at night and the next morning I was moved to speak
to him again, and then he parted from us the next morning. But he
confessed next time I saw him that the power of the Lord had so amazed
him that before he got home he was serious enough and left his laughing.
And the man came to be convinced and become a serious and good man and
died in the truth.
(C. J., I., p. 203.)
A Highnotionist.
And after the meeting was done the pastor came and asked me what must be
damned, being a highnotionist and a flashy man. And I was moved of a
sudden to tell him that which spoke in him was to be damned, which
stopped the pastor's mouth. And the witness of God was raised up in him.
(C. J., I., p. 114.)
Burning a Witch.
And from thence we went to Edinburgh again and many thousands of people
was gathered there and abundance of priests about burning of a witch and
I was moved to declare the day of the Lord amongst them and so went from
thence to the meeting and a many rude people and baptists came in and
there the baptists began with their logic and syllogisms but I was moved
in the Lord's power to thresh their chaffy light minds; and showed the
people after that manner of light discoursing they might make white
black and black white.
(C. J., I., p. 297.)
Discerners of Spirits.
And there came another company that pretended they were triers of
spirits; and I asked them a question: what was the first step to peace,
and what it was by which a man might see his salvation? And they was up
in the air and said I was mad. So such came to try spirits as did not
know themselves nor their own spirits.
(C. J., I., p. 11.)
Prisoners Spreading the Truth.
And when friends was got among the watches it would be a fortnight or
three weeks before they could get out of them again for no sooner had
one party taken them and carried them before the justices and they had
discharged them but then another would take them up and carry them
before other justices which put the country to a great deal of needless
cost and charges. And that which they thought to have stopped the truth
by was the means to spread it so much the more. For then friends was
continually moved to speak to one constable and to the other officer and
justice and this caused the truth to spread the more amongst them in all
their parishes.
(C. J., I., p. 231.)
A Veiled Condition.
When at any time my condition was veiled, my secret belief was stayed
firm, and hope underneath held me, as an anchor in the bottom of the sea
and anchored my immortal soul to its Bishop causing it to swim above the
sea, the world, where all the raging waves, foul weather, tempests and
temptations are. But O! then did I see my troubles trials and
temptations more clearly than ever I had done. As the light appeared,
all appeared that is out of the light; darkness, death, temptations, the
unrighteous, the ungodly; all was manifest and seen in the light.
(_Journal_, 8th ed., Vol. I, p. 14).