_THE ESSENTIALS OF QUAKERISM_
BY WILLIAM C. BRAITHWAITE
=Introductory Words=
It is with great diffidence that we from England venture to speak to
the American Yearly Meetings. Our circumstances and the problems we
have to face are often so different that it would be presumptuous in
us to feel that we had advice on matters of detail that would deserve
very great attention from you. But when it comes to our common history
and to the common inheritance we have in the principles and faith of
the Society of Friends, we may speak freely.
We represent the main body of those who call themselves “Friends.” The
Yearly Meetings from which we come connect by continuous history with
the first Quaker Churches of two hundred and fifty years ago. Of
course when we compare ourselves as we are now, with the first
Friends, we find great differences, as great undoubtedly as exist
between the New Englander of to-day and the Pilgrim Fathers. We should
find much to astonish if we could peep in at one of those first London
meetings held in the summer of the year 1655 at the Bull and Mouth,
the great “tavern-chapel” in Aldersgate, in which you could then crowd
a thousand people standing. I fancy these meetings may have been
rather like some of your pioneer meetings in the West. But the
pioneers of the London work, Howgill and Burrough, would find modern
Quakerism, whether in England or in the Middle West, a strange thing.
It takes a wise man to recognize his own great-great-great-great
grandchildren. They have an inheritance that connects them up with
their ancestor, but their environment is so different that on the
surface they seem to have been changed into another type of man. At
bottom, however, we shall find that the inherited type will continue.
“For never Pilgrims’ offshoot scapes control
Of those old instincts that have shaped his soul.”
(Lowell, “_Fitz Adam’s Story_.”)
In other words, the inner life of a religious movement remains,
although the expression of that life will greatly vary under changing
conditions of time and place.
I.
In order to get at the essentials of Quakerism, we do well to go
back to the beginnings, to those first years of nascent energy which
carried the Quaker message through the English-speaking world.
Whenever a new truth starts to life, it is intensely dynamic and
vital; it masters every opposing circumstance; it flings itself
victoriously against a stubborn world. It is a thing of life and
movement, and I believe it will be found that a live truth in motion
is the mightiest of all forces. But, a generation later, unless the
vital forces have been cherished, the emphasis comes to be laid on
establishment rather than movement, and when a thing gets established
it usually ceases to move; the emphasis comes to be laid on dogma
instead of truth, on organization instead of life, and the day of
glory and power passes away. That was the case with Quakerism.
Two things, I believe, leave a vivid impression upon any student of
the early Quaker movement. They can be stated quite simply, but they
make up together the fundamentals of Quakerism to which everything
else belongs as a natural consequence.
In the first place we find ourselves among men and women of an intense
sincerity, who are seeking truth with all the energy of their faith,
all the energy of their nature, and, in the second place, we become
aware that this earnest search after the Kingdom of God and its
righteousness was rewarded with a great finding, a rich personal
experience in their lives, of the living presence of Jesus Christ,
their Savior.
We know now that communities who called themselves “Seekers” were
specially receptive of the Quaker message, and became the main
strength of the new movement. In that Puritan age, filled with
religious zeal, there were many honest-hearted men craving after
something more real than the mere outward profession of religion. They
were not satisfied with the triumphant religion of the time, which put
strong emphasis, and rightly put strong emphasis, on belief in the
great historical facts of Christianity, but had little or no
conception of Christ’s living presence in the world to-day. And when
Fox told these honest-hearted Seekers that he knew in his own
experience that Jesus Christ was come to teach His people Himself,
their souls leapt up to welcome the Divine Guest. Fox himself was a
man of intense sincerity, who found actually in his own spirit the
place where the seed of Divine life was springing up, the place where
the voice of a Divine teacher was being uttered, the place that was
being inhabited by a Divine and glorious presence. He could tell the
great company of Seekers who met at Firbank Fell in Westmorland on
that memorable afternoon in June, 1652, not only of an historical
Christ, but of a living Savior, their Teacher to instruct them, their
Governor to direct them, their Shepherd to feed them, their Bishop to
oversee them, their Prophet to open Divine mysteries to them. I am
giving you the points of his three-hour sermon on that occasion. Their
bodies, he said, were intended to be temples for Jesus Christ to dwell
in. They were to be brought off from the temples, tithes, priests and
rudiments of the world. They were to come to the Spirit of God in
themselves and to Christ the Substance.
The new message opened out a new way of life to men who were sincere
enough to go through with it and to live it out. It carried with it a
radical transformation or rather transfiguration of life from the
earthly into the Heavenly. I will give a passage in the quaint English
of the time in which Edward Burrough, himself one of these Westmorland
Seekers, describes the experience:
“In all things we found the Light which we were enlightened withal,
and all mankind (which is Christ), to be alone and only sufficient to
bring to Life and eternal salvation. And so we ceased from the
teachings of all men, and their words, and their worships and their
temples, and all their baptisms and churches, and we met together
often, and waited upon the Lord in pure silence, from our own words
and all men’s words, and hearkened to the voice of the Lord, and felt
His word in our hearts to burn up and beat down all that was contrary
to God, and we obeyed the Light of Christ in us, and took up the cross
to all earthly glories, crowns and ways, and denied ourselves, our
relations and all that stood in the way betwixt us and the Lord, and,
while waiting upon the Lord in silence, as often we did for many hours
together, we received often the pouring down of the Spirit upon us,
and our hearts were made glad and our tongues loosed and our mouths
opened, and we spake with new tongues, as the Lord gave us utterance,
and as His Spirit led us, which was poured down upon us, on sons and
daughters, and the glory of the Father was revealed. And then began we
to sing praises to the Lord God Almighty and to the Lamb forever, who
had redeemed us to God, and brought us out of the captivity and
bondage of the world, and put an end to sin and death,—and all this
was by and through and in the Light of Christ within us.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Burrough, Preface to “Great Mystery.”]
Now, it is not my purpose to examine this experience from the side
either of psychology or dogmatic theology. There are psychologists and
theologians, too, with whom I could not venture to compare myself, but
it is enough to take the great experience simply as historical fact.
There can be no question that two hundred and fifty years ago actual
living intercourse with the Divine, such as Burrough describes,
gathered the first Friends into their wonderful fellowship. It lifted
them into an order of life which set them in a place of vision and
power and joy. They saw the things of time in the light of eternity.
They knew what it was to overcome the world, so that nothing could
daunt their faith. In the words of one of the finest of the first
Friends, William Dewsbury, the very prisons became palaces to them
and the bolts and locks jewels. The Kingdom of Heaven was theirs, not
indeed bringing the prizes of worldly ambition, but filling life with
something richer, righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.
And all this was the reward and the result of a single-hearted
sincerity,—full righteousness of heart, full humility of soul, full
searching after truth, full opening of the heart to the incoming of
the Divine life. It had been won, as men count, at a great price. It
had meant a breach with the current fashions of life and forms of
religion; it had meant a daring following of fresh truth through all
its untried consequences; it had meant suffering and loss; it had
meant the daily crossing of the carnal mind. It had meant all these
things, yes, but it had meant also the incoming of the Life of Christ,
bringing men into a new fellowship with one another and with God.
We have to admit that in the first tide of this wonderful experience
there were some serious extravagances of thought and conduct. It would
be strange, I suppose, if newly opened eyes did not sometimes see men
as trees walking. You get these extravagances when a fresh faculty of
the soul is awaking to its powers. But the main phenomenon of
Quakerism is the heightened personality which undoubtedly came to the
Children of the Light. They were men and women to “shake their country
in their profession for ten miles round,” as some of our Friends have
done in the Western states. Their very look carried with it the
sentence of honor or shame. Their words had a challenging power,
challenging men’s consciences, forcing them to face the issues of good
and evil, shattering self-complacency and self-righteousness. The
Quaker was an impregnable man, his principles were held with an
extraordinary tenacity. He stood not on a sandy foundation of notions,
but on a rock of experience, and thus founded the man was sure and
steadfast. The message of a present living Christ within the heart and
a present Kingdom of God awaiting those who would receive it burned in
the heart of these first Friends. It burned in their hearts as a
gospel for all men. It is a great mistake to suppose that the Quaker
Church was founded as a sect. It had nothing sectarian about it. It
had a great message of vital spiritual experience to give to the whole
world. These first Friends were evangelists of vital Christianity.
They began as our evangelists to-day begin, by warning men to repent.
George Fox went up Wensleydale calling on men to repent, for the day
of the Lord was at hand, and proclaiming the Kingdom of Christ at the
door of men’s hearts, for them to take or reject. That is the spirit
of this early Quakerism, and it surely takes us back to the spirit of
the prophets and of primitive Christianity.
II.
The centering of life on the realities of inward intercourse with God
is the great mark of the prophetic and apostolic type of religion and
is in sharp contrast with religion of the priestly or institutional
type. The prophet was a man who knew what it was to have converse
with Jehovah and sure knowledge of His will. He became a Seer, a man
of insight and foresight, aware of the true values of things, the true
values as weighed in the balance of the sanctuary. He became thereby a
great social and moral reformer. His ideal was of a time when all
would be prophets—when “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.”
And we may remember that this ideal is recognized on the day of
Pentecost as the natural first-fruits of the Spirit. If it had been
realized the Church would have been a school of prophets from
generation to generation. Unfortunately the Church has more often
stifled the seer and glorified the priest.
As I understand it, it is the specific mission of Quakerism to
propagate a Christianity of this prophetic, apostolic type, a
Christianity in which the Church is a living fellowship of disciples
at work for the social and moral ends of the Kingdom of God. But the
Church is not simply, in the Quaker conception, a fellowship of
disciples at work for the Kingdom of God; it is such a fellowship
_plus_ Jesus Christ Himself, in whose Spirit, the Spirit which unites
them one to another and to Him, they become together “one flock, one
Shepherd.”
Fellowships, made up of groups of men and women who are with Christ,
redeemed by Him, learning from Him, following Him, helping in His
work, looking out on life with something of His devotion to the will
of God and His passion to seek and save the lost—such are the true
Quaker Churches. It is worth while to analyze the conception a little.
The Church, we say, is a living fellowship—not in the first place an
organization, but in the first place an organism—not an institution,
but a body, built up of many cells, many individuals, just as the body
has cells that grow and change and perform their several functions
under the direction of an all-pervading, all-embracing life. That is
what a living fellowship means. This life received through direct
contact with the Divine life is the one essential of the Christian
Church. It is the business of the Church to see that it is fostered
in every possible way, so that the body may freely grow under its
influence and freely express the life in all forms of worthy living.
Historically, Quakerism is the product of this vital experience and
while we gladly recognize that the experience is shared by us with
many other branches of the Christian Church, it remains true that no
other religious community so deliberately and emphatically bases its
individual and corporate life upon this supreme fact of the soul’s
immediate contact with God.
Our special position among the churches is sometimes stated—not by the
Five Years’ Meeting—in a series of desolating negatives. We do not
practice water baptism, nor partake of the outward elements of the
Lord’s Supper, we are against war and oaths and priestcraft, our
meetings are held on a basis of silence, and so on—all negatives. But
we were gathered as a people out of the world through the force of
dynamic positives. We withstand priestcraft because every disciple is
ordained for service. As George Fox said, every man hath an office
and is serviceable. We witness against oaths, because we uphold a
single standard of truth speaking, and against distinctions of dress
and address, because all men are equal in the sight of God; we oppose
war because the armor of the children of light is the armor of
righteousness, and disuse the outward form of baptism because the
all-important thing is not the form but the inward repentance and
cleansing by the blood of Christ. We cannot narrow down the experience
of communion with our Lord to special ceremonials and places and
ministrants, when we hold that Jesus offers Himself as the Bread of
Life to His people day by day—in the home, in the factory, at
business, in all our common work and in all our loftiest worship—the
whole of life may be a sacrament of communion with Jesus Christ.
It is as a “religion of life” that Quakerism will be presented in the
future and is being presented now.
Its distinguishing note will be its resolve to bring all this human
life of ours under the transforming power of spiritual life. It will
stand out against all divisions and compartments that separate the
sacred from the secular, the sanctuary from the outward world of
nature, the sacrament from the day’s common work, the clergy from the
laity.
It will tell of a Christian experience that makes all life sacred and
all days holy, all nature a sanctuary, all work a sacrament, and gives
to every man and woman in the body fit place and service. Its concern
will be to multiply men and women who will have a message of power
because they are themselves living in the power of God, who will
spread the light because they are themselves the children of light. It
will claim the whole of a man’s life, and the whole of life,
individual, social, national, international, for the dominion of the
will of God.
III.
So then the question comes: How can we foster this life? How can the
Church continue, through a succession of generations and amid
manifold changes of circumstance and thought, not merely its name and
organization, its tradition of the fathers and its orthodoxy of
language, but a living body of Christ, which shall embody Him, as He
would make Himself known to each age?
That is the supreme question. Unless the Church does that, it
misrepresents its Lord and hinders the coming of His Kingdom.
Everything must be thought of in terms of vital relation if we are to
see our way to an answer. We are dealing with life, and it is life, a
unity of life, that connects the individual Christian with his Savior
and with his fellow-Christians.
I know vital relations are costly things; it is comparatively easy to
preach and profess; it is not easy to give ourselves. But vital
relations are abundantly fruitful, and that supreme giving of life
which we associate with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is, we know, the
most fruitful vital relation that has ever been exhibited in history.
“He, the Son of man, gave his life a ransom for many”—for the whole
world.
Dr. Hort has finely said:
“In the times when Christianity owed nothing to custom and tradition,
and when all the ways of ordinary society tended to draw men away from
it, what drew them to it and held them to it, despite all persecution,
was the power of its life.... Life calling to life was the one
victorious power which mastered men and women of all conditions and
all grades of culture.”[2]
[Footnote 2: “The Way, The Truth, The Life,” p. 183.]
We cannot commend the Kingdom of God to the world through institutions
that are starched and stiff, but only by the living, warm, expansive
touch of human hearts reaching out in fellowship to others.
Men substitute tradition for the living experience of the love of God.
They talk and think as though walking with God was attained by walking
in the footsteps of men who walked with God. There has been a great
deal of that in the Quaker Church.
They substitute authority for leadership, the authority of the men of
the past for the inspiration of men who have vision and first-hand
experience of truth to-day. They substitute conventional methods—we
have had a great deal of that, too—for the natural arrangements which
a living fellowship of disciples would make and modify from time to
time and place to place. They substitute a cold organization for a
warm fellowship, an outward profession for an inward experience,
priestly agency for personal responsibility, dogmatic teaching for
education, almsgiving for personal social service, sectarian ends for
the great purposes of the Kingdom of God.
There is no end to the cheap substitutes offered for the use of the
Church. Almost all of them are methods for running the Christian
Society with the minimum of spiritual energy, seeing how little
spiritual life you can manage with, whereas our aim ought to be to
generate and use the maximum in the illimitable service of the Kingdom
of God.
A religion of life must devote itself to vital processes and vital
relations. These are the things that concern our truest welfare. Take
the chief:—loyal discipleship, inspired leadership, warm fellowship,
loving service, steady spiritual growth; every one of them vital
processes. Look at them in order just sufficiently to get them well in
mind.
Jesus Christ, so far as we know, wrote nothing, He organized no
religious society, He formulated no creed, but what He did was to
gather around Himself a band of disciples, men and women, who received
His spirit, and in turn would bring others into touch with the life
which had redeemed them. His life, springing up in the lives of men,
was to be fundamentally that which should regenerate the world.
The act of discipleship was following Jesus. It began with personal
adherence to the Lord, and it continued through personal communion
with Him. In art and in learning we know how stimulating the daily
contact of teacher and disciple proves to be—the disciple’s spirit
kindled by the enkindled spirit of his teacher, the coming together of
teacher and scholars into a common life and a common purpose. That is
why the colleges of American Quakerism have been such great forces.
Still greater, vastly greater, is the discipleship which is ours in
the School of Christ. It calls for the fullest dedication, the closest
following, the daily taking of the cross, but it gives us Him who is
the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Discipleship then is the first vital relation that must be always
energizing the Church, but next in order comes inspired leadership.
The great initial success of Quakerism was due, beyond all else, so
far as human means went, to the traveling “Publishers of Truth,” as
they called themselves, who carried their burning message far and
wide; they were like rich life-blood circulating freely through the
body. They were for the most part men and women of competent Bible
knowledge and religious training, men with intense sincerity, with a
great experience, who were talking about Christ because they knew Him.
They went out on a devoted service, which no privations or
persecutions could daunt, and many of them were young men in the
prime of their ardor and strength, who would follow the movings of
life rather than the counsels of prudence—and we want those in the
Church. The Church must be prepared to take a few risks with its young
men. After all, the hearts of the young are burning for a crusade.
In the days of persecution which came upon the Quaker Church there was
a great mortality among these leaders and unfortunately the supply of
new leaders was small, indeed, ever since that glorious morning of
Quakerism, the equipment of the Quaker Church with inspired leaders
has been a pressing problem. It is our business to raise up not
priests but prophets, Christian men and women of trained intelligence
and wide outlook, who know God and have a sure insight into the great
social and spiritual needs of humanity, whose lives have been
redeemed, whose hearts have been touched with the live coal from off
the altar. There is no place in vital religion for the vested
interests of a clerical caste, nor the dead hand of tradition, nor
the compulsion of conscience by the authority of the expert; but
there is every need for a leadership, which continues the past in a
living experience and educates and inspires and illuminates. A
democracy requires leadership, not the leadership of authority, but
what we may call, to use the constitution of the Five Years Meeting,
an _advisory_ leadership, moving along channels of inspiration and
personal influence. “For lack of vision the people perish.”
The third great vital relation that the Church has to be fostering is
warm fellowship. A few degrees of temperature may alter a climate and
introduce wonderful possibilities of new life. Change the climate and
you change the kinds of growth which may come into the world. It is
very much the same with the Church. I remember a story of a little
girl who was taken into a cold church one winter’s day. She got in at
one end and could scarcely hear what the preacher was talking about.
After church she went home and her mother asked her: “Nellie, what was
the text to-day?” She answered, “I couldn’t hear it very well, but I
think it was ‘Many are cold but few frozen.’”
I think congregations have sometimes preached that sermon. It is
oftener preached by the congregation than by the minister.
Quakerism at times has suffered from a frigidity of climate which has
repressed and repelled. In the first centuries Christianity became a
great power, because it was a great brotherhood. Surely we need to
warm up our church organization so that it becomes quickened into a
living fellowship. We want a Christianity with the brotherliness left
in and the starch taken out. I remember seeing an advertisement,
“Catlow’s preserves, boiled in silver pans.” What it meant was this:
you got the sugar, you got the fruit, and you got nothing else. That
is what we want in our Christianity. We want the sweetness and we want
the fruitfulness. We don’t want much else. We don’t want frigidity, we
don’t want starch.
Group life with a strong fellowship about it has always been a Quaker
characteristic. In the early days it was groups of Seekers who
embraced the message of Fox, and in England we still find Friends
settled in groups over the country. I notice, in the expansion of
Quakerism in the far West, that it is colonies of Friends you get. You
cannot have a diffused Quakerism diffused over the whole State of
Nebraska or California, but you can have a few groups of Friends at
particular points. But group life means a great deal more than the
collection of persons within the four walls of a particular building.
It means a life in community and comradeship, because the members are
joined together actually and vitally in a common Lord and a common
discipleship. It means, as with the limbs of the body, that the gifts
and activities of each are freely used for the service of the whole.
It means that each shares in and contributes to the larger life of the
whole.
Then there is the need for loving service. A Church is not an end in
itself, not a club where we sit at ease in Zion; it is a means to an
end. It ought to be, in the phrase of our early Friends, a “camp of
the Lord.” It needs to have the purposes of the Kingdom of God ringing
in its ears all the time. It needs to be vowed to the great redemptive
work of seeking and saving the lost. It will be rightly judged by its
output of service for the Kingdom of God. I fancy that the weakness of
modern Christianity is very similar to the besetting weakness of
civilization. We grasp our privileges and shirk our responsibilities.
The healthy Church fixes each member with personal responsibility for
using the life which he has received. It finds work for all to do. It
knows that activity is the natural expression of life, and that the
torpor of any part spells atrophy and death.
Last of my list is what I have called steady, spiritual growth. The
vital relations which are the wealth of the Church not only bring
about a unity of life with God and with one another, but produce that
progressive development of personality that we call growth.
These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves all the time:
Are our church members bigger men and women inwardly than a year ago?
Are they stronger in faith, more radiant in hope, warmer in love?
Have their spiritual senses developed? Do they see more of truth, hear
more readily the Divine voice, respond more quickly to the guidance of
the Spirit?
Are their consciences alert, their loins girt, their hands eager for
sacrifice and service?
Here surely is what we may call the intensive work of the Church, the
making of men and women not after the pattern of the world, but after
the pattern of Jesus Christ, who shall go forth in His power and
spirit to serve the Kingdom of God.
Now, we might well enlarge on these five important vital
processes—discipleship, leadership, fellowship, service and growth.
But my purpose will have been served if I have said enough to bring
home to you the fact that these are the things that matter, the things
that are of vital importance in the Church. Methods and machinery,
organization and Church discipline have a value of their own, but
only a subordinate value to these prime factors of health. If these
lesser things are accepted as a substitute for the vital factors, the
Church becomes weak. If they are allowed to limit the development of
the life, the Church may become dwarfed and deadened. Their true
function, the true function of organization and discipline and these
other matters, is surely large enough—namely, to provide means with
which and through which the life can readily work.
IV.
In vital Quakerism then, the form has continually to be subordinated
to the life. The life must be allowed free expression from time to
time and place to place according to the varying needs and
circumstances. In a word, the form must be kept plastic. This should
be as much a fundamental of religious biology as it is of physiology.
The physiologist tells us that living matter is always soft and
jelly-like. It is matter in a jelly-like state, permitting of the free
play of molecular interchanges, so that it is called a “dynamical
state of matter.” That is the general statement about living matter
which the physiologist has to make to us to-day. It is essential that
it should be plastic, able to grow, able to change its shape from time
to time. It is always changing its form, as may be seen in the
colorless cells of the blood. It has been said, and said truly, that
no one of us is the same person we were seven years ago, every little
bit of us has been changed in the interval. Living matter does not
grow like the crystal, by the addition of new matter on its surfaces.
It grows by absorbing matter into its substance and transforming that
into matter like itself.
It should surely be the same in the life of institutions. The form
should be flexible so that the life may be continually growing and
changing its form according to the great directing control which the
life exerts upon the body, and you want ease and flexibility in
organizations just as you do in clothes. If you do not have this, you
will have a good deal of chafing and cramping. Sometimes, perhaps, a
growing boy will burst his waistcoat. It is a great mistake to try to
fit the man to the clothes when we ought to be fitting the clothes to
the man, but it is a mistake that the Quaker Church has frequently
made.
In Church life, our own included, the letter that killeth has again
and again encroached upon the quickening spirit. Outward government
and external rules have limited spiritual guidance. The desire to
preserve the deposit of faith has crystalized vital experience into
formularies and creeds. Emphasis has been laid upon life according to
some stereotyped standard with a particular cut of collar and a
particular mode of language and the life of the spirit has been
quenched. But where the Spirit of God has been allowed freely to work
upon the groups of disciples there has been a wonderful expansion of
Christianity of a vital kind. This has been largely the case in the
great foreign missionary work of the Churches, and in our Adult School
movement in England, and in the pioneer work of Quakerism in the
Western states.
If spiritual life is allowed to be the controlling, directing, molding
force in Quakerism I have no fear for our future. We shall put in the
forefront of our Church work the things that belong to life, the
gathering of disciples, the raising of leaders and prophets, the
maintenance of warm fellowship, the encouragement of service, the
fostering of growth. This means that our Church arrangements will be
so made and modified as to promote and secure the expression through
them of the living forces which we have at our command. Those living
forces are the spiritual force of the individual, which we call
individual responsibility, the living force of the group, which we
call fellowship, and above all, the Divine vitality, the incoming of
the life of Jesus Christ, which we call spiritual power and spiritual
guidance. Church arrangements, important in themselves, must be
regarded as simply machinery through which forces can work, and the
more efficiently the machinery allows the forces to work, the richer
will be the service of the Church.
Let us consider the way in which these great forces get to work. I
will take the meetings of the Church as my illustration. I am not one
who says that the only kind of Friends’ meeting is a meeting for
worship. I believe that there are three or four types of Friends’
meetings, in all of which we may have personal responsibility and
group fellowship and the spiritual power and guidance of Jesus Christ.
Take first—it comes first—the evangelistic service, the meeting which
seeks to do the primary work of the Church, by bringing the gospel of
Jesus Christ to man, the living gospel of a living Savior. For such a
meeting you want a man who feels his personal responsibility, who
feels that he is speaking as the ambassador of Jesus Christ, called,
chosen, faithful, with a freshly given message of truth on his lips,
but you want also behind him to back him the fellowship and sympathy
of a group of earnest souls, who are helping the meeting by their
prayer and sympathy, and who perhaps themselves will have some share
in the delivery of the message or in the other outward service of the
meeting. Moreover, the ingathering of disciples is a matter not only
for evangelistic services, but for individual personal influence.
Andrew findeth his own brother Simon: Philip findeth Nathanael. The
men and women reached will need from the first to be surrounded with a
new set of companions and to be brought into a new fellowship. They
will need, not simply one service on a Sunday stimulating them to
follow Jesus Christ, but the helpful comradeship of a group bringing
them into a knowledge of what it means to live according to the will
of God. In the redemptive work which our Adult Schools in England have
done in hundreds of cases amongst men and women who had lost their own
respect and were down in the gutter, the most fruitful work has been
done by bringing men and women a new set of companions, in whose
fellowship they may learn what the love of Jesus Christ means.
Take next the Friends’ meeting with worship as its primary object.
There you see clearly the three-fold play of these same forces of
personal responsibility, group-fellowship and spiritual guidance.
Worship in fellowship is an intensely active thing. Its basis is not
an inert stillness, but a waiting upon God in the unity of the spirit.
The meetings of the first Friends were radiant with the joy of
Christ’s indwelling life. There were times of living fellowship and
communion, warm with the central fires of Divine love, so delightful
that sometimes they could hardly break them up and would stay far into
the night.
The meeting for worship, more than any other agency, has given the
world the Quaker type of character—the man or woman who meets life’s
problems simply and wisely, because he resolves them, not by passion
or prejudice, nor mainly by the motions of human wisdom or policy, but
by habitually consulting the Light of God which shines in the waiting
soul.
The revival in its power of the Quaker meeting is an urgent need in
the crowded hurry of this twentieth century, when men live so much
upon the surface and so little in the deep places of their lives.
The world is too much with us, late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
In England, wherever you get earnest-hearted groups of persons
together at a special gathering, as an Adult School week end, or a
lecture school, or a conference, you find, whether they are Friends or
not, that a Friends’ meeting of a free, open kind, with prayer and
praise and speech and silent worship all mingled under the guidance of
the Spirit, comes as the great crown of all our fellowship and our
intercourse, the benediction of all that has taken place, the
perfectly natural means through which the common fellowship and
purpose are lifted into communion with the life of God. We hardly
sufficiently understand the great value in deepening character and
consolidating fellowship of meetings of this kind, where there is a
common purpose.
The poverty of many Friends’ meetings for worship has lain, I think,
in the poverty of common purpose in the congregation. Where there is a
common purpose, a sincere waiting upon the Lord in fellowship, their
value is very great.
It is the place for withdrawing awhile from the things of outward
sense and exercising the faculties of spiritual sense; the place where
to the awakened soul the vision of truth may be seen, the Word of the
Lord may be heard, the guidings of His hand may be felt; the place
where the heart may become aware of its waywardness and want and may
gain strength to repent and come to Christ and choose the narrow road
of life and dedicated service; the place where many have been able to
say, with Isaac Penington, “I have met with my God, I have met with my
Savior, and He hath not been present with me without His salvation,
but I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His wings.”
But it is also the place where the worship we render and the life we
receive are parts of a fellowship of worship and of life which comes
to the meeting as a whole and finds its natural expression through the
lips of one and another as the Spirit touches them to utterance.
There is a third type of meeting, which we may call a teaching
meeting, sometimes a Bible class and sometimes a service in which
teaching ministry is to the front. There, again, surely you get the
same forces in operation. The most vital teaching meetings are those
which best combine inspiration, personal influence and fellowship. In
true educational work the character and the faculties of a group of
scholars are being trained by vital contact with one another and with
the teacher. The contact of life with life is going on all the time.
My friend, Rufus M. Jones, is quite right in saying that the central
weakness of the Friends in the past lay in their failure to appreciate
the importance of the fullest education of human personality in mind
and soul, and the attention that is now being given to education in
the Society of Friends is of the highest value. We cannot overestimate
the promise to American Quakerism and to English Quakerism of our
great educational institutions.
V.
I have now sought to show that Quakerism at its best is always the
product of vital forces, and is always producing vital relations. I
say “at its best”; that is the necessary qualification.
This brings me to my last point. What is needed besides the life of
the Spirit, the life of Jesus Christ in the Church? Surely what we
need is an earnest dedication on the part of those who are seeking to
know Jesus Christ. God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must
worship in spirit and truth.
In the early days of Quakerism men were athirst for the gospel of a
living Christ. In the present day, side by side with much indifference
and indolence there is a wide-spread craving for reality in religion
and life.
Tremendous social problems confront men to-day, new hopes of higher
life are coming to the mass of workers, new convictions and new duties
are dawning on the world, and fresh questions are being raised in the
domains of history, psychology and philosophy. We are probably living
in the midst of as great a period of transition as that which formed
the bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern Europe, and those alone
will find the fuller truth and lead men into it who will bear the
travail and follow the trail of the Seekers of the Light. We want men
who will get on the top of the situation, men in the spirit of George
Fox. When he was overwhelmed by the confusion of the year of anarchy
that preceded the Restoration of 1660, he lay in great exercise of
spirit at Reading for ten weeks and he writes:
“And so when I had travailed with the witness of God which they had
quenched and gotten through with it and over all that hypocrisy ... I
came to have ease and the Light shined over all.”[3]
[Footnote 3: _Cambridge Journal_, i, 343.]
It is the duty of the Church to discountenance all the manifold
insincerities which disfigure our current Christianity, and to give
free scope to honest-hearted love of truth. Sincerity is a plant that
thrives under freedom and light, but withers under authority. The
Church must use methods of illumination and education and fellowship
as its means for cherishing true-hearted allegiance to the Lord. It
will find these methods more fruitful than methods of authority.
Methods of authority may secure an artificial conformity, but it will
always be at some expense of sincerity.
Jesus resolutely turned His back on the quickly won Kingdom of God, to
be made up of those who gave Him external obedience; He set Himself to
the slow achievement of an inward Kingdom, which should gather men
into willing discipleship.
I desire an atmosphere of large-hearted charity and brotherly
confidence, which will allow the Seeker after truth to live in the
power of his experience, even if it is not a full experience, without
being expected to live beyond his experience, an atmosphere which will
allow him to make use of all the great aids which we have to-day in
the search after truth—the great aids of scientific investigation, and
what is still more important, in my opinion, the modern historical
method which we are using to-day. We want to have as the motto of our
Church the motto of one of our Yorkshire towns, “Weave truth with
trust.” We want a Church that believes in the nobility of the truth;
as this belief prevails amongst us, so shall we find a deeper reality
in all our Church life, and a fresh release of energy and renewal of
inspiration. For Quakerism is essentially _a religion of sincerity,
answered by the incoming of the living Christ_.
VI.
What then shall groups of Friends, who have reached the vital
experience of which I have been speaking, do with their experience?
Surely there are great demands confronting them to-day, great duties
and convictions to be entered upon, great Messianic hopes stirring in
the world. This world of change is also a world that is fertile in the
promise of richer life. There is the passionate craving after truth.
Surely we are to stand for reality in religion and life. There is the
fresh sense that is coming to men of the meaning and the worth of
personality. Men are learning what the early Friends reached as a fact
of inner experience, that their hearts could be places where the
Divine side of life could spring up, and that here in this world of
our own personality, in personal responsibility, personal dedication,
personal service, is the very heart of religion.
There is another Messianic hope: Woman’s place in the universe in
equal fellowship with man. Surely we can stand for that. We have
expressed that in our Church life long before it came as a great hope
to the mass of the people.
Then there is the hope of the establishment of the reign of law
instead of brute force in international affairs. We stand and have
always stood for that.
Again, there is the hope of the better ordering of society, removing
the menace of destitution from the poor, securing an equality of
opportunity for all, remedying the conditions that produce stunted
lives, and giving those whom we call men the chance to become men in
reality. The social regeneration of England and America has become
to-day a living Messianic hope, making an insistent demand upon the
Christian Church. Surely, with our witness to the practical
application of Christianity to every part of life, we stand for that.
Above all, and finally, there is the great hope of Christ and His
Kingdom, not for a few only but for the whole world. With our living
experience of Jesus Christ, we must stand for that. Are we not again
called to form a vanguard of progress towards the Kingdom of God? Our
response to the call depends upon our personal consecration to the
task. Behind the Kingdom of God as it is, behind the Kingdom of God as
it is to be, there stand the actual groups of disciples, their
personal experience, their personal devotion.
Joseph Sturge, the founder of the Adult School movement, once wrote:
“It seems to be the will of Him who is infinite in wisdom, that light
upon great subjects should first arise and be gradually spread through
the faithfulness of individuals in acting up to their own
convictions.” This personal witness for truth, based upon a living
experience of it, is the great duty laid upon each member of the
Quaker Church. It carries with it the necessity for self-sacrifice. We
know how the self-sacrifice of our Lord on the cross was the atonement
of the world, and the self-sacrifice of men and women, in the spirit
of Jesus Christ, has still redemptive force.
We see before the Society of Friends, as it renews its spiritual
communion and its warmth of fellowship, a great service for which it
has been wonderfully prepared—a service for the revival of vital,
prophetic religion and for its expression in righteousness of life—but
the service will be fruitful through discipline and suffering; if it
is to be redemptive of society it will cost much; those of us who have
seen the vision of the future that may be will find our eyes filled
with light and our hearts with peace, and our souls will know the
springings-up of everlasting life and power, but at the same time our
feet must be treading the way of the Cross with our Lord.