I
When Fox came back to the world from his lonely wanderings, he had no thought of setting up a church in opposition to, or in any sort of competition with, existing churches. His message was for all, worshipping under whatever name or form; his sole concern to reveal to men their own wealth, to wean them to turn from words and ceremonials, from all merely outward things, to seek first the inner reality. Many of the Puritan leaders were brought by their contact with Fox to a more vital attitude with regard to the faith in which they had been brought up. Several of the magistrates before whom he and his followers were continually being haled, unable after hours of examination and discussion not only to find any cause of offence in these men, but unable, also, to resist the appeal of their strength and sincerity, espoused their cause with every degree of warmth, from whole-hearted adherence to lifelong, unflagging interest and sympathy. But the general attitude, from the panic-stricken behaviour of those who regarded the Quakers as black magicians, incarnations of the Evil One, or Jesuits in disguise, to the grave concern of the Calvinist divines, who saw in the Quaker movement a profane attack upon the foundation-rock of Holy Scripture, was one of fear—fear based, as is usual, upon misunderstanding. A concise reasoned formulation of the Quaker standpoint, though it may be picked out from the writings of Fox and the early apologists, was to come, and then only imperfectly, when the scholarly Robert Barclay joined the group; meanwhile, the sometimes rather amorphous enthusiasm, the “mysterious meetings,” the apocalyptic claims and denunciations—meaningless to those who had no key—stood as a barrier between the “children of the light” and the religious fellowship of the Commonwealth church. Fear is clearly visible at the root of the instant and savage persecution of the Quakers, not only by the mob, but by official Calvinism, throughout the chapter of its power. The keynote was struck by the local authorities at Nottingham, who responded to Fox’s plea for the Inner Light during a Sunday morning’s service in the parish church by putting him in prison. It is usually maintained that his offence was brawling, but it is difficult to reconcile this reading with the facts of the case. Theological disputations were the most popular diversions of the day. There were no newspapers, nor, in the modern sense of the word, either “politics” or books; popular literature consisted largely of religious pamphlets; amateur theologians abounded; the public meetings arousing the maximum of enthusiasm were those gathered for the duels of well-known controversialists; while speaking in church after the minister had finished was not only recognized, but far from unusual. In this instance the minister had preached from the text, “We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn and the day star arise in your hearts,” and had developed his theme in the sense that the sure word of prophecy was the record of the Scripture. Fox—whom we may imagine already much the man William Penn later on described for us as “no busybody or self-seeker, neither touchy nor critical ... so meek, contented, modest, easy, steady, tender, it was a pleasure to be in his company.... I never saw him out of his place or not a match for every service and occasion; for in all things he acquitted himself like a man—yea, a strong man, a new and heavenly-minded man—civil beyond all forms of breeding in his behaviour”—rose with his challenge, threw down the gauntlet to biblicism, and declared that the Light was not the Scriptures, but the Spirit of God....
But, as we have seen, religious England was not wholly Puritan. Fox’s world was waiting for him. From every denomination and every rank of society the Children of the Light came forth. Very many—notably the nuclear members of small independent groups—had reached the Quaker experience before he came. The beliefs and customs which have since been identified with the Society of Friends were already in existence in the group of Separated Baptists at Mansfield in Nottingham, which formed in face of the closed doors of official religion the centre of the little Quaker church. The singleness of type, moreover, in the missionary work of the early Quakers, extending, as it did, over the whole of Christendom, carried on independently by widely differing natures—“narrow” nonconformist ministers, prosperous business men, army officers and privates, shepherds, cloth-makers, gentlewomen and domestic servants, under every variety of circumstance, would be enough in itself to reveal Fox as the child of his time. But as we watch the movement, as we see it assailed by those dangers arising wherever systems and doctrines are left behind and reason gets to work upon the facts of a man’s own experience; as we find the fresh life threatening here to crystallize into formal idealism, there to flow away into pantheism or antinomianism, again to pour into a dead sea of placid illumination; as we see the little church surviving these dangers and continually reviving, we recognize that Fox was more than the liberator of mystical activity. He was its steersman. His constructive genius cast the mould which has enabled this experiment to escape the fate overtaking similar efforts. Seventeenth-century mysticism in France[6] and Spain was succumbing to Quietism. Molinos, the Spanish monk, a contemporary of Fox, popularized a debased form of Teresian mysticism, formulating it as a state “where the soul loses itself in the soft and savoury sleep of nothingness, and enjoys it knows not what”; while in France the practice of passive contemplation had gained in the religious life of the time a popularity which even the mystical genius of Madame Guyon—who herself, it is true, lays in her writings over-much stress upon this, the first step of the mystic way—failed to disturb.
For Fox, we cannot keep too clearly in mind, the relationship of the soul to the Light was a life-process; the “inner” was not in contradistinction to the outer. For him, the great adventure, the abstraction from all externality, the purging of the self, the Godward energizing of the lonely soul, was in the end, as it has been in all the great “actives” among the mystics, the most practical thing in the world, and ultimately fruitful in life-ends. He surprises us by the intensity of his objective vision, by the number of modern movements he anticipates: popular education; the abolition of slavery; the substitution of arbitration for warfare amongst nations, and for litigation between individuals; prison reform, and the revising of accepted notions as to the status of women. He delights us with the strong balance of his godliness, his instant suspicion of religiosity and emotionalism, his dealing with those extremes of physical and mental disturbance which are apt in unstable natures to accompany any sudden flooding of the field of consciousness; his discouragement of ranting and “eloquence,” of self-assertion and infallibility—of anything indicating lack of control, or militating against the full operation of the light.
But, enormously powerful as was the influence of Fox upon the movement which he liberated and steered, it was at the same time exceptionally free—even in relation to the comparatively imitative mass of the Quaker church—from that limitation which justifies the famous description of an institution as the lengthened shadow of a man. The partial escape of the Quaker church from this almost universal fate of institutions becomes clear when we fix our attention on the essential nature of Fox’s “discovery” and what was involved in his offering it to the laity, when we note that within the Quaker borders there arose that insistence on the “originality” of life on all levels that has, at last, in our own day, made its appearance in official philosophy.
II
The history of the Quaker experiment reveals in England three main movements: the first corresponding roughly to the life of Fox, and covering the period of expansion, persecution,[7] and establishment; the second, which may be called the retreat of Quakerism, the quiet cultivation of Quaker method; and the third, the modern evangelistic revival.
The first rapid spreading in the North of England was materially helped by the establishment, in 1652, of a centre at Swarthmoor Hall, near Ulverston in Lancashire, the property of Judge Fell and his wife Margaret, good churchpeople, much given to religious exercises, and holding open house for travelling ministers of all denominations. The capture of this stronghold gave the movement a northern headquarters, and a post-office. Margaret Fell, converted by Fox at the age of thirty-eight, built the rest of her life into the movement; seventeen years later—more than ten years after the death of her husband—she became Fox’s wife. Her voluminous and carefully preserved correspondence with the leading missionaries of the group alone forms almost a journal of the early years of the Society.[8]
The whole of the countryside at Swarthmoor, whose minister Fox had repudiated, finding him filled with a ranting spirit, high words and “notions”—“full of filth,” as he tersely notes in his Journal—came out against him.
He was given up to justice, ordered to be whipped, and then handed over to the mercy of the mob, who beat him until he fell senseless. Presently, rising up, he bade them strike again. A mason numbed his arm with a blow from a staff; the arm recovered instantly under the power of his outgoing love for his persecutors. Incidents of this kind—of beatings, stonings, and assaults of a more disgusting nature—are typical of the treatment received with unvarying sweetness by the Quaker missionaries, both in England and in America. On several occasions Fox’s life was attempted.
Persecutions of all kinds, moreover, fell far more heavily upon the Quakers than upon other nonconformists, owing to their persistence in holding their meetings openly—meeting in the street if their premises were burned down, the children meeting together when the parents were imprisoned. Fines, flogging, pillory, the loathsomeness of damp and uncleansed dungeons, the brutality of gaolers, left their serenity unmoved; the exposure of women in the stocks for seventeen hours on a November night confirmed their faith. In the Restoration period particularly, when the strong influence of the religious soldiers of the Commonwealth—many of whom, including Cromwell, were able to grasp the tendency of Fox’s conception—was removed, persecution became methodical. Some three thousand odd had suffered before the King came back, twenty-one dying as a result of cruel treatment. Three hundred died during the Restoration period, and they were in prison thousands at a time, for although Charles II., once the leaders had made clear their lack of political ambition, promised them full freedom from disturbance, the panic of fear of sectaries of all kinds which followed the Fifth Monarchy outbreak in London opened an era of persecution and imprisonment. Enormous sums of money were extracted from them under various pretexts; the Quaker and Conventicle Acts were used against them with ingenious brutality, an inducement in the shape of the fine imposed being held out to informers. The Militia Act was, of course, a convenient weapon, and their refusal to pay tithes meant a perpetual series of heavy distraints. It was a common trick with judges and magistrates when they could find no legitimate ground of complaint, to tender to Quakers the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy and turn them into law-breakers on the ground of their refusal to swear. Wales offered the most ferocious persecution suffered by them in these islands, but the Welsh converts furnished Pennsylvania with a fine group of vigorous, industrious colonists.
In 1654 the “new doctrine” was brought to the South by some sixty travelling missionaries. The Universities, inflamed, no doubt, in advance by the report of the Quaker scorn of wisdom and high “notions”—having already revenged themselves upon four Quaker girls who were the first to “publish truth” in the colleges and churches, Cambridge following up the savagery of the students by public flogging, Oxford by ducking—had little but rage and evil treatment for the missionaries. Amongst the few converts made in Oxford, however, was the man who, in his turn, brought William Penn into the Quaker fold. In pious London, sunk in theological strife, the obscure Waiters, Ranters, and Seekers were the most favourable soil.
The Quakers, however, worked everywhere, ploughing up the land, calling men to cease the strife of words, and to wait before the Lord for living experience.
They had come down in June, and in August were so far settled as to undertake expansion east and west. The east, a stronghold of Puritanism, was less receptive than the western country, where Seekers abounded and convincements took place by hundreds.
Ireland was broken into by William Edmondson, an ex-Cromwellian soldier. The country was in process of being “settled” by English colonists, who, most of them being either Baptists or Independents, were already a sufficient source of irritation, and the progress of the new message was slow, and met with a persecution, borrowing much of its bitterness from the state of nervous fear prevailing amongst the civil and military authorities. For a time there was an attempt systematically to exclude Friends from the country, but it gave way before the zeal and simplicity of the preachers, and Quakerism, gaining most of its early converts from the army, became in the end a rapidly expanding force.
In Scotland Quaker teaching progressed slowly. By 1656 the Continent had been attacked, Holland and Germany, Austria and Hungary, Adrianople, where a young girl who had gone out alone reasoned with the Sultan, and was told that she spoke truth, and asked to remain in the country; Rome—where John Love was given up by the Jesuits to the Inquisition, examined by the Pope, and hanged—the Morea, and Smyrna, and Alexandria were visited. Many attempts were made to land at the Levantine ports, most of which were, however, frustrated by English consuls and merchants; George Robinson reached Jerusalem, and came near to meeting his death at the hands of the Turks; and the first isolated attempt had been made in the West Indies and America. These activities and expansions were helped forward and confirmed by Fox during the intervals between his many imprisonments. He spent altogether some six years in prison. For the rest, his life was one long missionary enterprise, and during his detentions he worked unceasingly.
He early recognized the need of a definite church organization, and matured a system whose final acceptance by the society as a whole was helped on by an incident occurring during his eight months’ confinement in Launceston gaol.[9] James Nayler, one of the sweetest and ablest of Quaker writers and preachers, of an acutely “suggestible” temperament, and less stable than his followers, unsettled by the success attending his work both in the north and the south and by the adulations of some of the more excitable of his fellow-workers, permitted on the occasion of his entry into Bristol a triumphant procession, the singing of hosannas, and Messianic worship. It is noteworthy that of the thousand odd Quakers in Bristol at the time not one took any part in the outbreak. The matter was taken up by Parliament, a committee was appointed, and Nayler came near being put to death for blasphemy. He suffered in the pillory, was whipped through London and Bristol, his tongue was bored, his forehead branded, and he was kept in prison for three years. He made full public recantation of his errors, and enjoyed full communion with the society which had never repudiated him, recognizing even in his time of aberration the fine spiritual character of the man. This incident, loaded with publicity, brought much discouragement to Friends; but it also showed them their need of the organization and discipline insisted upon by Fox. And so the Quaker church—the most flexible of all religious organizations—came into being.