The counter-agitation[24] brought forth in England by the American Hicksite movement, ended, after prolonged discussion and stress, in a decisive readjustment of the Society of Friends. There were numerous secessions into the Evangelical church and the Plymouth Brotherhood. There were separations of those who followed Elias Hicks in his repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and of those who favoured Wilbur in protesting against “book religion,” reasserting the doctrines of the Quaker fathers, and insisting on simplicity of life; but the society as a whole was swept forward, under the leadership of Joseph John Gurney (brother of Elizabeth Fry), by the invading wave of Protestant evangelicalism. Gurney, coming of old Quaker stock, though religious and pious and full of zeal for the salvation of the world, never grasped the essentials of Quakerism. He had no touch of the intuitive genius which makes the mystic. Every line he has written betrays the Protestant biblicist, the man who puts the verbal revelation before any other whatsoever. He did not repudiate the Fathers, but he denied that they had ever questioned the supreme authority of the scriptures as the guide of mankind.
His strong persuasive personality revived the enthusiasm of the imitative mass of the society, and once more the Quakers faced the world. It was a new world. The religious liberty Friends had prophesied and worked towards had come at last. The Test Act had been repealed. Nonconformists were admitted to Parliament and to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The London University had been established. The emerging Quakers, on their side, began to break down the barriers they had erected between themselves and the world by their peculiarities of speech and of dress, and showed a tendency to relax their hostility towards “art.”
They were a little band, tempered and disciplined by their century of quiet cultivation of the Quaker faith and method, and they were at once available for a share, strikingly disproportionate to their numbers, in the evangelical work of an awakening Christendom. From the time of their emergence their missionary labours have been unremitting. They engaged in prison reform and the reform of the penal code. They initiated the reform of the lunacy laws, working for the substitution of kindly treatment in special institutions[25] for the orthodox method of chains and imprisonment. They began to educate the poor. The foundation of their Foreign Missions dates from this period of revival.
They have widening centres of missionary work in India, Madagascar, Syria, China, and Ceylon. They have been the main movers in the work of abolishing the opium traffic, and are engaged, both at home and abroad, in all the many well-known efforts towards social amelioration, amongst which, perhaps, the leading part they have taken in experimental philanthropy, in educational method (their co-education schools scattered over the country are models of method, standing for common sense, humanity, and a wise use of modern resources), in the housing and betterment of the lot of the working classes, and in the establishment of garden suburbs, are particularly worthy of mention.
From their Sunday-school work, begun in Bristol in 1810, and gradually spreading over the country, has arisen what is perhaps the most widely influential of the present activities in which Friends are interested on behalf of the working classes—the Adult School Movement. Originally initiated[26] in the interest of loafers at street corners, it has now become a national movement, with a complete organization, upwards of a thousand schools, and a membership in its ninetieth thousand. It is spreading on the Continent and in America. At the meetings of its weekly classes, which are open to all who care to attend (the men’s and women’s classes are held independently), led by an elected president, who may be an adherent of any creed or of none, part of the time is devoted to the consideration of religious questions and part to lecturettes, debates, readings, and so on. Each school develops secondary interests and engages in special work.
Within the society from which this perpetual stream of evangelical work flows forth we must distinguish two distinct types of religious culture. There is, first of all, the main mass, differing only in its method of worship from the main body of Protestant nonconformity—taking, as we have said, its stand first and foremost upon the scriptures. In most Quaker meetings to-day this typically “Protestant” attitude predominates numerically. But while we recognize this state of affairs as one of the inevitable consequences of any endeavour to found an “open” church upon a mystical basis, it is, nevertheless, amongst the Quakers, modified, to a certain extent, in two ways: first, by its subjection to its environment, the framework of the old Quaker culture, the training implied in Fox’s method both of private and public worship, in the expectation of unmediated Divine leadership in all the circumstances of life, the training in freedom from the domination of formulæ and deductions, the insistence on the important meaning of the individual soul.
It is modified, in the second place, by the nucleus of genuine mystical endowment, which has persisted through the centuries at the heart of the Quaker church, both handed down in the direct line and coming in from without; the remnant whose influence has so often made this little church the sorting-house, so to say, amongst the sects for mystically minded persons. And during the last ten years—the years which have seen such a striking revival of the interest in mysticism, have felt a clearing and a growth of the recognition of the importance to the race as a whole of mystical genius, have produced a mass of seriously undertaken studies of this phenomenon from every point of approach—the Quaker church has continued increasingly to fulfil this function. Not only from the sects, but from the older establishments, and from the ranks of religiously unclassified “philosophy” and “culture,” there is a steady migration towards the Quaker fold.
The vitality of this modern Quaker group is expressing itself at the present time in a twofold activity over and above the home and foreign missionary work we have already noted. This activity is visible throughout the society, both in England and in America. There is, on the one hand, an effort emanating from the more intellectual section of the group, to express Quakerism in terms of modern thought, to reach, as far as may be, with the help of modern psychology, a philosophical “description” of the doctrine of the “inner light”—a description which is thought to be much more possible to-day than it was at the time of George Fox. This effort, which includes the rewriting in detail and from original documents of the history of the Society of Friends, is embodied in the work of a little group of Quaker writers, prominent amongst whom are the late John Wilhelm Rowntree, the late Miss Caroline E. Stephen, Dr. Rufus M. Jones, Mr. William C. Braithwaite, Mr. Edward Grubb, and Miss Joan M. Fry. Mr. Edward Grubb,[27] perhaps one of the most illuminating of the Quaker writers upon the doctrine of the Inner Light, realizes with perfect clearness that the dogma of the Infallible Spirit presents at least as many difficulties as that of an infallible Church or Bible; that in the case of either of these infallibilities the question immediately arises as to “ who ” is the infallible interpreter? Fox, he points out, trusted urgency and unaccountability by mere thought processes for the sign of the higher source. He adds to this that “the spirit in one man must be tested by the spirit in many men. The individual must read his inward state in the light of the social spiritual group,” ... and thus reaches a sort of spiritual democracy. On the whole, however, his appeal is to idealism as the supplanter of materialism; he claims thought as the prius of knowledge, and identifies consciousness with thought. He leaves us with the “notional” God of transcendental idealism, who is just as far off as the corresponding matter-and-force God of consistent materialism.
Mr. William C. Braithwaite is, perhaps, happier. “The consciousness,” he says in Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience,[28] “that our subjective impression of guidance needs correction to allow for the personal factor, and the sense that truth of all kinds and in all ages is harmoniously related, naturally point to the great advantage of co-ordinating the light that has come to our souls with the light that has come to others in our own day or in past ages. This is not the same thing as merely relying on tradition or accepting an experience second-hand; nor does it mean that we refuse to accept any guidance which goes beyond the experience of others—it means simply that over the country we have to traverse there are many paths already trodden along which we may have safe and speedy passage.”
Professor Rufus Jones, who has done much in relation to the psychology of Quakerism, also voices the corporate idea in declaring that the Friend must test his light by the larger revelation of his co-believers, and they, again, by the larger revelation which has come to prophets and apostles, saints and martyrs; but here, again, we seem to find ourselves within a circle of ideas. In place of the simple homely imagery of Fox, “the seed,” “the light,” the “new birth,” “that which hath convinced you,” we have in these modern descriptions, it is true, all the rich and intricate spatial terminology of modern science; but, so far, the most successful efforts in the direction of “description” of mystical religion in modern terms have not come from the society, where the belief in, and the attempt to live in sole dependence upon, the indwelling spirit is still, for very many of its members, the single aim, where there are still many with whom “knowing” is more important than “knowing about.”
The boldest and clearest sighted, the most comprehensive and lucid descriptions of the mystic type, of his distinctive genius, his aim and method, his kinship with his fellows throughout the ages, the world-old record of his search and its justification, are to be found elsewhere.[29]
Side by side with the attempt to rationalize and restate in terms of modern thought the faith that is in them is a movement enrolling growing numbers, particularly of younger Friends, in both continents, in the direction of expressing Quakerism in terms of modern life.
Home life, social life, business life, every modern development, is brought to the test of Quaker principles. There is a spirit abroad declaring that Quakerism has become devitalized; that the religious life is stereotyped and perfunctory; that the joyous, all-conquering zeal of the early Friends was the outcome of a secret unknown to their followers; that the way to the fount at which they were sustained is lost—that it may be found again if the daily life is brought under Divine control. A call has gone forth to sacrifice, to scale the heights of right living in that purer air, that the sight may grow clear.
Everywhere in Quakerdom we meet this question as to the secret of the early Quakers. Do we read in this outcry an admission of the failure of group mysticism as it has so far been attempted by the Society of Friends? The little church of the spirit seems to be at the turning of the ways.
All barriers are down. The rationale of primitive Quakerism is fully established. The Quakers no longer stand facing an outraged or indifferent Christendom. The principles “discovered” by their founder are conceded in theory by the religious world as a whole.
Will they remain in their present position, which may be described as that of a Protestant Ethical Society, with mystical traditions and methods, part of an organized and nationalized world-church, suffering the necessary limitations of a body thrown open to all, converted and unconverted, committed to the necessity of teaching doctrinal “half-truths,” organizing necessarily in the interest of conduct as an end? or will they constitute themselves an order within, and co-operating with, the church—an order of lay mystics, held together externally by the sane and simple discipline laid down by Fox, and guarded thus from the dangers to which mysticism is perennially open; an order of men and women willing corporately to fulfil, while living in the daily life of the world, the conditions of revelation, and admitting to membership only those similarly willing; a “free” group of mystics ready to pay the price, ready to travel along the way trodden by all their predecessors, by all who have truly yearned for the uncreated Light?