The Quakers : a study, historical and critical

Preface

In 1872 the writer of this book returned in broken health from a second period of missionary labour in China. Two years later some members of the Society of Friends invited him to become secretary of a Committee formed to agitate for the suppression of the Opium Trade between India and China. At this time he was totally ignorant of the history and religious belief of the Friends, unless the vague and hazy notions about them in the popular mind be called knowledge. Although association in philanthropic work, and much kindness received by him, produced in his mind a high esteem for their Society, strange to say, he remained in the same state of ignorance for nine j-ears. The Quakers do not proselytize : and he was too much absorbed in other studies to enter upon an investigation which seemed of no practical interest. The study of the Evidences of Christianity, commenced in China for the sake of the heathen, had to be continued at home in the face of the rising tide of scepticism, which threatened to sweep away the very foundations of the Christian faith. A long and sore mental conflict he had to pass through, in the course of which he was sometimes reduced well-nigh to despair. But in the great mercy of God, he kept his hold on the faith, or rather the truth kept its hold upon him ; until gradually a new conception of the Christian religion and its evidences was revealed to him. This conception he wrote down in the early part of 1883, in a paper as yet vi Preface.

unpublished. In that year a quale er lady gave him a copy of John Woolman's Journal. At once he recognised that his new conception was not new, but had been revealed to others before. Following the clue, be plunged into the study of George Fox and the primitive Quakers, traced the story to the present day, and was led to the conviction that it was his duty to write the book now in the reader's hands.

The writer is not a Quaker, nor is the book especially addressed to Quakers. Its central truth is, according to his belief, the very foundation of the Christian faith, which, in this sceptical age, it behoves every Christian to know clearly, as well as to possess experimentally. Therefore, if he has had any class of readers in his thought more than another, it has been those who, have had to pass through, or are now in the midst of a conflict with unbelief. But this he can honestly say — and let the reader judge — the history is, as far as his utmost endeavour could attain, pure history. Not a word, not a line, of the history is accommodated to the exigency of an apologetic argument. Much there is in the narrative which the writer could have wished otherwise, but the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, has been his aim.

The foresight that some of the Friends will be grieved by portions of the book is painful to the writer. But those whose forefathers called themselves not barely " Friends," but " Friends of Truth," and " Children of the Light," will freely acknowledge that he had no choice. Mistaken he may be : but it was imperative that he should write the whole truth as it appeared to him.

F. S. T.

Contents

CHAP.

I. INTRODUCTORY n. THE CHALLENGE

III. THE APOSTLE OF THE INWARD LIGHT

Chapter I Inteoductoey

In 1648, after a whole generation of mortal combat, Catholicism and Protestantism stood face to face, bleeding and breathless, yet mutually defiant and irreconcileable. Germany was half -depopulated. Once flourishing cities were ruined, and fertile districts had fallen back to forest. All Europe had taken part in the conflict, and the nations were drained of life-blood and treasure. Slowly and sullenly kings and priests recognised the exhaustion of their resources, and terminated by the peace of Westphalia the Thirty Years War. The attempt to restore the Unity of the Church by the sword had failed. Luther and Leo X. had rent the Church in twain, and the schism was irreparable. The two sections into which western Christianity was then split have diverged farther with the years, and to-day they eye each other across a great gulf; neither party seriously essaying the conversion of the other; each regarding the evangelization of Asia and Africa as an easier enterprise, more likely to

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bs rewarded by speedy success, than any effort to reunite Christendom.

In England, in the year 1648, Puritanism was triumphant. King Charles was a prisoner, for whom the axe was sharpening, to fall in the _ coming January. Episcopacy was suppressed. Eomanism, hated and feared as Antichrist embodied, was too weak in Britain to cause serious alarm. On our island soil. Protestantism stood, a strong man armed, who had bound his foe and taken possession of his goods. Flushed with victory, confident that the Lord of Hosts was on his side, the strong man may even have dreamt for a moment of crossing the waves, and renewing the war against Rome. Just at this time, in this puritan England, a new Reformer appeared, who challenged Protestantism in its stronghold, denounced the reformed churches as unsparingly as they denounced the Papacy, and proclaimed through the length and breadth of the land, the return to the world of that primitive and spiritual Christianity, the temporary disappearance of which from the earth was pre-figured, he said, in apocalyptic vision, by the flight of the Woman arrayed with the sun, and with the moon under her feet, who, after the birth of the Man-child, was compelled to flee from the dragon, and to hide in the wilderness, until the appointed time.

This precursor of the new Reformation, by name George Fox, was born in 1625, and was twenty-three years old when the Westphalian peace was signed. Well-nigh forgotten now, except by the small sect which traces its origin to him, readers of this generation catch a glimpse of him, through the spectacles of one who was in some respects a kindred spirit, Thomas Carlyle.

Introductory.

" Perhaps the most remarkable incident in modern history/' Carlyle makes his Teufelsdrockh say, " is not the Diet of Worms, still less the battle of Austerlitz, Waterloo, Peterloo, or any other battle ; but George Fox's making to himself a suit of leather. This man, the first of the Quakers, and by trade a shoemaker, was one of those to whom, under ruder or purer form, the Divine idea of the Universe is pleased to manifest itself, and across all the hulls of Ignorance and earthly degradation, shine through in unspeakable Awfulness, unspeakable Beauty, in their souls ; who therefore are rightly accounted Prophets, God-possessed, or even Gods, as in some periods it has chanced."

Whatever the exact meaning of this language, it shows that the great moral teacher of the nineteenth century, to whom also something of a prophetic character has been attributed, held the Quaker prophet in sincerest reverence, and in a sense believed in his mission. The "suit of leather" is not quite historical. In his journal Fox wrote that in many places the priests, that is the clergy, were so afraid of him, that they would get out of the way when they heard that, "the man in leathern breeches is come."^ Nor was he altogether a shoemaker. He tells us himself: "I was put to a man that was a shoemaker by trade, and that dealt in wool, and used grazing, and sold cattle; and a great deal went through my hands." ^ William Penn says : " As to his employment, he was brought up in country business, and as he took most delight in sheep, so he was very skilful in them, an em-

1 Joimial Edition 1827. Vol I. page 146. 2 Ibid, page 76.

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ployment that very well suited his mind in several respects, hoth from its innocency and solitude ; and was a just figure of his after ministry and service." Probably young George learnt to handle awl and bristles, and could cobble a shoe, or sew a pair of leather breeches, but in the latter part of his apprenticeship he seems to have been employed in attending markets. That he was the first of the Quakers is true ; but without explanation the statement conveys an erroneous impression. The Quakers have for generations been a quiet religious sect, few in numbers, inoffensive, and retiring : so far from zealous in obtruding their peculiar tenets upon public attention that perhaps hardly any one outside their fraternity knows exactly what their creed is ; but everybody knows and respects them as a sober, wealthy, peaceful, philanthropic society of nonconforming Christians, the friends of all, the enemies of none.

Not of such Quakers was George Fox the first and founder; but of a people of almost entirely opposite characteristics, a people numerous, notorious, aggressive ; poor, persecuted, and of evil reputation. In the eyes of their contemporaries the first Quakers were Jesuits in disguise, disturbers of the churches, emissaries of Satan, the latest spawn of hell, undermining the very foundations of the truth ; the more to be hated and dreaded, because they concealed diabolical designs under the garb of an outwardly strict and blameless morality. In their own eyes these calumniated folk were no sect, but the only true Church, divinely raised, up to complete the work of the Reformation and to restore pure, primitive, spiritual Christianity. Richard Baxter and John Bunyan saw in George Fox a half-crazed blasphemer, a deluder

Introductory. 5 of giddy brains and seekers after novelties, a heretic of heretics. In the eyes of William Penn and Robert Barclay he was a prophet sent from God. The Quakers, instead of keeping their principles retired in the quiet shade of secluded meetings as their descendants do, were in their first generation the universal disturbers of the churches. They entered cathedrals and parish churches in the time of public worship, and contradicted the preachers in the name of the Lord. They proclaimed their message on the highways and the hill tops ; to the king in his palace, to parliament in session. When Lord Protector Cromwell opened his parliament at Westminster, Samuel Fisher, though not a member, rose to declare to him the word of the Lord. Edward Burroughs wrote to Charles IL with the boldness of Elijah addressing King Ahab. Such men could not escape persecution, nor did they wLsh to escape. One injunction of their Divine Master, I find them to have overlooked, and it was this ; " When they persecute you in one city, flee ye unto another." The Quakers, would not flee, they preferred to die. So the prisons of England were filled with them, and numbers perished under their sufierings. Nor was their zeal limited to these islands. In Paris they were denounced as a liellish sect. They traversed and took root in Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and America. Their women crossed sea and land to bear God's word to the Pope and to the Sultan. They were the filth of the world and the off-scouring of all things in the eyes of the orthodox ; and the mob, prompt to support the orthodoxy of the day, stoned them, beat them, rolled them in the mire, flung them into the stream. But the more they were persecuted, the more

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they flourished. Before the death of their founder, their numbers, their piety, their energy and zeal encouraged them to predict the universal triumph of their principles.

Not less remarkable than the vehemence of their early zeal, and the furious . opposition it encountered, is the suddenness and completeness, of its subsidence. Up to the end of the seventeenth century, they confidently foretold the conversion of the world to quakerism. In the eighteenth they were paralysed, almost fossilised. In the nineteenth they sadly calculate the probable date of their extinction. During the last few years an increase of activity has arrested the decline and revived hope in some breasts. But the stirrings of new life are the result of the influence of modern evangelicalism, not a revival of the old quakerism of George Fox. Already to the student, quakerism seems to belong to a museum of religious antiquities rather than to form a living part of the Church of the present day. Among the Quakers it is a frequently expressed opinion that their decay as a denomination has been brought about by the general acceptance of their principles ; an opinion not destitute of considerable plausibility. The more we study their original doctrines, the greater is our astonishment to observe in how true a sense and to how great a degree quakerism was prophetic ; advocating, generations in advance, reforms which are now accomplished facts, and other reforms the necessity of which begins to be perceived. Religious toleration, for which they were among the earliest and most consistent pleaders, is now the accepted doctrine of civilized humanity. They were the first to insist upon that truth of speech and fixity of price in

Introductory.

traffic which is the established custom of trade, amongst us. The sturdy Quaker refusing to doff his hat, to bo-wand scrape and bend the knee, to nobleman, magistrate, or monarch, -was the harbinger of the modern democratic spirit. In an age -when fine gentlemen arrayed themselves like peacocks, the Quaker gentleman cut off the buttons and bows from his dress, and the Quaker tailor refused to make foppish attire, though the refusal cost him his livelihood. Quakers were the first temperance reformers, the earliest friends of the negro slave. They from the first elevated woman to complete equality with man ; they advocated, and for themselves obtained, the abolition of oaths ; they protested against war as unchristian, and chose rather to die than to kill. Two centuries ago, the Quakers emancipated themselves from the domination of a professional clergy, and proved by experiment that the highest type of Christian life is possible without sermons and without ceremonies. All these particular features of quakerism are parts and consequences of their conception of the source and nature of Christianity itself; and not until after a careful survey of their doctrines and practice shall we be in a position to consider how far this conception was true, and to what extent it was obscured and encumbered by the admixture of errors prevalent in their day. But the cursory glance we have already taken may well make us marvel, both that so excellent a people were once so foully libelled and bitterly hated b}'^ their fellow- Christians, and now have so sadly d.windled away. Even in their decay, there is a quiet dignity and beauty. In the last century when quakerism as a religious movement was on the verge of extinction, the life that

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was in it re-appeared in the form of philanthropy ; and in this character the sect has ever since taken the lead among the churches. Mainly through their zeal and self-denial the abolition of West Indian slavery was achieved, and still, with unwearied pertinacity, though almost alone, they toil for the entire suppression of slavery the wide world over. In the great work of prison reform, Elizabeth Fry takes rank with John Howard. In the temperance movement, in the education of the masses, in the protection of oppressed aboriginal races, in advocating peace and goodwill among men, the Quakers march in the first rank of philanthropists. When Paris, freed from the German leaguer, was on the brink of starvation, Quakers hurried forward with supplies, and were waiting outside with stores of food, before the road was opened. Such deeds as these have won for them the respect and love of mankind. Probably there is not one Englishman in a thousand who could give an account of Quaker tenets ; and not one Englishman in a thousand who is ignorant that from William Penn to Joseph Sturge and John Bright, Quakers have been the friends and benefactors of the human race.

To study this George Fox and his principles, to try to discern whether he was a half-crazed fanatic or a prophet of God, would seem then not likely to prove misspent time. Possibly the study may shed some light upon the religious perplexities of the present day. Possibly the sudden decadence of the sect may have been due to the fact that the age was not fully ripe for the reception of the truth which was revealed to Fox and his followers. We must not prejudge the case before

Introductory.

hearing. It may turn out in the end, that some of us will attribute the arrest of the movement to the discovery that its original impulse was in a false direction : others may judge that the collapse was rather due to the unfaithfulness of the succeeding generation to the truth they, had received. But, whatever the issue, the study of so remarkable a development of Christianity can hardly fail to be instructive. Quakerism is an off-shoot from the great Christian trunk, and a biological study of this one minor brancli may aid our efforts to understand the whole tree.

Chapter II. The Challenge

One Sunday morning in 1649 — in what month is not known, and the year is fixed only by a marginal note, to which some doubt attaches ; possibly the occurrence may belong to the end of 1648 — the congregation in the principal church of Nottingham witnessed a memorable scene. The townsfolk had passed through a long period of excitement ; for seven years before, King Charles hoisted his royal standard in their old castle ; and afterwards their town was held for the parliament, gallant Colonel Hutchinson doing brave deeds of arms against the Cavaliers. But now Hutchinson was in London, where he had lately been one of the judges who tried the defeated monarch ; and peace was in all the land, save that Cromwell was mustering his forces for Ireland. The great many-windowed church was probably filled with worshippers : for those were church-going, sermonhearing days, when absentees and dissenters were few and unpopular. The service was conducted according to the Directory of the Westminster Assembly, and the clergyman in the pulpit was a Presbyterian. In the previous century Queen Elizabeth ejected the mass and installed the prayer-book. Now the Long Parliament forbade the prayer-book and introduced the Genevan form of worship. In both cases the people, a minority

The Challenge. ii excepted, submissively accepted the changes. The officiating divine on that Sunday morning, whether the Kev. Edmundus Lay cock, the vicar, or another, was doubtless a clergyman of standing and repute ; and the sermon would be earnest and scholarly. One would like to be able to revive in mental picture the long-ago scene ; the sober citizens and their wives ; soldiers of the garrison ; the magistrates, the gentry, the craftsmen, and the poor, seated rank behind rank, in solemn stillness ; while up above in the tall pulpit, the grave, black-robed parson watched his hour-glass as he duly gave forth his sixthly and seventhly; and the serious monotony of his discourse rolled over their heads, like the low thunder of unseen waves beating on the dark shore of a world of dreams. Meantime the maiden's thoughts strayed to her lover ; the trooper wondered whether he would be sent to the Irish war; the townsman mused sadly on the recent news from London, and as he imagined to himself the black-draped scaiFold outside Whitehall, and the blooddripping head of the Lord's anointed held on high in the executioner's hand, he shuddered ; for the hearts of the people were loyal to King and Church, and hated the military despotism which professed to bestow on them civil and religious liberty. So the preacher droned on in the pulpit, and the hearers stared at him in that half-narcotized condition with which church-goers are familiar. Suddenly a man stepped forth into the aisle in view of all ; and a strong clear voice rang out like a battle-cry. In an instant the blood leapt to the brain, every sleeper woke, and a thousand eager faces were straining towards the youth. He was a tall, gaunt, j^oung man, with piercing eyes, long hair, his countenance pale and emaciated as with frequent fasting ; but the glow of enthusiasm lighted it up as he flatly contradicted the preacher, hurling back in his teeth the very foundationdoctrine of the Protestant faith. "No. It is not the Scriptures. It is the Spirit of God." Is he another Luther, herald of a new Reformation, or is he a madman ? In justice to him, and as a preface to our inquiry, let George Fox describe the scene for us in his own words.

"Now as I went towards Nottingham on a first-day in the morning, with friends to a meeting there, when I came on top of a hill in sight of the town, I espied the great steeple-house, and the Lord said unto me : ' Thou must go cry against yonder great idol, and against the worshippers therein.' So I said nothing of this to the friends that were with me, but went on with them to the meeting, where the mighty power of the Lord was amongst us ; in which I left friends sitting in the meeting, and I went away to the steeple-house ; and when I came there all the people looked like fallow ground ; and the priest, like a great lump of earth, stood in his pulpit above. And he took for his text these words of Peter : ' 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 he told the people that this was the Scriptures, by which they were to try all doctrines, religions, and opinions. Now the Lord's power was so mighty upon me, and so strong in me, that I could not hold, but was made to cry out and say : ' Oh, no, it is not the Scriptures ; ' but I told them what it was, namely the Holy Spirit, by which the holy men of

The Challenge. 13

God gave forth the Scriptures, whereby opinions, religions, and judgments were to be tried : for it led unto all truth, and so gave the knowledge of all truth. For the Jews had the Scriptures, and yet resisted the Holy Ghost, and rejected Christ, the bright morning Star, and persecuted Christ and his A.postles, and took upon them to try their doctrines by the Scriptures ; but erred in judgment, and did not try them aright, because they tried without the Holy Ghost. Now as I spake thus amongst them, the officers came and took me away, and put me into a nasty stinking prison, the smell whereof got so into my nose and throat that it very much annoyed me."^

Poor George. He was not yet accustomed to prisons, the condition of which in England at that time, and for long after, was not unsavoury merely, but too often deadly. During the ensuing quarter of a century Fox spent about six years in prisons, in which he endured worse than foul smells. But now the young man was fresh from the fields and the woods, and confinement in a stinking gaol was an offensive novelty to him. He richly deserved the punishment, you say, for his scandalous interruption of the preacher. It is doubtful, however, whether the interruption was in itself a serious offence, if an offence at all, according to the feeling and custom of those times. In the religious excitement which had so largely contributed to bring about the upheaval of the whole framework of society, it was not an unheard of thing that a preacher should be challenged in his very pulpit. Did not the Apostle Paul ordain, that if anything were revealed to him that sat by, then the first speaker was to hold his peace ? The interrup- ^ Jfex'* Journai, Vol. I., page 105.

tion no doubt was an irregularity, which might, however, have been justified, or at least excused, if the character of the communication had been other than it was. . George Fox was listened to in silence for some minutes : and not until the shocking nature of his utterance was perceived, did the order issue for his removal. Two or three years before this time Parliament had enacted an " Ordinance for the Suppression of Blasphemies and Heresies," in which it was decreed that the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity, or of the divinity of Christ, or that the hooks of Scripture are the Word of God, was to be punished by death, unless the offender should abjure his heresy. His startling declaration in Nottingham. Church brought George Fox perilously near to the application of this statute: nor can we wonder that the magistracy felt bound to subject him to strict examination.

Our interest being rather in the prisoner than in the judges, let us turn back for a second glance at that page from his journal. The reader notes that Fox entered the church in a hostile frame of mind. The very sight of the great " steeple-house " filled him with prophetic wrath. " The Lord said unto me, thou must go cry against yonder great idol." The steeple-house was the idol. Popular language, popular sentiment, then as now, called the building consecrated to sacred uses, the House of God ; and to Fox this was idolatry. Some time before, there was a great gathering in one of the Leicester churches, in which Presbyterians and Baptists, Independents a,nd Episcopalians met to discuss their differences. Fox was there, and listened quietly for awhile, until a woman ventured to put a question. The clergyman who was in the pulpit said that a woman was not

The Challenge. ij permitted to speak in tbe church. "Whereupon," Fox tells us, " I was wrapped ^ up, as in a rapture, in the Lord's power ; and I stepped up in a place, and asked the priest : Dost thou call this (the steeple-house) a church? Or dost thou call this mixed multitude a church ? For the woman asking a question he ought to have answered it, having given liberty for any one to speak. But he did not answer me neither, but asked me what a church was. I told him, the church was the pillar and ground of truth, made up of living stones, living members, a spiritual household, which Christ was the head of ; but He was not the head of a mixed multitude, or of an old house made up of lime, stones, and- wood. This set them all on fire ; the priest came down out of his pulpit, and others out of their pews, and the dispute there was marred."^ The steeple-houses, the old mass-houses, as Fox perpetually reminded his Protestant adversaries they had been formerly, were in his view " idols," the objects of superstitious reverence, and therefore ofi^ensive to God. Nor was the worship carried on therein less displeasing to him. " When I heard the bell toll to call the people together to the steeple-house it struck at my life : for it was just like a market-bell, to gather people together, that the priest might set forth his wares to sale. 0, the vast sums of money that are gotten by the trade they make of selling the scriptures, and by their preaching, from the highest bishop to the lowest priest. What one trade else in the world is comparable to it ?"^ Tetzel's sale of indulgences did not stink more intolerably in Luther's nostrils than 1 " Wrapped," he wrote, for rapt. ^ Journal I. 93.

* Journal L 105.

the tithes and stipends of the clergy in those of George Fox. He denounced all who received money for preaching, whether they received it from the state or from their congregations, as covetous hirelings, diviners for filthy lucre, false shepherds who devoured the flock. Besides his aversion to a paid ministry, he was opposed to the clergy on other grounds ; for it was one of his earliest revelations that " being bred at Oxford or Cambridge was not enough to make a man fit to be a minister of Christ." What was the nature and what the value of these " revelations " of his must be considered in another chapter. Here we note that the audacious young reformer set out on his mission, running full tilt against the prevalent faith in the Church, the priesthood, and the Bible.

At this point I am somewhat afraid that my reader may think that he wants to hear no more about George Fox. If the reader is a sceptic, to whom not even the Bible is a revelation from God, he will hardly consider it worth while to listen to the " revelations " of an ignorant fanatic of the benighted age of the Puritans. If he is an orthodox believer, clinging to the traditional faith in the Word of God, he will be disgusted at this reckless assault on its authority. In either case, he may, perhaps, on farther investigation, see cause to modify his first impression. Whatever our hero was, it would be difficult to name the man who loved his Bible more, and was more familiar with its contents than he. In his lifetime, it was said, that if the Bible were lost, it could be written down again from Fox's lips. Some of his writings consist almost entirely of continuous quotations of the sacred text ; and in every controversy he appealed to the scrip-