The story of George Fox

Front matter

ROTTUS m°<j©m:

Class.

Book

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Drayton Boy i

II. The Youth Seeking for Light 10

Introduction

One of the most interesting periods of all English History is the period of the Commonwealth — in round numbers, 1640 to 1660. Great deeds were done then; great persons lived; great battles were fought; great writers wrote immortal books; great achievements were made for human freedom and a great awakening came to men's souls. Many of the noble figures and leaders of that age were young men, in the early bloom and vigor of their lives. It was a time of sunrise and promise and enthusiasm, and so it makes its perennial appeal of interest to those who are young. Milton and Cromwell, two of the greatest names in this famous epoch, are known to all my young readers, but George Fox, the hero of this story, is perhaps not so well known. His Journal, in which he told his own story, is very long and some parts of it not easy to read. Much has been written about him in large historical books and in big religious treatises, but not much has been written about his life in the manner and style that appeals to young people. If I have succeeded in making his life clear and vivid and real I know that you,

X INTRODUCTION

my young readers, will like him, as I do, and will feel a warm interest in him.

He was an unusual person, different from others as a boy, and he remained different from others in his older years. He had almost no education. He never learned how to write well; nor could he spell correctly — a thing which most persons in his time had not learned to do. He lacked the skill and refinement which a good school might have given him. But in spite of his peculiarities and this lack of education he knew and loved outdoor Nature; he possessed great native gifts; he read the Bible until he almost knew it by heart; he had an honest, sincere soul; he was a born leader of men; he had a most remarkable experience of God; he was ready to go through fire and water to perform his duty, and he won the love of men in an extraordinary way, somewhat as did St. Francis of Assisi, more than four centuries earlier.

There are all kinds of heroes, but every hero, to be a hero, must face danger bravely. He must forget himself and live greatly for others. He must win for the race something that has not been won before. He must act so as to make his life and deeds an inspiration to those around him and to those who come after him. On all these counts I think you will agree with me that George Fox was a hero. One trouble with us, both young

INTRODUCTION XI

and old, is that we are inclined to take the easyway of doing what others do, of sliding along the smooth path that people in general take, of going with the crowd, and of having little power of decision, and manly choice of will. It is worth while to stop now and then and read about one who could stand out alone and decide for himself what he believed was right; who had a moral backbone in his frame and who did not say things or do things just because that would make him popular and give him an easy time. The greatest thing about George Fox, and the most heroic thing, was his conviction of duty and his obedience to it. He seemed to hear a voice speaking in his soul, and when once he felt sure what course that voice inside pointed out, he took it forthwith, in spite of all obstacles and in the face of difficulties and dangers. In this respect he was like a still greater hero — St. Paul, who was " ready' ' at any moment to face danger or death and who could not be turned aside from the path which his soul 's vision marked out for him. "I am ready," he told his friends, "not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the cause of the Lord Jesus." That was George Fox's way, as you will see, and he, therefore, proved to be a difficult man to bend or conquer! But it was not in his own strength that he was strong; it was through what he calls "the mighty power of God"' "Love the

Xll INTRODUCTION

truth more than all," he used to say, "and go on in the mighty power of God as good soldiers of Christ." "Every one who confronted him personally," Professor William James of Harvard wrote about Fox, "from Oliver Cromwell down to magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power." I hope that this short book may explain to you how he came to have this "superior power."

Chapter I The Drayton Boy

George Fox was born in the little hamlet of Fenny Drayton, which his autobiography, the Journal, calls "Drayton-in-the-clay," on the western edge of Leicestershire, England, in the year 1624. Two hundred and seventy-five years ago, when George was a youth, the country about Drayton formed a narrow strip of low, undrained, clay-formed, fen land, with lines of hills running north and south, both on the east and on the west of the hamlet. Bosworth-field where Henry of Richmond plucked the English crown from the head of Richard III., lies close to Fenny Drayton and only two or three miles away is the old town of Nuneaton where " George Eliot" was born. All the region about Nuneaton is thick with scenes made memorable in the early stories of this famous novelist, who was very unlike the George who was born in nearby Drayton.

The actual house in which George Fox was born has fallen into ruins and disappeared, though the church where he went every week as a boystill stands, but little changed in the almost three centuries that have passed. The solemn yew trees in the yard in front of the church look very much as they did when the tiny baby was brought there to be christened in 1624. The old manorhouse of the Drayton squires, the noted Purefoy family, is also much the same as when the quiet, meditative boy watched the aristocratic family, with their boys and girls, come through their private door into the little church where he was sitting.

While we are trying to imagine the Drayton church, with its Norman doorway, the two aisles and chancel, and its monuments to the famous Purefoys, we may as well try to think at the same time what the sermons were like in those distant days. While little George was growing up from childhood to youth England was becoming every year more strongly Puritan. England had, a hundred years before, in the time of the Reformation, broken away from the old historic Roman Catholic Church and had established its own English Church, with the King at its head in place of the Pope. But the new Church was too much like the old one to suit some of the men and women of England. There were persons in all parts of the country who wanted a great many more changes made. These people wanted to

THE DRAYTON BOY 3

have the Church "purified" so that it would be more like the Church which they thought Christ had meant to create in the world. These stout Puritans not only wanted to change the Church, they also desired to change the state so that there would be more freedom and greater liberty for everybody. It seemed to them that James I. and still more Charles L, the new Stuart kings who came from Scotland to the throne after Queen Elizabeth, were taking away the hard-won rights and privileges of the English people. When George Fox was eighteen years old the Puritan party came into open conflict with the king and a great civil war was begun on the green fields of England between the Puritan forces and the Royalist forces.

Two years before the beginning of the Civil War (1640) a new minister had come to the Drayton church, to preach to the people of the hamlet. His name was Nathaniel Stephens. He was thirtyfour years old, a fine scholar from Oxford and a strong Puritan who knew exactly what he believed. Like most of the Puritan ministers of the time, he preached very long sermons and prayed long prayers. When he began to preach he started an hourglass running and, when the sand had all run out, he turned it again and went right on preaching, without thinking how tired the little boys' legs were in the hard pews. Like all the other Puritan ministers then, he preached almost every Sunday about Adam's "fall," and the sin, guilt and wickedness of all men, women and children in the world. He made life seem dark, sad and hard. He told his hearers in the Drayton church, over and over again, that God had chosen some people to be saved and some people to be lost; that even little children would be lost, if they were not "elected" to be saved, and then they would suffer forever and ever in hell with the wicked fallen angels. "Priest Stephens/' as George Fox always calls him, could talk for hours at a time of the way of escape from the " City of Destruction" to the "Celestial City," about which Bunyan wrote, and everybody learned to know what he was going to say as they heard him read his text from the great Bible on his pulpit desk. George, even while he was still very young, did not enjoy these sermons. They did not seem to him to fit what Jesus said in the gospels. He did not believe that God ever chose anybody to be lost. He did not think that it was Adam who made people do wrong; if they sinned it was their own fault. He could not see that these long sermons which the Puritan preacher gave them every Sunday made the people of Fenny Drayton any better or any more Christlike than they were before they heard his sad, solemn and tedious talk. But even if George did not believe all that "Priest

THE DRAYTON BOY 5

Stephens" said in his long hourglass sermons, and did not enjoy hearing so much about "Adam," and "sin/' and "elected," and "lost," at least these sermons set him to thinking, made him a quiet, solemn boy, and started him off on a new track, so that in the course of time, as we shall see, he became a new kind of hero.

The father and mother of George Fox were poor, humble, hardworking people, but they were brave, upright and good. The father's name was Christopher, whom the neighbors called "righteous Christer," because he was absolutely straight and honest in his dealings. He was a weaver and worked with his hand loom in the little cottage where George was born. His mother's name was Mary Lago, who came of a family that already had its list of martyrs. She was different from the other women in Drayton — more educated and more finely cultivated — and though her surroundings were hard and mean, and her days were full of work, she was pure, lovely and nobleminded, and she knew how to understand, help and direct her unusual boy. His mother died in 1664 when George Fox was fifty years old. When the news of her death reached him he went to a room in the inn where he was staying and sat alone in the stillness and thought of all her life had meant to him. As he sat alone with his sorrow and knew that he could never see his mother again on earth, suddenly he seemed to see her still alive with God in the eternal world and, as he says, "everlastingly with me over all." "I did verily love her as ever one could a mother," is his simple, beautiful word about her, "for she was a good, honest, virtuous, right-natured woman." As had been the case with Martin Luther, a hundred and fifty years earlier, here, again, was just the right kind of home and the fitting kind of father and mother to produce a new prophet who could be a leader of men.

George was an odd, strange boy. He did not play games like other boys. He lived apart and wandered about alone, shy, grave and thoughtful, always "wondering." William Penn, who later knew him better than almost anyone else, says: "From a child he appeared of another frame of mind than the rest of his brethren: being more religious, inward, still, solid and observing beyond his years." He asked many questions and often sat alone, thinking and thinking. His great desire, even as a little boy, was to be pure and good, and he seems to have succeeded, for he says in his Journal, "When I came to eleven years of age, I knew pureness and righteousness." The thing which made him most different from the other people around him was that he was so unusually honest about everything he did. He seems to have got this trait from both his father and his mother.

THE DRAYTON BOY J

He never could pretend. He would not act as though he knew unless he really did know. He would not make believe he had something unless in very fact he had it. Even as a little boy he hated sham more than he hated anything else on earth. He was resolved that if he was going to live at all he would live a sincere life. We shall see that whatever else he is doing he is always trying to be genuine.

While still hardly more than a boy he went to work for a man who was a shoemaker by trade. This shoemaker also kept sheep and cattle and George not only learned to cut out leather and to sew and peg shoes, but he also tended the sheep, washed and sheared them and helped sell the wool in market. His work with the sheep took him out into the fields and pastures where he was alone with nature and where he learned to love everything God had made and to feel himself, as he puts it, "in unity with the creation."

Nature in the fields and hills and sky seemed to him full of beauty and order; what he could not understand was why men's lives were not more beautiful and orderly, as God meant them to be. He "wondered" over this problem more than over any thing else. Why, he asked again and again, are people so light and wanton? What makes them so hard and unkind to one another and to God's creatures? Why should they love to do wrong and spoil life which was intended to be always fair and joyous and beautiful? "Priest Stephens" kept saying in his sermons that it was all because Adam sinned and the world was ruined by the fall. But when the minister told them how to escape from sin, and how to be saved from it, why didn't they stop sinning and become pure and good? They acted as though they supposed that it was enough just to listen to the sermons, without doing anything more, or without changing their lives in any way. Religion was, thus, like having money put away in a bank and never using it. It seemed to George to be something that you heard about and talked about in a church, but not something that made any difference in the way you lived after you went home from church. He had an interesting word for that kind of a religious person. He called him a "professor," i. e., one who professes to believe the things which are preached in church, but who lives in the world exactly as though he did not believe them.

One day all this about which he had long been thinking came sweeping over George's sensitive soul with such a rush that it almost overwhelmed him. He had gone to a market-fair in a nearby town and two "professors," one of them being George's cousin, asked him to go with them to an inn and drink beer. The two "professors" drank many mugs of beer and when George refused to

THE DRAYTON BOY drink with them they tried to make him pay for what they drank. It shocked the gentle youth to see two persons who professed to be good Christians, guzzling beer and acting as though they had no religion at all, and thereupon he put down a small piece of money, and walked out of the inn, and left the "professors" there alone.

When he got home to Drayton he could not get this scene in the inn out of mind. It seemed to him only a vivid illustration of the way everybody was doing. The world seemed twisted and out of joint. People said one thing and did another. Religion looked like a hollow sham, a thing for show, not for daily practice. Poor, honest-hearted, pure-minded George Fox could not stand the discovery. It crushed his soul and broke his spirit. He could not sleep. He could not eat. He moaned and cried and wandered about alone, trying to understand the strange, wilderness world he was in. At length he decided to leave his home — it seemed as though God sent him out — and to go up and down the land seeking for light and endeavoring to find some help for his disturbed soul. He went out into the mysterious world not knowing whither he went, but resolved to see if he could discover anywhere any real religion which made people's lives right, and gave them power to live by.

Chapter II The Youth Seeking For Light

If George Fox had not been different from other boys he would very quickly have got over his strange sorrow on account of other people's shams. He would not have allowed that to spoil his appetite and disturb his sleep. But he was different from other boys and he could not get over his sorrow and depression. The world seemed one great question-mark to him and he didn't care about living if he could not find an answer to his mysteries. He was nineteen years old when, in 1643, ^ e started out on his wanderings. He went to a great many English towns, and he seems to have tried in each place to find somebody who could help him out of his darkness into light. He had heard that there were people scattered over England, in out-of-the-way places, who were discovering new truth about God and man and life and the Church of Christ, and he hoped that he might fall in with some person or persons who could set him on the right track. England was seething with eagerness and enthusiasm. Religion was the main business and the great matter. George Fox was not the only one who was endeavoring

THE YOUTH SEEKING FOR LIGHT II

then to find a fresh way of life. It was a seeking age and all sorts of new ideas were in the air, like thistle-down in autumn. Drayton was a little hamlet, and nobody came there with new thoughts and fresh truth. If George was to discover anything deep enough and great enough to satisfy his perplexed soul he knew that he must go out and hunt for it. And hunt he surely did! Everybody who was serious then was reading the Bible. Only a little while before this, in 1611, it had been translated into the wonderful English of the King James version. There was no other book like it. It was the most interesting one that had ever been put into a boy's hand and George, like all other serious persons then, was reading and rereading it. Often in his lonely room in some town, where he knew nobody, he would read and meditate till the sun went down. Other times he would walk in the fields, which he loved with a kind of poetic passion, and sit in hollow trees, or on the sheltered bank of a brook, and read the book that told him about God and man's true life.

In his travels in pursuit of truth he went to London. But it seemed like a great, dark Babylon to him. He could find everything there but the one thing he was seeking. The city was full of interesting sights and wonderful things, but he could not find there any guide for his soul. He had an uncle, named Pickering, in London, who was a Baptist, but though the uncle and his Baptist friends were " tender" — by which word George Fox means serious, spiritual, earnest, sincere, devout — George felt that he could not get any help from them. He found that he could not talk freely with them about his condition, that they did not understand his troubles and that he could not join with them. London had no message of light for him. John Milton was there and John Pirn was there, — two Johns who were "well-beloved disciples of liberty/' — and the great Oliver, but even if he had found them they could not have helped him in his difficult quest.

He heard that his parents and other relatives were troubled over his absence from home and so he came back from London to Fenny Drayton. Some of his relatives who did not understand him advised him to take a bride, as the same kind of people once told St. Francis of Assisi to do, but George told them he was seeking for wisdom and not for a wife! Others urged him to become a soldier and take his part in the civil war, but he felt that fighting with swords would not cure his soul or remove his load of trouble. At Drayton he talked much with "Priest Stephens" who sometimes preached on Sunday the things which he had heard George say during the week, but the Puritan minister had no message of help for " Righteous Christens" son. He was to George only a

THE YOUTH SEEKING FOR LIGHT IJ

"professor/' and not a "tender" man, nor a real guide of souls.

He tried many other "priests" in the neighboring towns, in the hope that they might have more light than the Drayton minister could give him, but they proved to be no better than he. One told him to try tobacco, another advised him to sing hymns. Some got angry with him and some made fun of him. But in one thing they were all alike, they had no light for him; they all seemed to him "miserable comforters." He walked seven miles to consult a priest at Tamworth, but he found him to be like the rest, "a hollow, empty cask," without anything inside.

His sorrow and depression went so deep into his soul that it finally broke down his health and brought him into a dangerous physical and mental condition. He was a poor forlorn soul in a world of utter mystery. But it is sometimes darkest just before dawn, and so it proved to be now in George's case. Two years he had wandered about without any relief to his mind. He had found the ministers in the churches much more "empty" than he had expected to find them. He discovered nobody who seemed to be a real prophet and could speak living words of truth for God. But gradually, in 1646, he began to realize that God himself was speaking to him in his own soul. Truths seemed to flash into his mind, like wavy streamers of northern lights. He would suddenly see a truth as though electric signs were signaled to him from a central station. It dawned upon him that God was the same now as when He revealed messages to prophets in olden times and could still reveal His will. He saw that temples and churches were not the most holy places; the soul of man itself was the really holy place, for God and man could meet therein. He saw that any man could be a priest if he only learned how to hear the voice of God .within his soul and to obey it, and could tell others how to hear it and understand it. To do this one would not need to study theology for years and years in a university; it would only be necessary that one should be quick and sensitive to hear the divine voice in the soul and be ready and eager to do what God revealed there.

As these truths flashed into George Fox's inner soul they gave him thrills of joy and relieved him, while they lasted, of his depression. But he was not yet sure enough of his new discovery to believe in it all the time. It would come in happy moments and then slip away and leave him discouraged again. It was a kind of a seesaw life, now up in the heights of vision and now dowji in the flats of life with no blue sky in sight. The same old wanderings continued, as though he were on a new quest for the Holy Grail; the search for helpers went on and the restless youth pored over

THE YOUTH SEEKING FOR LIGHT 1 5

the pages of his Bible, until he knew them almost or quite by heart. At last, one great and memorable day, he discovered something which lasted; he saw a truth which did not vanish away. He saw that Jesus Christ who lived in Palestine centuries ago and helped men out of their sin and weakness, their sorrow and trouble, was still alive and unchanged in love and goodness. The only difference was that then He walked about in a body like other men and could be in only one place at one time, now He came as a Spirit within the soul and could be in all places at once, helping and healing, comforting and blessing all who needed Him, just as thousands of people at the same time can all have the warmth and light of the one sun.

In the stillness of his soul George Fox heard Christ speaking to him so clearly that he could not mistake it. "I heard a voice," he wrote in his Journal, "which said, 'There is one, even Christ Jesus that can speak to thy condition 9 and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy." He felt now that he knew Christ in the same way that one knows a human friend. He had met Him; he had found Him. It was an experience and not a guess. The Holy Grail, then, was to be found within, and not in a distant country. It was as though he now had a pass key, a master key, which would open any door where he wanted to enter. He had discovered something better than men, better than l6 THE STORY OF GEORGE FOX

priests, better than books — the living Christ who could speak and teach and live in his own heart, just as the light and heat and power of the distant sun can be present here on the earth, where we need light and heat and power.

Nobody can correctly understand George Fox and nobody can properly read the story of his remarkable life of heroism without hearing first what happened in his soul. We are so used to having all our stories tell about things that happen in the world which we see with our eyes that it will seem odd to begin with this other kind of story, of what took place inside where there were no windows for any one to look in.

Most of our heroes just do things, and we read about their deeds and are thrilled. Here we have a hero who cared more about being than about doing. It seemed to him no use to go out and do a lot of things if your soul was all wrong and your life all twisted out of shape. That was just the kind of sham which he hated most. He wanted to be so clear and transparent that if men, or even God, looked through him there would be only fair and beautiful things to see in the inside part of himself where he lived.

Something like having God look through him did happen to George Fox. He thought he heard God say to him: "My love was always to thee and thou art in my love," and another time when he

THE YOUTH SEEKING FOR LIGHT 17

was walking in the fields, which always seemed full of God, he heard a voice that said, " Thy name is written in the Lamb's book of life. ,> Nothing else in the universe seemed so certain to him as the love of God. He might lose his eyes, as John Milton had done, and then he would not be able to see the hills and trees and sky, but he could not lose his real, inside eyes which saw the infinite love of God. He knew there was evil in the world; that there were pain, sorrow and death; but greater than all these was the God who still loved and, in the end, would conquer. He says: "I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death; but an infinite ocean of light and love flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that I saw the infinite love of God."