Gleanings from the Works of George Fox

RELIGION OF LIFE SERIES.
GLEANINGS FROM GEORGE FOX.
UNIFORM VOLUMES IN Religion of Life Series.
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. ISAAC PENINGTON. GEORGE FOX. SIR THOMAS BROWNE. THE CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT. WILLIAM PENN.
Cloth, 1s. net. Leather, 2s. net.
BY DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON AUTHOR OF “The Quakers: Past & Present.”
LONDON: HEADLEY BROTHERS, BISHOPSGATE, E.C.
George Fox may be variously described. If we look at him from the standpoint of orthodox Catholicism we shall see a heretical genius, a man who tried to re-organise the church and succeeded in establishing a sect—in defiance of the fact of the rarity of the religious and the still greater rarity of the mystical temperament—upon a basis of mystical opportunism, in a condition of divorce from sacraments, culture and tradition.
From the Protestant point of view he becomes the man who made a temporarily successful attempt to undermine the authority of the Scriptures; his failure being attested by the return of the majority of the Quakers, from the third generation onwards, to biblicism—their tacit throwing up of their earlier position with regard to the inward light.
The “free” churches find in Fox the collector and organizer of a type of Christian believers whose shining record has so fully justified his essential soundness and unity with the main purpose of Christendom that minor differences may be ignored.
Students of mysticism, Christian mysticism in particular, seeing Fox as one in the long line of those who have adventured into the undivided truth they find stirring within their own souls, have placed him amongst the grand “actives” of European mysticism.
Here and there an attempt has been made to disentangle the essential distinction of the man himself from his relation to groups and abstract ideas, and to show that distinctive character working itself out in his life and writings, and in the varying history of the church he founded.