II.
To the present writer George Fox appeals not only by the inherent strength of his mystical genius, not only because amongst his fellows in the mystical family he is, characteristically, the practical western layman, the market-place witness for the spiritual consciousness in every man, but also because he is, essentially, the English mystic—because he represents, at the height of its first blossoming, the peculiar genius of the English “temperament.” He is English particularism, English independency and individualism expressed in terms of religion, and offering its challenge, for the first time, in the open to all the world. This is his unique contribution to the evolution of Christendom.
His fellows and predecessors, the German mystics of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought, it is true, the same message, the same account of the pathway to reality as did Fox, but they brought it in a restricted form. They were largely dominated by tradition, they remained, most of them, within the official church, and those who did not met secretly and laboured behind closed doors. It was in George Fox that religious particularism, the outcome of the civilization whose cradle was the little isolated homesteads upon the Scandinavian fiords, reached its full flower. With him there re-appears in the form of an experiment in everyday life, in the heart of the modern state, the truth that dawned in Palestine sixteen hundred years before, the truth that was side-tracked but never quite lost amidst the policies, expediencies and jealousies of the official church, that has been clearing and elaborating itself with increasing steadiness ever since the seventeenth century, the truth that only in individuality carried to its full term can we find the basis of unity. Unity amongst Fox and his followers is the fruit and fulfilment of separateness. In order truly to love his neighbour, a man must first love himself. He must achieve singleness of soul, must discover that within him which is of God; that which “speaks” with him only in the solitude of his inner being.
The unit, with Fox, is never, except incidentally, the group; never, except incidentally, the family; but the single human soul faced with its individual consciousness, the germ of truth, goodness, beauty, light, love, God, it bears within itself, the seed of God present in all human kind.
He stands for liberty, for trust and toleration in a day of unchallenged religious and civil antagonisms and authoritarianisms. He stands for love, for the essential harmony of the creation in a day when warfare was the unquestioned and “divinely-appointed” method of settling international differences, and litigation and debate the accepted steersmen of private relationships.