Quaker Strongholds

by Caroline Emelia Stephen

The practice of addressing such queries to the subordinate meetings is maintained to this day, although the queries themselves have from time to time been altered, and of late years the greater number of them are directed to be seriously considered, but not answered. This change in our practice has probably not been without a balance of advantage and disadvantage. The system of requiring answers to the queries was, in truth, a very powerful engine of discipline, for they were considered and answered with scrupulous care and precision, and, in case of an unfavourable report, individuals who were regarded as failing to maintain the testimonies of the Society were liable to be “put under dealing,” and, in case of obstinacy, to eventual disownment. This ultimate penalty of disobedience was in former times inflicted for much slighter causes than would at the present day render any one liable to it.[17]

It seems to me that there is a serious danger inherent in the very nature of collective testimonies, especially those which imply the lifting up of a standard of exceptional severity and purity, lest that which is in some, perhaps even in the majority, sincere and spontaneous should be adopted at second hand, and without personal warrant, by others, and should thus become a mere hollow profession. For this reason I am thankful that a much greater degree of freedom is now allowed to our members in all matters as to which there is room for a conscientious difference of opinion. Our strength seems to me to depend largely upon our consistency in appealing to the gospel rather than to the law—in trusting to the purifying power of an indwelling, informing Spirit, rather than to any external framework of regulations. To do anything which can stimulate the profession of more or higher enlightenment than is actually possessed, is indeed a signal and a grievous departure from our own avowed principles; and I believe that no surer method could be devised for bringing our Society into disrepute and decay than the attempt to require a pre-arranged uniformity with regard to those special testimonies which imply special enlightenment.

The loftier and more delicate the ideal, the greater the risk of formulating and attempting to impose it. It seems to me that our wisdom is to insist more and more boldly upon obedience to the broad plain laws of duty which all Christians recognize as laid down for us by those recorded words of our Master Himself, which are our one supreme standard; and at the same time to leave more and more scope for the working out in detail of all the lovely and harmonious yet varying results of individual faithfulness to the promptings of His Spirit in each heart. Any distinct breach of the moral law, any falling below that standard of “peaceable innocent life” which is acknowledged by all as the test of the reality of light within, may and should surely be made a matter of Church discipline—a matter, that is, in which brethren should watch over one another for good, and obedience to which must be a condition of sound fellowship. But when discipline descends to the regulation of details whose whole significance and value depend upon their being prompted by conscience, under the living and ever-present guidance of the light, then surely the human is intruding upon the province of the Divine, and we are checking and hampering and weakening that very moulding from within which it is our chief object as a Society to watch for and to yield to in all things.

But while all attempts at collective self-discipline must involve a danger of hollowness, which means weakness, if not actual insincerity, it is to be remembered, on the other hand, that there is in association not only a well-known source of strength, but a very valuable shelter; a protection to right instincts of modesty. In maintaining any exceptionally high standard of action, especially in matters of detail, there is a real safety as well as comfort in united action. While we are treading in the steps of our honoured predecessors, however freely we may have chosen our path, we are not tempted to claim that we discovered it; nor need we anxiously vindicate it as though it were but the prompting of some individual scruple or preference. In the practical results of the collective exercises of a considerable body of fellow-disciples, we do, I believe, in fact find, as we might reasonably expect to find, a peculiar purity and propriety. It is not difficult to justify the wisdom by which our special testimonies have been worked out, though it is easy also to see the mischief of too rigid an enforcement of them.

Our Society, like the United Kingdom, enjoys the elasticity resulting from the absence of any written constitution, and the precise working of its discipline is by no means easily traced. Its “testimonies,” though clearly recognized and notorious, are not formulated or defended in any authoritative document. The “Book of Discipline” consists, as I have said, of extracts from “Epistles” and “Advices” circulated from time to time by the Yearly Meeting. These are in the nature of brotherly exhortations, which assume our principles as undisputed; and though carefully worded, they do not deal in definitions or arguments. Our testimonies are, in fact, to a degree which is, I think, hardly understood outside the Society, the result of individual and spontaneous obedience to the bidding of individual conscience, and to the guiding of the Divine light shining in each heart, rather than of conformity to rules enforced or even precisely laid down by any human authority. They are collective, but unformulated; subjects for discipline, yet not prescribed or regulated; familiar and even notorious peculiarities, yet varying indefinitely in the degree in which they are maintained by individuals.

The traditional reverence for individual conscience is still so strong that the precise nature of the obstacle felt by Friends to any particular course of conduct is apt to be shrouded in some degree of mystery. The phraseology of the Society, which is almost a separate language, vividly conveys this sense of an insuperable but (to outsiders) mysterious restraint. “Truth requires” that certain things should be done or left undone. A Friend “feels a stop in his mind,” or “is not easy to proceed with” some undertaking. Such and such a thing “appears” (to John Woolman, for instance) “to be distinguishable from pure wisdom.”

There are, as is well known, individual Friends who have abundantly argued, on general grounds, the moral questions involved in our “testimonies.” Friends have never been wanting in pugnacity, whatever their scruples as to the use of “carnal weapons” or of violent language. But yet their practice has in the main been felt out rather than thought out; their testimonies are instances of problems solved by going forward rather than of theories built up through any speculative process; and in regard to each one of them every true Friend feels that to his own Master he stands or falls, and that there is but one Example to which he ought to look, and one Guide whom he desires to obey. As in regard of our public ministry, so in the lesser matters of everyday life and practice, we jealously guard our individual liberty from human interference in order that it may be the more unreservedly subjected to all Divine influences.

And not only do we guard our own liberty—we refrain from attempting to limit that of others. If our conscientious abstinence from certain practices is inevitably understood as in some sense casting a shadow of reproach or blame upon those practices, we yet are careful to abstain from condemning those who are acting in obedience to their own measure of light. I believe we must with boldness and humility acknowledge that such practical witness-bearing as we believe ourselves called to implies that we are as “a city set on a hill.” We do not attempt to lay down rules applicable at once and equally to all. The homeward road cannot be altogether the same for dwellers on the hill and dwellers on the plain; the goal alone is one.[18]

The most important and the best known of the special testimonies of which I have now to speak is that which has been steadily borne by our members against all war. Friends have ever maintained and acted upon the belief that war and strife of all kinds are opposed to the spirit and the teaching of Christ, and have felt themselves, as His disciples, precluded from engaging in them. They have steadfastly refused to take up arms at the bidding of any human authority, or in the presence of any danger. This course of conduct has, of course, brought them into frequent collision with the civil power, and needs for its justification, as Friends are the first to acknowledge, the warrant of a higher than any national authority.

It is, indeed, an awful position which we have thus been bold to take up—the position of those who feel themselves called upon to act as the salt of the earth, as leaders who refuse to be led. I do not hesitate to confess that this attitude of possible resistance to the demands of our country in the presence of a common danger was the one part of the Quaker ideal which I for a time seriously hesitated to accept. So long as I understood it to be accompanied by or based upon any condemnation of those who conscientiously believe that their duty to God requires them to yield unqualified obedience to the demands of their country for military service, I was unable to accept it. But when I came to understand that the Quaker testimony against all war did not take the form of any ethical theory of universal application, but was simply the acting out in one’s own person and at one’s own risk of obedience to that which one’s own heart had been taught to recognize as Divine authority, even where its commands transcended and came into collision with those of the nation, I felt at once that the position was not only perfectly tenable, but was the only one worthy of faithful disciples.