In England, the first movement towards the goal of “religious liberty” was made by a body of believers who declared that a national church was against the will of God. Catholic in ideal, democratic in form, they set their hope upon a world-wide Christendom of self-governing congregations. They increased with great rapidity, suffered persecution, martyrdom, and temporary dispersal.[1]
Following on this first challenge came the earliest stirring of a more conservative catholicism. Fed by such minds as that of Nicholas Farrer, grieving in scholarly seclusion over the ravages of the Protestantisms, it found expression in Laud’s effort to restore the broken continuity of tradition in the English church, to reintroduce beauty into her services, and, while preserving her identity as a developing national body, to keep open a rearward window to the light of accumulated experience and teaching. But hardly-won freedom saw popery in his every act, and his final absolutism, his demand for executive power independent of Parliament, wrecked the effort and cost him his life.
These characteristic neo-Protestantisms were obscured at the moment of the appearance of the Quakers by the opening in this country of the full blossom of the Genevan theology. The fate of the Presbyterian system, which covered England like a network, and had threatened during the shifting policies of Charles’s long struggle for absolute monarchy to become the established church of England, was sealed, it is true, when Cromwell’s Independent army checked the proceedings of a Presbyterian House of Commons; but the Calvinian reading of the scriptures had prevailed over the popular imagination, and in the Protectorate Church where Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians held livings side by side with the clergy of the Protestant Establishment, where the use of the Prayer-Book was forbidden and the scriptures were at last supreme, the predominant type of religious culture was what we have since learned to call Puritanism. In 1648 Puritanism had reached its great moment. Its poet[2] was growing to manhood, tortured by the uncertainty of election, half-maddened by his vision of the doom hanging over a sin-stained world.
But far away beneath the institutional confusions and doctrinal dilemmas of this post-Reformation century fresh life was welling up. The unsatisfied religious energy of the maturing Germanic peoples, groping its own way home, had produced Boehme and his followers, and filled the by-ways of Europe with mystical sects. Outwards from free Holland—whose republic on a basis of religious toleration had been founded in 1579—spread the Anabaptists, Mennonites, and others. Coming to England, they reinforced the native groups—the Baptists, Familists, and Seekers—who were preaching personal religion up and down the country under the protection of Cromwell’s indulgence for “tender” consciences, and found their characteristically English epitome and spokesman in George Fox.
Born in an English village[3] of homely pious parents,[4] who were both in sympathy with their thoughtful boy, his genius developed harmoniously and early.
Until his twentieth year he worked with a shoemaker, who was also a dealer in cattle and wool, and proved his capacity for business life. Then a crisis came, brought about by an incident meeting him as he went about his master’s affairs. He had been sent on business to a fair, and had come upon two friends, one of them a relative, who tried to draw him into a bout of health-drinking. George, who had had his one glass, laid down a groat and went home in a state of great disturbance, for he knew both these men to be professors of religion. He grappled with the difficulty at once. He spent the hours of that night in pacing up and down his room, in prayer and crying out, in sitting still and reflecting. In the light of the afternoon’s incidents he saw and felt for the first time the average daily life of the world about him, “how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth,” all that gave meaning to life for him had no existence in their lives, even in the lives of professing Christians. He was thrown in on himself. If God was not with those who professed him, where was He?
The labours and gropings of the night simplified before the dawn came to the single conviction that he must “forsake all, both young and old, and keep out of all, and be a stranger unto all.” There was no hesitating. He went forth at once and wandered for four years up and down the Midland counties seeking for light, for truth, for firm ground in the quicksands of disintegrating faiths, for a common principle where men seemed to pull every way at once. He sought all the “professors” of every shade and listened to all, but would associate with none, shunning those who sought him out: “I was afraid of them, for I was sensible they did not possess what they professed.” He went to hear the great preachers of the day in London and elsewhere, but found no light in them. Now and again amongst obscure groups to which hope drew him one and another were struck by his sayings, and responded to him, but he shrank from their approval. The clergy of different denominations in the neighbourhood of his home, where he returned for a while in response to the disquietude of his parents, could not understand his difficulties. How should they? He was perfectly sound in every detail of the Calvinian doctrine. They could make nothing of a distress so unlike that of other pious young Puritans. Orthodox as he was, there is no sign in his outpourings of any concern for his soul, not a word of fear, nor any sense of sin, though he heartily acknowledges temptations, a divided nature, “two thirsts.” He begs the priests to tell him the meaning of his troubled state—not as one doubting, but rather with the restiveness of one under a bondage, keeping him from that which he knows to be accessible.
One minister advised tobacco and psalm-singing, another physic and bleeding. His family urged him to marry.
His distress grew, amounting sometimes to acute agony of mind: “As I cannot declare the great misery I was in, it was so great and heavy upon me, so neither can I set forth the mercies of God unto me in all my misery.” Brief intermissions there were when he was “brought into such a joy that I thought I had been in Abraham’s bosom.”
But on the whole his wretchedness steadily increased. None could help. The written word had ceased to comfort him. He wandered days and nights in solitary places taking no food.