The Quakers, Past and Present

by Dorothy M. Richardson

Illumination came at last—a series of convictions dawning in the mind that truth cannot be found in outward things, and, finally, the moment of release—the sense of which he tries to convey to us under the symbolism of a voice making his heart leap for joy—leaving him remade in a new world.

Two striking passages from his Journal may serve to illustrate this period of his experience: “The Lord did gently lead me along, and did let me see His love, which was endless and eternal, and surpasseth all the knowledge that men have in the natural state, or can get by history or books ... and I was afraid of all company, for I saw them perfectly where they were, through the love of God which let me see myself”; and, again, as he struggles to express the change that had taken place for him: “Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before beyond what words can utter.”

Two years of intense life followed. He came back to the world with his message for all men, all churches, with no new creed to preach, but to call all men to see their creeds in the light of the living experience which had first produced them, to live themselves in that light shining pure and original within each one of them, the light which wrote the scriptures and founded the churches; to refuse to be put off any longer with “notions,” mere doctrines, derivative testimonies obscuring the immediate communication of life to the man himself.

This message—the message of the inner light of immediate inspiration, of the existence in every man of some measure of the Spirit of God—the Quakers laid, as it were, side by side with the doctrines of the Puritanism amidst which they were born. They did not escape the absolute dualism of the thought of their day. They believed man to be shut up in sin, altogether evil, and they declared at the same time that there is in every man that which will, if he yields to its guidance, lift him above sin, is able to make him here and now free and sinless. The essential irreconcilability of the two positions does not appear to have troubled them.

This belief in the divine light within the individual soul was, of course, nothing new. The Roman Church had taught it. Instruction as to the conditions whereby it may have its way with a man was the end of her less worldly labours.

The Protestants taught it; the acceptance of salvation, the birth of the light in the darkness of the individual soul was the message of the Book. But George Fox and his followers claimed that the measure of divine life, nesting, as it were, within the life of each man, was universal, was before churches and scriptures, and had always led mankind. Yet it was not to be confused with the natural light of reason of the Socinians and Deists, for the first step towards union with it was a control of all creaturely activities, a total abandonment of each and every claim of the surface intelligence—“notions,” as the Quakers called them—a process of retirement into the innermost region of being, into “the light,” “the seed,” “the ground of the soul,” “that which hath convinced you.”

The God of the Quakers, then, was no literary obsession coming to meet them along the pages of history; no traditional immensity visiting man once, and silent ever since, to be momentarily invoked from infinite spatial distance by external means of grace; no “notion,” no mere metaphysical absolute, but a living process, a changing, changeless absolute, a breath controlling all things, an amazing birth within the soul. Tradition they valued as a record of God’s dealings with man. The Bible held for them no enfeebling spell. Their controversial writings have, indeed, anticipated, as has recently been pointed out,[5] the methods of the higher criticism; they touch on the synoptic problems; they ask their biblicist opponents whether they are talking of original autographs, transcribed copies, or translations. They rally them: “Who was it that said to the Spirit of God, O Spirit, blow no more, inspire no more men, make no more prophets from Ezra’s days downward till Christ, and from John’s days downward for ever? But cease, be silent, and subject thyself, as well as all evil spirits, to be tried by the standard that’s made up of some of the writings of some of those men thou hast moved to write already; and let such and such of them as are bound up in the bibles now used in England be the only means of measuring all truth for ever.”

The Incarnation was to them the one instance of a perfect shining of the light, a perfect realization of the fusion of human and divine, the full indwelling of the Godhead, which was their goal. The incidents of that life shone clear to them in the light of what went forward in themselves in proportion as they struggled to live in the spirit.

But neither was this claim, the assertion of an immediate pathway to reality within the man himself, anything new in the world. Each nation, each great period of civilization, has produced individuals, or groups separated by time and creed, but unanimous in their testimony as to its existence.

The giants among them stand upon the highest peaks of human civilization. Their art or method in debased or arrested forms is to be found in every valley. They have been called “mystics,” and it is to the classical century of European mysticism, to the group (of which Tauler was the mainstay) calling themselves the “Friends of God,” that we must go for an outbreak of mystical genius akin to that which took place in seventeenth-century England. Both groups made war on the official Christianity of their day, and strove to relate Christendom afresh to its true source of vitality, to re-form the church on a spiritual basis. The testimony, the end, and the means for the attainment of the end were the same in both. The immense distinction between them arose from the difference in the conditions under which the two ventures were made. The fourteenth-century mystics opened their eyes in a congenial environment, in a church whose symbolism, teaching, and ordinances, were a coherent reflection of their own experiences, stood justified by their personal knowledge of the “law” of spiritual development, the conditions of advance in the way on which their feet were set.