The Quakers, Past and Present

by Dorothy M. Richardson

The Quakers have never, in spite of their deprecation of the written word and their insistence on the secondariness of even the highest “notions” and doctrines, been backward in defending their faith. They sat at the feet of no man, nor did they desire that any man should sit at theirs; but when they met, not merely at the hands of the wilder sectaries, but from sober, godly people, with accusations of blasphemy, when they were told that they denied Christ and the Scriptures, they rose up and justified themselves. They were fully equal to those who attacked them in the savoury vernacular of the period, in apocalyptic metaphor, in trouncings and denunciations. Bunyan, their relentless opponent throughout, is thus apostrophized by Burrough: “Alas for thee, John Bunion! thy several months’ travail in grief and pain is a fruitless birth, and perishes as an untimely fig, and its praise is blotted out among men, and it’s passed away as smoke.” But throughout the vehemence of the Friends’ controversial writings runs the sense of fair play—the fearlessness of truth; the spirit, so to say, of tolerance of every belief in the midst of their intolerance of an “unvital” attitude in the believer. Their positive attitude to life, their grand affirmation, redeems much that on other grounds seems regrettable.

By the time the classical apologist of Quakerism—Robert Barclay, a member of an ancient Scottish family, liberally educated at Aberdeen College and in Paris, who had on his conversion forced himself to ride through the streets of his city in sackcloth and ashes—had published his book,[13] any justification of Quakerism had, from the point of view of the laity at large, ceased to be necessary. They had had some thirty years’ experience of the fruits of the doctrine; they knew the Quakers as neighbours; had scented something of the sweet fragrance of their austerity; had wondered at their independence of happenings, their freedom from fear, their centralized strength, their picking their way, so to say, amongst the externalities of life with the calm assurance of those who hold a clue where most men blunder, driven by fear or selfish desire. They knew them, moreover, as untiringly available outside their own circle on behalf of every sort of distress. The custodians, amateur and official, of theology still preyed upon them, though many of these were, no doubt, disarmed by the Puritan orthodoxy of the background upon which Barclay’s rationale of the Quaker’s attitude is wrought.

There is ample evidence that he was widely read, both in England and abroad, and the fact that no one took up the challenge, though Baxter and Bunyan were still living and working, may perhaps be accounted for by the absence in the Apology of any clear statement of the real irreconcilability between Quakerism and attitudes that are primarily doctrinal or institutional.

He accepts the scriptures as a secondary light, saying that they may not be esteemed the “principal ground of all Truth and Knowledge, nor yet the adequate primary rule of faith and manners,” that they cannot go before the teaching of the very spirit that makes them intelligible. He maintains that the closing adjuration in the Book of Revelation refers only to that particular prophecy, and is not intended to suggest that prophecy is at an end. The ground of knowledge is immediate revelation, which may not be “subjected to the examination either of the outward Testimony of the Scripture or of the Natural Reason of Man as to a more noble or certain Rule or Touchstone.”

He considers that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin was called out by his zeal against the Pelagian exaltation of the natural light of reason. He admits that man in sin—the natural man—can know no right; that, therefore, the Socinians and Pelagians are convicted in exalting a “natural light,” but that, nevertheless, God in love gives universal light, convicting of sin, and teaching if not resisted. He qualifies the Quaker claim to the possibility of absolute present salvation from sin by adding that there may be a falling off.

The whole of his argument displays the impossibility of rationalizing the position to which the Quakers had felt their way in terms of the absolute dualism of seventeenth-century philosophy. He places the doctrines of natural sinfulness and of universal light side by side, and so leaves them.

The logical instability of Quaker formulas due to the limitations of the scientific philosophy of the day (not until the dawn of our own century has a claim analogous to theirs been put forward on the intellectual plane)—due, in other words, to the characteristic lagging of thought behind life, while comparatively immaterial in the founders and leaders of the Quaker movement, who were all mystics or mystically minded persons, a variation of humanity, peculiar people gathered together, with all their differences, by a common characteristic, seeing their universe in the same terms urged towards unanimous activity—began to bear fruit in the second generation. Mystical genius is not hereditary, and to the comparatively imitative mass making up the later generations the Inward Light becomes a doctrine, a conception as mechanical and static as is the infallible Scripture to the imitative mass of the Protestants.

We may not, of course, apply the term “imitative” in too absolute a sense. All have the light. We are all mystics. We all live our lives on our various levels, at first hand. But a full recognition of this fact need not blind us to the further fact that, while those who have mystical genius need no chart upon their journey, most of us need a plain way traced out for us through the desert. Most of us follow the gleam of doctrine thrown out by first-hand experience, and cling to that as our guide. But if the Quaker message failed as theology, and the later generations swung back to the simpler doctrine of Protestantism and re-enthroned an infallible Scripture, something, nevertheless, had been done. Within the precincts of Quakerism certain paths backwards were, so to say, permanently blocked. A fresh type of conduct was assured. The world, the environment in which the new lives of the group were to arise, had been changed for ever.

The working out of the logical insecurity of the Quaker position is interestingly shown in the person of George Keith, intellectually the richest of the early Quakers, a man whose writings have been acknowledged by his fellows, and would still stand if he had not left the group, as amongst the best expositions of the Quaker attitude.

He was a Scotch Presbyterian, and seems to have joined the Quakers while still a student at Aberdeen University. For nearly thirty years he was under the spell of the Quaker reading of life, and lived during this time well in the forefront of public discussion and persecution. We find him writing books and pamphlets in and out of prison, full of the ardour and the joy of his discovery that there are to-day immediate revelations, speaking with delight of the meaning and use of silence, defending his new faith before Presbyterian divines and University students, declaring that he found Friends “wiser than all the teachers I ever formerly had been under.”