V.
If Fox had been only the liberator of the mystical forces moving and quickening under the drying crust of official and authoritarian theology, he would have left on the outward form of the religious life of his country as little mark as did his great brother Boehme on his. But he was more than liberator. He was also steersman. It was his organizing genius that laid the foundation of a new religious culture; a culture in which sacraments and symbols, politics and authoritarianism should play no part—a culture which took no account of “persons,” “notions,” or “theories,” which put being before “knowing,” intuition before intellection, which dared to trust in and enquire of women, not in name only, but in fact.
The vitality of the society he founded is the test of the organizing genius of this “madman.”
It has had its critical period. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it sank into Quietism, and thence back to a pre-Quaker pietist biblicism, in which the nature of Fox’s contribution to religion—his restatement, both in life and in church method of the immediacy, the “originality” of the Christ-life, the life of God in man—was almost lost to view. But the culture-ground, the means of grace, the Quaker “method” of quiet waiting on God, the unflinching faith, remained untouched, the little church survived and in due time revival took place. To-day, in spite of the strong leaven of biblicism, the Quaker church serves (as I have pointed out elsewhere)[1] as a sorting-house for mystics and persons of the mystical type, and lies a radiating centre of divine common-sense, of practical loving wisdom at the heart of English religious life.
VI.
What Fox did with the unconsciousness of genius, modern thought is elaborating and explaining. “Experts” in all departments of knowledge are at the confessional declaring their bankruptcy. Science admits her helplessness to do more than collect and describe phenomena, and begs implicitly to rank as a servant rather than a guide (thereby, incidentally coming for the first time to her full height and value).
Metaphysic, come out at last from her academic seclusion to the light of common day, points the way to the threshold of reality, declares that we may possess and be possessed by it, not via the intellect, but directly by intuition. This reality that we ignorantly worship the mystics have declared to us as goodness, beauty and truth. Fox called it God in man, the life, the seed, the divine light latent in every son of man, and once in the life of this planet fully and completely informing a human frame.
PART I.
NARRATIVE PASSAGES.
NOTE.
The reference “C.J.” indicates the Cambridge edition of Fox’s Journal, compiled from original MSS. (Cambs. Univ. Press. 1911); “Works,” refer to the Philadelphia edition of Fox’s printed works. Punctuation, which varies in the different editions and is almost lacking in MSS. and of course in literal transcripts, has been altered or inserted by the compiler, as seemed needful.