Rise of Quakerism.
The origin of the Quakers, as they were first derisively called,[363] of the Friends, as they prefer to be designated, was under the Commonwealth. Then the freedom granted to enquiry within Evangelical limits, the violent reaction which had set in against the forms and ceremonies of Anglo-Catholicism, the generally unsettled state of religious thought, the activity of tendencies towards a sort of ultra-spirituality, and a natural craving—amidst the revolutions of an age which tore up old conventionalities of belief—to get at the pure substance of truth, and at the heart of things, combined to draw out and to nourish whatever of the mystical element there might be in English souls. Sympathies of that order were vaguely working and were indefinitely expressed in many quarters.
Quakerism, as a congenial centre, speedily attracted them to itself. The true Friend, travelling in modern days on religious service, finds in churches the most remote, persons whose inner life presents strange affinities to his own. Discoursing in his peculiar way upon the mysteries of religious experience, he evokes recognitions of brotherhood from the Spanish Catholic and the Russian Greek;[364] no wonder, therefore, when mysticism in England found for itself such a voice in the middle of the seventeenth century, that it soon drew within the circle of its fellowship thousands who were waiting for its call.
George Fox.
The rise of Quakerism must be sought in the life of its founder. If ever the child was father to the man, it certainly was so in the case of George Fox. Born of humble but virtuous parents—his father, Christopher, an honest weaver, winning amongst his companions the name of "righteous Christer;" his mother, Mary Lago, a pure-minded woman, sprung from a family stock which had borne fruits of martyrdom—he was not likely in his early days to see much of immorality, nor were the folks who crossed his parents' threshold, and whom the boy heard talking round the hearth-stone, likely to be otherwise than of the better sort in morals; yet their cheerfulness and mirth shocked little George so much, that he would say within himself, "If ever I come to be a man surely I will not be so wanton." He was too precocious to like childish games, and shewed his activity of intellect and depth of feeling in strange questions about religion, and in ways of worship unlike his mother's. When only eleven, he had inward monitions, inclining him to an ascetic life, and impulses which two hundred years earlier would have made a youth of his stamp an exemplary monk. Apprenticed to a dealer in leather and wool, who bred sheep for the sake of the fleece, George was set to watch the flocks, and in his shepherd life he found "a just emblem of his after ministry and service." As he grew older, men admired the justness of his dealings, and in his "verily" found what was more than equivalent to another man's oath, so that it became a proverb, "If George says verily there is no altering him." When business or persuasion took him to the market or the fair, his righteous soul was vexed with what he saw and heard—for even drinking healths appeared offensive—and he would return from the gaiety of the gathering to mourn in secret, through sleepless nights, over the world's vanity and sin. He resolved to separate from his acquaintances and to spend a life of retirement and devotion. None of the professions of religion in those days met his views. The Episcopal Church seemed little better than the world—Baptists and Independents were not sufficiently spiritual—current forms of theology did not supply the necessities of the young enquirer—and therefore in solitude and fasting, in the Scriptures, and in communion with his own deep thoughts, George Fox sought to satisfy the hunger of his soul.[365]
The intellectual character of this remarkable person is not easily measured. Possessing little of the logical faculty, eschewing argumentative forms of thought, and altogether ignorant of Baconian methods of induction, he had nevertheless a keen, lightning-like power of penetrating hidden truths and of laying open secret things. By intuitive perception he reached spiritual truths. He felt a great deal to be right which he could not prove to be so; and much which to men of another mould seemed occult and shadowy, to him appeared firmer than the earth on which he trod. He cared not for the coverings of truth, the nakeder it was to him the better. He could boast of no poetical imagination, yet he possessed a prodigious power of realizing what he believed, and had he been a school-man, he would have been as decided a Realist as Thomas Aquinas.
George Fox had strong sympathies with what is spiritual everywhere and in all things, but especially with what is so in religion. As in striving after truth he was ever breaking shells to get at kernels, so in his pantings for fellowship with God, which constituted the most pressing need of his nature, he was intolerant of forms. He had no patience with any ceremonial avenues by which to walk up to the temple of the Eternal, but rather longed for an eagle's wing to fly at once to the mount of God; forgetful, in his sincere raptures, of the conditions of humanity, and not considering that in the pursuit of the noblest as of the humblest ends, mortals cannot dispense with means, and that we are all of us two-sided beings, needing helps from without to strengthen and preserve what is most Divine within.
In morals his character was more than unimpeachable. Rarely has a man been found so just and true, so virtuous and temperate, so benevolent and pacific; although, withal, so bold, and even severe in rebuking falsehood, hypocrisy, and every kind of sin. His moral indignation, which was sometimes misplaced, made him forgetful of the courtesies of life, and the rudeness which he thus displayed served to increase both the animosity and the number of his enemies.[366]
George Fox.