A Book of Quaker Saints

by L. V. Hodgkin

These flax-weavers of Brigflatts were a company of 'Seekers,' unsatisfied souls who had strayed away like lost sheep from all the sects and Churches, and were longing for a spiritual Shepherd to come and find them again and bring them home to the fold.

George Fox was a weaver's son himself. Directly he heard it, the whirr of the looms beside the rushing Rawthey must have been a homelike sound in his ears. But more than that, his spirit was immediately at home among the little colony of weavers of snowy linen; for he recognised at once that these were the riverside people 'in white raiment,' whom he had seen in his vision, and to whom he had been sent.

Not only the flax-weavers, but also some of the 'considerable people' of the neighbourhood accepted the message of the wandering preacher, who came to them over the dales that memorable Whitsuntide. The master of the house where the meeting was held, Colonel Gervase Benson himself, and his good wife Dorothy also, were 'convinced of Truth,' and faithfully did they adhere thereafter to their new faith, through fair weather and foul. In later years, men noted that this same Colonel Benson, following his teacher's love of simplicity, and hatred of high-sounding titles, generally styled himself merely a 'husbandman,' notwithstanding 'the height and glory of the world that he had a great share of,'[4] seeing that 'he had been a Colonel, a Justice of the Peace, Mayor of Kendal, and Commissary in the Archdeaconry of Richmond before the late domestic wars. Yet, as an humble servant of Christ, he downed those things.'[5] His wife, Mistress Dorothy, also, was to prove herself a faithful friend to her teacher in after years, when his turn, and her turn too, came to suffer for 'Truth's sake.'

But in these opening summer days of 1652, no shadows fell on the sunrise of enthusiasm and of hope, as, in the good Justice's house beside the rushing Rawthey, the gathering of the 'great people' began.

The day was Whitsunday, the anniversary of that other gathering in the upper room at Jerusalem, when the Apostles being all 'in one place, with one accord, of one mind,' the rushing mighty Wind came and shook all the place where they were sitting, followed by the cloven tongues 'like as of fire, that sat upon each of them.'

The gift given at Pentecost has never been recalled. Throughout the ages the Spirit waits to take possession of human hearts, ready to fill even the humblest lives with Its Own Power of breath and flame.

This was the Truth that had grown dusty and neglected in England in this seventeenth century. The 'still, small Voice' had been drowned in the clash of arms and in the almost worse clamour of a thousand different sects. Now that, after his own long search in loneliness and darkness, George Fox had at length found the Voice speaking to him unmistakably in the depths of his own heart, the whole object of his life was to persuade others to listen also to 'the true Teacher that is within,' and to convince them that He was always waiting to speak not only in their hearts, but also through their lives. 'My message unto them from the Lord was,' he says, 'that they should all come together again and wait to feel the Lord's power and spirit in themselves, to gather them together to Christ, that they might be taught of Him who says "Learn of Me."'

This was the Truth—an actual, living Truth—that not only the flax-weavers of Brigflatts, but many other companies of 'Seekers' scattered through the dales of Yorkshire and Westmorland, as well as in many other places, had been longing to hear proclaimed. 'Thirsty Souls that hunger' was one of the names by which they called themselves. It was to these thirsty, hungering Souls that George Fox had been led at the very moment when he was burning to share with others the vision of the 'wide horizons of the future' that had been unfolded to him on the top of old Pendle Hill.

No wonder that the Seekers welcomed him and flocked round him, drinking in his words as if their thirsty souls could never have enough. No wonder that he welcomed them with equal gladness, rejoicing not only in their joy, but yet more in that he saw his vision's fulfilment beginning. Here in these secluded villages he had been led unmistakably to the 'Great People,' whom he had seen afar off, waiting to be gathered.

Within a fortnight from that assembly on Whit-Sunday at Justice Benson's house George Fox was no longer a solitary, wandering teacher, trying to convince scattered people here and there of the Truths he had discovered. Within a fortnight—a wonderful fortnight truly—he had become the leader of a mighty movement that gathered adherents and grew of itself, spreading with an irresistible impulse until, only a few years later, one Englishman out of every ninety was a member of the SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.