THE ESSENTIALS OF QUAKERISM

BY WILLIAM C. BRAITHWAITE

Introductory Words

It is with great diffidence that we from England venture to speak to the American Yearly Meetings. Our circumstances and the problems we have to face are often so different that it would be presumptuous in us to feel that we had advice on matters of detail that would deserve very great attention from you. But when it comes to our common history and to the common inheritance we have in the principles and faith of the Society of Friends, we may speak freely.

We represent the main body of those who call themselves “Friends.” The Yearly Meetings from which we come connect by continuous history with the first Quaker Churches of two hundred and fifty years [12] ago. Of course when we compare ourselves as we are now, with the first Friends, we find great differences, as great undoubtedly as exist between the New Englander of to-day and the Pilgrim Fathers. We should find much to astonish if we could peep in at one of those first London meetings held in the summer of the year 1655 at the Bull and Mouth, the great “tavern-chapel” in Aldersgate, in which you could then crowd a thousand people standing. I fancy these meetings may have been rather like some of your pioneer meetings in the West. But the pioneers of the London work, Howgill and Burrough, would find modern Quakerism, whether in England or in the Middle West, a strange thing. It takes a wise man to recognize his own great-great-great-great grandchildren. They have an inheritance that connects them up with their ancestor, but their environment is so different that on the surface they seem to have been changed into another type of man. At bottom, however, we shall find that the inherited type will continue.

In other words, the inner life of a religious movement remains, although the expression of that life will greatly vary under changing conditions of time and place.

I.

In order to get at the essentials of Quakerism, we do well to go back to the beginnings, to those first years of nascent energy which carried the Quaker message through the English-speaking world. Whenever a new truth starts to life, it is intensely dynamic and vital; it masters every opposing circumstance; it flings itself victoriously against a stubborn world. It is a thing of life and movement, and I believe it will be found that a live truth in motion is the mightiest of all forces. But, a generation later, unless the vital forces have been cherished, the emphasis comes to be laid on establishment rather than movement, and when a thing gets established it usually ceases to move; the emphasis comes to [14] be laid on dogma instead of truth, on organization instead of life, and the day of glory and power passes away. That was the case with Quakerism.

Two things, I believe, leave a vivid impression upon any student of the early Quaker movement. They can be stated quite simply, but they make up together the fundamentals of Quakerism to which everything else belongs as a natural consequence.

In the first place we find ourselves among men and women of an intense sincerity, who are seeking truth with all the energy of their faith, all the energy of their nature, and, in the second place, we become aware that this earnest search after the Kingdom of God and its righteousness was rewarded with a great finding, a rich personal experience in their lives, of the living presence of Jesus Christ, their Savior.

We know now that communities who called themselves “Seekers” were specially receptive of the Quaker message, and became the main strength of the new movement. In that Puritan age, filled with [15] religious zeal, there were many honest-hearted men craving after something more real than the mere outward profession of religion. They were not satisfied with the triumphant religion of the time, which put strong emphasis, and rightly put strong emphasis, on belief in the great historical facts of Christianity, but had little or no conception of Christ’s living presence in the world to-day. And when Fox told these honest-hearted Seekers that he knew in his own experience that Jesus Christ was come to teach His people Himself, their souls leapt up to welcome the Divine Guest. Fox himself was a man of intense sincerity, who found actually in his own spirit the place where the seed of Divine life was springing up, the place where the voice of a Divine teacher was being uttered, the place that was being inhabited by a Divine and glorious presence. He could tell the great company of Seekers who met at Firbank Fell in Westmorland on that memorable afternoon in June, 1652, not only of an historical Christ, but of a living Savior, their Teacher to instruct them, [16] their Governor to direct them, their Shepherd to feed them, their Bishop to oversee them, their Prophet to open Divine mysteries to them. I am giving you the points of his three-hour sermon on that occasion. Their bodies, he said, were intended to be temples for Jesus Christ to dwell in. They were to be brought off from the temples, tithes, priests and rudiments of the world. They were to come to the Spirit of God in themselves and to Christ the Substance.

The new message opened out a new way of life to men who were sincere enough to go through with it and to live it out. It carried with it a radical transformation or rather transfiguration of life from the earthly into the Heavenly. I will give a passage in the quaint English of the time in which Edward Burrough, himself one of these Westmorland Seekers, describes the experience:

“In all things we found the Light which we were enlightened withal, and all mankind (which is Christ), to be alone and only sufficient to bring to Life and eternal [17] salvation. And so we ceased from the teachings of all men, and their words, and their worships and their temples, and all their baptisms and churches, and we met together often, and waited upon the Lord in pure silence, from our own words and all men’s words, and hearkened to the voice of the Lord, and felt His word in our hearts to burn up and beat down all that was contrary to God, and we obeyed the Light of Christ in us, and took up the cross to all earthly glories, crowns and ways, and denied ourselves, our relations and all that stood in the way betwixt us and the Lord, and, while waiting upon the Lord in silence, as often we did for many hours together, we received often the pouring down of the Spirit upon us, and our hearts were made glad and our tongues loosed and our mouths opened, and we spake with new tongues, as the Lord gave us utterance, and as His Spirit led us, which was poured down upon us, on sons and daughters, and the glory of the Father was revealed. And then began we to sing praises to the Lord God Almighty and to the Lamb [18] forever, who had redeemed us to God, and brought us out of the captivity and bondage of the world, and put an end to sin and death,—and all this was by and through and in the Light of Christ within us.”[Footnote 1]

Now, it is not my purpose to examine this experience from the side either of psychology or dogmatic theology. There are psychologists and theologians, too, with whom I could not venture to compare myself, but it is enough to take the great experience simply as historical fact. There can be no question that two hundred and fifty years ago actual living intercourse with the Divine, such as Burrough describes, gathered the first Friends into their wonderful fellowship. It lifted them into an order of life which set them in a place of vision and power and joy. They saw the things of time in the light of eternity. They knew what it was to overcome the world, so that nothing could daunt their faith. In the words of one of the finest of the first Friends, William Dewsbury, the very prisons became palaces [19] to them and the bolts and locks jewels. The Kingdom of Heaven was theirs, not indeed bringing the prizes of worldly ambition, but filling life with something richer, righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. And all this was the reward and the result of a single-hearted sincerity,—full righteousness of heart, full humility of soul, full searching after truth, full opening of the heart to the incoming of the Divine life. It had been won, as men count, at a great price. It had meant a breach with the current fashions of life and forms of religion; it had meant a daring following of fresh truth through all its untried consequences; it had meant suffering and loss; it had meant the daily crossing of the carnal mind. It had meant all these things, yes, but it had meant also the incoming of the Life of Christ, bringing men into a new fellowship with one another and with God.

We have to admit that in the first tide of this wonderful experience there were some serious extravagances of thought and conduct. It would be strange, I suppose, [20] if newly opened eyes did not sometimes see men as trees walking. You get these extravagances when a fresh faculty of the soul is awaking to its powers. But the main phenomenon of Quakerism is the heightened personality which undoubtedly came to the Children of the Light. They were men and women to “shake their country in their profession for ten miles round,” as some of our Friends have done in the Western states. Their very look carried with it the sentence of honor or shame. Their words had a challenging power, challenging men’s consciences, forcing them to face the issues of good and evil, shattering self-complacency and self-righteousness. The Quaker was an impregnable man, his principles were held with an extraordinary tenacity. He stood not on a sandy foundation of notions, but on a rock of experience, and thus founded the man was sure and steadfast. The message of a present living Christ within the heart and a present Kingdom of God awaiting those who would receive it burned in the heart of these first Friends. It burned [21] in their hearts as a gospel for all men. It is a great mistake to suppose that the Quaker Church was founded as a sect. It had nothing sectarian about it. It had a great message of vital spiritual experience to give to the whole world. These first Friends were evangelists of vital Christianity.

They began as our evangelists to-day begin, by warning men to repent. George Fox went up Wensleydale calling on men to repent, for the day of the Lord was at hand, and proclaiming the Kingdom of Christ at the door of men’s hearts, for them to take or reject. That is the spirit of this early Quakerism, and it surely takes us back to the spirit of the prophets and of primitive Christianity.

II.

The centering of life on the realities of inward intercourse with God is the great mark of the prophetic and apostolic type of religion and is in sharp contrast with religion of the priestly or institutional type. The prophet was a man who knew [22] what it was to have converse with Jehovah and sure knowledge of His will. He became a Seer, a man of insight and foresight, aware of the true values of things, the true values as weighed in the balance of the sanctuary. He became thereby a great social and moral reformer. His ideal was of a time when all would be prophets—when “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” And we may remember that this ideal is recognized on the day of Pentecost as the natural first-fruits of the Spirit. If it had been realized the Church would have been a school of prophets from generation to generation. Unfortunately the Church has more often stifled the seer and glorified the priest.

As I understand it, it is the specific mission of Quakerism to propagate a Christianity of this prophetic, apostolic type, a Christianity in which the Church is a living fellowship of disciples at work for the social and moral ends of the Kingdom of God. But the Church is not simply, in the [23] Quaker conception, a fellowship of disciples at work for the Kingdom of God; it is such a fellowship plus Jesus Christ Himself, in whose Spirit, the Spirit which unites them one to another and to Him, they become together “one flock, one Shepherd.”

Fellowships, made up of groups of men and women who are with Christ, redeemed by Him, learning from Him, following Him, helping in His work, looking out on life with something of His devotion to the will of God and His passion to seek and save the lost—such are the true Quaker Churches. It is worth while to analyze the conception a little. The Church, we say, is a living fellowship—not in the first place an organization, but in the first place an organism—not an institution, but a body, built up of many cells, many individuals, just as the body has cells that grow and change and perform their several functions under the direction of an all-pervading, all-embracing life. That is what a living fellowship means. This life received through direct contact with the Divine life is the one essential of the Christian Church. It is the business [24] of the Church to see that it is fostered in every possible way, so that the body may freely grow under its influence and freely express the life in all forms of worthy living.

Historically, Quakerism is the product of this vital experience and while we gladly recognize that the experience is shared by us with many other branches of the Christian Church, it remains true that no other religious community so deliberately and emphatically bases its individual and corporate life upon this supreme fact of the soul’s immediate contact with God.

Our special position among the churches is sometimes stated—not by the Five Years’ Meeting—in a series of desolating negatives. We do not practice water baptism, nor partake of the outward elements of the Lord’s Supper, we are against war and oaths and priestcraft, our meetings are held on a basis of silence, and so on—all negatives. But we were gathered as a people out of the world through the force of dynamic positives. We withstand priestcraft because every disciple is ordained for [25] service. As George Fox said, every man hath an office and is serviceable. We witness against oaths, because we uphold a single standard of truth speaking, and against distinctions of dress and address, because all men are equal in the sight of God; we oppose war because the armor of the children of light is the armor of righteousness, and disuse the outward form of baptism because the all-important thing is not the form but the inward repentance and cleansing by the blood of Christ. We cannot narrow down the experience of communion with our Lord to special ceremonials and places and ministrants, when we hold that Jesus offers Himself as the Bread of Life to His people day by day—in the home, in the factory, at business, in all our common work and in all our loftiest worship—the whole of life may be a sacrament of communion with Jesus Christ.

It is as a “religion of life” that Quakerism will be presented in the future and is being presented now.

Its distinguishing note will be its resolve [26] to bring all this human life of ours under the transforming power of spiritual life. It will stand out against all divisions and compartments that separate the sacred from the secular, the sanctuary from the outward world of nature, the sacrament from the day’s common work, the clergy from the laity.

It will tell of a Christian experience that makes all life sacred and all days holy, all nature a sanctuary, all work a sacrament, and gives to every man and woman in the body fit place and service. Its concern will be to multiply men and women who will have a message of power because they are themselves living in the power of God, who will spread the light because they are themselves the children of light. It will claim the whole of a man’s life, and the whole of life, individual, social, national, international, for the dominion of the will of God.

III.

So then the question comes: How can we foster this life? How can the Church [27] continue, through a succession of generations and amid manifold changes of circumstance and thought, not merely its name and organization, its tradition of the fathers and its orthodoxy of language, but a living body of Christ, which shall embody Him, as He would make Himself known to each age?

That is the supreme question. Unless the Church does that, it misrepresents its Lord and hinders the coming of His Kingdom.

Everything must be thought of in terms of vital relation if we are to see our way to an answer. We are dealing with life, and it is life, a unity of life, that connects the individual Christian with his Savior and with his fellow-Christians.

I know vital relations are costly things; it is comparatively easy to preach and profess; it is not easy to give ourselves. But vital relations are abundantly fruitful, and that supreme giving of life which we associate with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is, we know, the most fruitful vital relation that has ever been exhibited in history. [28] “He, the Son of man, gave his life a ransom for many”—for the whole world.

Dr.Hort has finely said:

“In the times when Christianity owed nothing to custom and tradition, and when all the ways of ordinary society tended to draw men away from it, what drew them to it and held them to it, despite all persecution, was the power of its life.... Life calling to life was the one victorious power which mastered men and women of all conditions and all grades of culture.”[Footnote 2]

We cannot commend the Kingdom of God to the world through institutions that are starched and stiff, but only by the living, warm, expansive touch of human hearts reaching out in fellowship to others.

Men substitute tradition for the living experience of the love of God. They talk and think as though walking with God was attained by walking in the footsteps of men who walked with God. There has been a great deal of that in the Quaker Church.

They substitute authority for leadership, [29] the authority of the men of the past for the inspiration of men who have vision and first-hand experience of truth to-day. They substitute conventional methods—we have had a great deal of that, too—for the natural arrangements which a living fellowship of disciples would make and modify from time to time and place to place. They substitute a cold organization for a warm fellowship, an outward profession for an inward experience, priestly agency for personal responsibility, dogmatic teaching for education, almsgiving for personal social service, sectarian ends for the great purposes of the Kingdom of God.

There is no end to the cheap substitutes offered for the use of the Church. Almost all of them are methods for running the Christian Society with the minimum of spiritual energy, seeing how little spiritual life you can manage with, whereas our aim ought to be to generate and use the maximum in the illimitable service of the Kingdom of God.

A religion of life must devote itself to vital processes and vital relations. These [30] are the things that concern our truest welfare. Take the chief:—loyal discipleship, inspired leadership, warm fellowship, loving service, steady spiritual growth; every one of them vital processes. Look at them in order just sufficiently to get them well in mind.

Jesus Christ, so far as we know, wrote nothing, He organized no religious society, He formulated no creed, but what He did was to gather around Himself a band of disciples, men and women, who received His spirit, and in turn would bring others into touch with the life which had redeemed them. His life, springing up in the lives of men, was to be fundamentally that which should regenerate the world.

The act of discipleship was following Jesus. It began with personal adherence to the Lord, and it continued through personal communion with Him. In art and in learning we know how stimulating the daily contact of teacher and disciple proves to be—the disciple’s spirit kindled by the enkindled spirit of his teacher, the coming together of teacher and scholars [31] into a common life and a common purpose. That is why the colleges of American Quakerism have been such great forces. Still greater, vastly greater, is the discipleship which is ours in the School of Christ. It calls for the fullest dedication, the closest following, the daily taking of the cross, but it gives us Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Discipleship then is the first vital relation that must be always energizing the Church, but next in order comes inspired leadership.

The great initial success of Quakerism was due, beyond all else, so far as human means went, to the traveling “Publishers of Truth,” as they called themselves, who carried their burning message far and wide; they were like rich life-blood circulating freely through the body. They were for the most part men and women of competent Bible knowledge and religious training, men with intense sincerity, with a great experience, who were talking about Christ because they knew Him. They went out on a devoted service, which no privations or persecutions could daunt, and many of [32] them were young men in the prime of their ardor and strength, who would follow the movings of life rather than the counsels of prudence—and we want those in the Church. The Church must be prepared to take a few risks with its young men. After all, the hearts of the young are burning for a crusade.

In the days of persecution which came upon the Quaker Church there was a great mortality among these leaders and unfortunately the supply of new leaders was small, indeed, ever since that glorious morning of Quakerism, the equipment of the Quaker Church with inspired leaders has been a pressing problem. It is our business to raise up not priests but prophets, Christian men and women of trained intelligence and wide outlook, who know God and have a sure insight into the great social and spiritual needs of humanity, whose lives have been redeemed, whose hearts have been touched with the live coal from off the altar. There is no place in vital religion for the vested interests of a clerical caste, nor the dead hand of tradition, nor the [33] compulsion of conscience by the authority of the expert; but there is every need for a leadership, which continues the past in a living experience and educates and inspires and illuminates. A democracy requires leadership, not the leadership of authority, but what we may call, to use the constitution of the Five Years Meeting, an advisory leadership, moving along channels of inspiration and personal influence. “For lack of vision the people perish.”

The third great vital relation that the Church has to be fostering is warm fellowship. A few degrees of temperature may alter a climate and introduce wonderful possibilities of new life. Change the climate and you change the kinds of growth which may come into the world. It is very much the same with the Church. I remember a story of a little girl who was taken into a cold church one winter’s day. She got in at one end and could scarcely hear what the preacher was talking about. After church she went home and her mother asked her: “Nellie, what was the text to-day?” She answered, “I couldn’t hear [34] it very well, but I think it was ‘Many are cold but few frozen.’”

I think congregations have sometimes preached that sermon. It is oftener preached by the congregation than by the minister.

Quakerism at times has suffered from a frigidity of climate which has repressed and repelled. In the first centuries Christianity became a great power, because it was a great brotherhood. Surely we need to warm up our church organization so that it becomes quickened into a living fellowship. We want a Christianity with the brotherliness left in and the starch taken out. I remember seeing an advertisement, “Catlow’s preserves, boiled in silver pans.” What it meant was this: you got the sugar, you got the fruit, and you got nothing else. That is what we want in our Christianity. We want the sweetness and we want the fruitfulness. We don’t want much else. We don’t want frigidity, we don’t want starch.

Group life with a strong fellowship about it has always been a Quaker characteristic. [35] In the early days it was groups of Seekers who embraced the message of Fox, and in England we still find Friends settled in groups over the country. I notice, in the expansion of Quakerism in the far West, that it is colonies of Friends you get. You cannot have a diffused Quakerism diffused over the whole State of Nebraska or California, but you can have a few groups of Friends at particular points. But group life means a great deal more than the collection of persons within the four walls of a particular building. It means a life in community and comradeship, because the members are joined together actually and vitally in a common Lord and a common discipleship. It means, as with the limbs of the body, that the gifts and activities of each are freely used for the service of the whole. It means that each shares in and contributes to the larger life of the whole.

Then there is the need for loving service. A Church is not an end in itself, not a club where we sit at ease in Zion; it is a means to an end. It ought to be, in the phrase [36] of our early Friends, a “camp of the Lord.” It needs to have the purposes of the Kingdom of God ringing in its ears all the time. It needs to be vowed to the great redemptive work of seeking and saving the lost. It will be rightly judged by its output of service for the Kingdom of God. I fancy that the weakness of modern Christianity is very similar to the besetting weakness of civilization. We grasp our privileges and shirk our responsibilities. The healthy Church fixes each member with personal responsibility for using the life which he has received. It finds work for all to do. It knows that activity is the natural expression of life, and that the torpor of any part spells atrophy and death.

Last of my list is what I have called steady, spiritual growth. The vital relations which are the wealth of the Church not only bring about a unity of life with God and with one another, but produce that progressive development of personality that we call growth.

These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves all the time: Are our [37] church members bigger men and women inwardly than a year ago?

Are they stronger in faith, more radiant in hope, warmer in love?

Have their spiritual senses developed? Do they see more of truth, hear more readily the Divine voice, respond more quickly to the guidance of the Spirit?

Are their consciences alert, their loins girt, their hands eager for sacrifice and service?

Here surely is what we may call the intensive work of the Church, the making of men and women not after the pattern of the world, but after the pattern of Jesus Christ, who shall go forth in His power and spirit to serve the Kingdom of God.

Now, we might well enlarge on these five important vital processes—discipleship, leadership, fellowship, service and growth. But my purpose will have been served if I have said enough to bring home to you the fact that these are the things that matter, the things that are of vital importance in the Church. Methods and machinery, organization and Church discipline have a [38] value of their own, but only a subordinate value to these prime factors of health. If these lesser things are accepted as a substitute for the vital factors, the Church becomes weak. If they are allowed to limit the development of the life, the Church may become dwarfed and deadened. Their true function, the true function of organization and discipline and these other matters, is surely large enough—namely, to provide means with which and through which the life can readily work.

IV.

In vital Quakerism then, the form has continually to be subordinated to the life. The life must be allowed free expression from time to time and place to place according to the varying needs and circumstances. In a word, the form must be kept plastic. This should be as much a fundamental of religious biology as it is of physiology.

The physiologist tells us that living matter is always soft and jelly-like. It is matter in a jelly-like state, permitting of the free play of molecular interchanges, so that [39] it is called a “dynamical state of matter.” That is the general statement about living matter which the physiologist has to make to us to-day. It is essential that it should be plastic, able to grow, able to change its shape from time to time. It is always changing its form, as may be seen in the colorless cells of the blood. It has been said, and said truly, that no one of us is the same person we were seven years ago, every little bit of us has been changed in the interval. Living matter does not grow like the crystal, by the addition of new matter on its surfaces. It grows by absorbing matter into its substance and transforming that into matter like itself.

It should surely be the same in the life of institutions. The form should be flexible so that the life may be continually growing and changing its form according to the great directing control which the life exerts upon the body, and you want ease and flexibility in organizations just as you do in clothes. If you do not have this, you will have a good deal of chafing and cramping. Sometimes, perhaps, a growing boy [40] will burst his waistcoat. It is a great mistake to try to fit the man to the clothes when we ought to be fitting the clothes to the man, but it is a mistake that the Quaker Church has frequently made.

In Church life, our own included, the letter that killeth has again and again encroached upon the quickening spirit. Outward government and external rules have limited spiritual guidance. The desire to preserve the deposit of faith has crystalized vital experience into formularies and creeds. Emphasis has been laid upon life according to some stereotyped standard with a particular cut of collar and a particular mode of language and the life of the spirit has been quenched. But where the Spirit of God has been allowed freely to work upon the groups of disciples there has been a wonderful expansion of Christianity of a vital kind. This has been largely the case in the great foreign missionary work of the Churches, and in our Adult School movement in England, and in the pioneer work of Quakerism in the Western states.

[41] If spiritual life is allowed to be the controlling, directing, molding force in Quakerism I have no fear for our future. We shall put in the forefront of our Church work the things that belong to life, the gathering of disciples, the raising of leaders and prophets, the maintenance of warm fellowship, the encouragement of service, the fostering of growth. This means that our Church arrangements will be so made and modified as to promote and secure the expression through them of the living forces which we have at our command. Those living forces are the spiritual force of the individual, which we call individual responsibility, the living force of the group, which we call fellowship, and above all, the Divine vitality, the incoming of the life of Jesus Christ, which we call spiritual power and spiritual guidance. Church arrangements, important in themselves, must be regarded as simply machinery through which forces can work, and the more efficiently the machinery allows the forces to work, the richer will be the service of the Church.

[42] Let us consider the way in which these great forces get to work. I will take the meetings of the Church as my illustration. I am not one who says that the only kind of Friends’ meeting is a meeting for worship. I believe that there are three or four types of Friends’ meetings, in all of which we may have personal responsibility and group fellowship and the spiritual power and guidance of Jesus Christ.

Take first—it comes first—the evangelistic service, the meeting which seeks to do the primary work of the Church, by bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to man, the living gospel of a living Savior. For such a meeting you want a man who feels his personal responsibility, who feels that he is speaking as the ambassador of Jesus Christ, called, chosen, faithful, with a freshly given message of truth on his lips, but you want also behind him to back him the fellowship and sympathy of a group of earnest souls, who are helping the meeting by their prayer and sympathy, and who perhaps themselves will have some share in the delivery of the message or in [43] the other outward service of the meeting. Moreover, the ingathering of disciples is a matter not only for evangelistic services, but for individual personal influence. Andrew findeth his own brother Simon: Philip findeth Nathanael. The men and women reached will need from the first to be surrounded with a new set of companions and to be brought into a new fellowship. They will need, not simply one service on a Sunday stimulating them to follow Jesus Christ, but the helpful comradeship of a group bringing them into a knowledge of what it means to live according to the will of God. In the redemptive work which our Adult Schools in England have done in hundreds of cases amongst men and women who had lost their own respect and were down in the gutter, the most fruitful work has been done by bringing men and women a new set of companions, in whose fellowship they may learn what the love of Jesus Christ means.

Take next the Friends’ meeting with worship as its primary object. There you see clearly the three-fold play of these [44] same forces of personal responsibility, group-fellowship and spiritual guidance. Worship in fellowship is an intensely active thing. Its basis is not an inert stillness, but a waiting upon God in the unity of the spirit. The meetings of the first Friends were radiant with the joy of Christ’s indwelling life. There were times of living fellowship and communion, warm with the central fires of Divine love, so delightful that sometimes they could hardly break them up and would stay far into the night.

The meeting for worship, more than any other agency, has given the world the Quaker type of character—the man or woman who meets life’s problems simply and wisely, because he resolves them, not by passion or prejudice, nor mainly by the motions of human wisdom or policy, but by habitually consulting the Light of God which shines in the waiting soul.

The revival in its power of the Quaker meeting is an urgent need in the crowded hurry of this twentieth century, when men live so much upon the surface and so little in the deep places of their lives.

In England, wherever you get earnest-hearted groups of persons together at a special gathering, as an Adult School week end, or a lecture school, or a conference, you find, whether they are Friends or not, that a Friends’ meeting of a free, open kind, with prayer and praise and speech and silent worship all mingled under the guidance of the Spirit, comes as the great crown of all our fellowship and our intercourse, the benediction of all that has taken place, the perfectly natural means through which the common fellowship and purpose are lifted into communion with the life of God. We hardly sufficiently understand the great value in deepening character and consolidating fellowship of meetings of this kind, where there is a common purpose.

The poverty of many Friends’ meetings for worship has lain, I think, in the poverty of common purpose in the congregation. Where there is a common purpose, a sincere waiting upon the Lord in fellowship, their value is very great.

[46] It is the place for withdrawing awhile from the things of outward sense and exercising the faculties of spiritual sense; the place where to the awakened soul the vision of truth may be seen, the Word of the Lord may be heard, the guidings of His hand may be felt; the place where the heart may become aware of its waywardness and want and may gain strength to repent and come to Christ and choose the narrow road of life and dedicated service; the place where many have been able to say, with Isaac Penington, “I have met with my God, I have met with my Savior, and He hath not been present with me without His salvation, but I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His wings.” But it is also the place where the worship we render and the life we receive are parts of a fellowship of worship and of life which comes to the meeting as a whole and finds its natural expression through the lips of one and another as the Spirit touches them to utterance.

There is a third type of meeting, which we may call a teaching meeting, sometimes [47] a Bible class and sometimes a service in which teaching ministry is to the front. There, again, surely you get the same forces in operation. The most vital teaching meetings are those which best combine inspiration, personal influence and fellowship. In true educational work the character and the faculties of a group of scholars are being trained by vital contact with one another and with the teacher. The contact of life with life is going on all the time. My friend, Rufus M. Jones, is quite right in saying that the central weakness of the Friends in the past lay in their failure to appreciate the importance of the fullest education of human personality in mind and soul, and the attention that is now being given to education in the Society of Friends is of the highest value. We cannot overestimate the promise to American Quakerism and to English Quakerism of our great educational institutions.

V.

I have now sought to show that Quakerism at its best is always the product of [48] vital forces, and is always producing vital relations. I say “at its best”; that is the necessary qualification.

This brings me to my last point. What is needed besides the life of the Spirit, the life of Jesus Christ in the Church? Surely what we need is an earnest dedication on the part of those who are seeking to know Jesus Christ. God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.

In the early days of Quakerism men were athirst for the gospel of a living Christ. In the present day, side by side with much indifference and indolence there is a wide-spread craving for reality in religion and life.

Tremendous social problems confront men to-day, new hopes of higher life are coming to the mass of workers, new convictions and new duties are dawning on the world, and fresh questions are being raised in the domains of history, psychology and philosophy. We are probably living in the midst of as great a period of transition as that which formed the bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern Europe, and those alone [49] will find the fuller truth and lead men into it who will bear the travail and follow the trail of the Seekers of the Light. We want men who will get on the top of the situation, men in the spirit of George Fox. When he was overwhelmed by the confusion of the year of anarchy that preceded the Restoration of 1660, he lay in great exercise of spirit at Reading for ten weeks and he writes:

“And so when I had travailed with the witness of God which they had quenched and gotten through with it and over all that hypocrisy ... I came to have ease and the Light shined over all.”[Footnote 3]

It is the duty of the Church to discountenance all the manifold insincerities which disfigure our current Christianity, and to give free scope to honest-hearted love of truth. Sincerity is a plant that thrives under freedom and light, but withers under authority. The Church must use methods of illumination and education and fellowship as its means for cherishing true-hearted allegiance to the Lord. It will find these [50] methods more fruitful than methods of authority. Methods of authority may secure an artificial conformity, but it will always be at some expense of sincerity.

Jesus resolutely turned His back on the quickly won Kingdom of God, to be made up of those who gave Him external obedience; He set Himself to the slow achievement of an inward Kingdom, which should gather men into willing discipleship.

I desire an atmosphere of large-hearted charity and brotherly confidence, which will allow the Seeker after truth to live in the power of his experience, even if it is not a full experience, without being expected to live beyond his experience, an atmosphere which will allow him to make use of all the great aids which we have to-day in the search after truth—the great aids of scientific investigation, and what is still more important, in my opinion, the modern historical method which we are using to-day. We want to have as the motto of our Church the motto of one of our Yorkshire towns, “Weave truth with trust.” We want a Church that believes in the nobility of [51] the truth; as this belief prevails amongst us, so shall we find a deeper reality in all our Church life, and a fresh release of energy and renewal of inspiration. For Quakerism is essentially a religion of sincerity, answered by the incoming of the living Christ.

VI.

What then shall groups of Friends, who have reached the vital experience of which I have been speaking, do with their experience? Surely there are great demands confronting them to-day, great duties and convictions to be entered upon, great Messianic hopes stirring in the world. This world of change is also a world that is fertile in the promise of richer life. There is the passionate craving after truth. Surely we are to stand for reality in religion and life. There is the fresh sense that is coming to men of the meaning and the worth of personality. Men are learning what the early Friends reached as a fact of inner experience, that their hearts could be places where the Divine side of life could spring up, and that here in this world of our own [52] personality, in personal responsibility, personal dedication, personal service, is the very heart of religion.

There is another Messianic hope: Woman’s place in the universe in equal fellowship with man. Surely we can stand for that. We have expressed that in our Church life long before it came as a great hope to the mass of the people.

Then there is the hope of the establishment of the reign of law instead of brute force in international affairs. We stand and have always stood for that.

Again, there is the hope of the better ordering of society, removing the menace of destitution from the poor, securing an equality of opportunity for all, remedying the conditions that produce stunted lives, and giving those whom we call men the chance to become men in reality. The social regeneration of England and America has become to-day a living Messianic hope, making an insistent demand upon the Christian Church. Surely, with our witness to the practical application of Christianity to every part of life, we stand for [53] that. Above all, and finally, there is the great hope of Christ and His Kingdom, not for a few only but for the whole world. With our living experience of Jesus Christ, we must stand for that. Are we not again called to form a vanguard of progress towards the Kingdom of God? Our response to the call depends upon our personal consecration to the task. Behind the Kingdom of God as it is, behind the Kingdom of God as it is to be, there stand the actual groups of disciples, their personal experience, their personal devotion.

Joseph Sturge, the founder of the Adult School movement, once wrote: “It seems to be the will of Him who is infinite in wisdom, that light upon great subjects should first arise and be gradually spread through the faithfulness of individuals in acting up to their own convictions.” This personal witness for truth, based upon a living experience of it, is the great duty laid upon each member of the Quaker Church. It carries with it the necessity for self-sacrifice. We know how the self-sacrifice of our Lord on the cross was the atonement of [54] the world, and the self-sacrifice of men and women, in the spirit of Jesus Christ, has still redemptive force.

We see before the Society of Friends, as it renews its spiritual communion and its warmth of fellowship, a great service for which it has been wonderfully prepared—a service for the revival of vital, prophetic religion and for its expression in righteousness of life—but the service will be fruitful through discipline and suffering; if it is to be redemptive of society it will cost much; those of us who have seen the vision of the future that may be will find our eyes filled with light and our hearts with peace, and our souls will know the springings-up of everlasting life and power, but at the same time our feet must be treading the way of the Cross with our Lord.