George Fox may be variously described. If we look at him from the standpoint of orthodox Catholicism we shall see a heretical genius, a man who tried to re-organise the church and succeeded in establishing a sect—in defiance of the fact of the rarity of the religious and the still greater rarity of the mystical temperament—upon a basis of mystical opportunism, in a condition of divorce from sacraments, culture and tradition. From the Protestant point of view he becomes the man who made a temporarily successful attempt to undermine the authority of the Scriptures; his failure being attested by the return of the majority of the Quakers, from the third generation onwards, to biblicism—their tacit throwing up of their earlier position with regard to the inward light. The “free” churches find in Fox the collector and organizer of a type of Christian believers whose shining record has so fully justified his essential soundness and unity with the main purpose of Christendom that minor differences may be ignored. Here and there an attempt has been made to disentangle the essential distinction of the man himself from his relation to groups and abstract ideas, and to show that distinctive character working itself out in his life and writings, and in the varying history of the church he founded. II.To the present writer George Fox appeals not only by the inherent strength of his mystical genius, not only because amongst his fellows in the mystical family he is, characteristically, the practical western layman, the market-place witness for the spiritual consciousness in every man, but also because he is, essentially, the English mystic—because he represents, at the height of its first blossoming, the peculiar genius of the English “temperament.” He is English particularism, English independency and individualism expressed in terms of religion, and offering its challenge, for the first time, in the His fellows and predecessors, the German mystics of the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, brought, it is true, the same message, the same account of the pathway to reality as did Fox, but they brought it in a restricted form. They were largely dominated by tradition, they remained, most of them, within the official church, and those who did not met secretly and laboured behind closed doors. It was in George Fox that religious particularism, the outcome of the civilization whose cradle was the little isolated homesteads upon the Scandinavian fiords, reached its full flower. With him there re-appears in the form of an experiment in everyday life, in the heart of the modern state, the truth that dawned in Palestine sixteen hundred years before, the truth that was side-tracked but never quite lost amidst the policies, expediencies and jealousies of the official church, that has been clearing and elaborating itself with increasing steadiness ever since the seventeenth century, the truth that only in individuality carried to its full term can we find the basis of unity. Unity amongst Fox and his followers is the fruit and fulfilment of separateness. In order truly to love his neighbour, a man must The unit, with Fox, is never, except incidentally, the group; never, except incidentally, the family; but the single human soul faced with its individual consciousness, the germ of truth, goodness, beauty, light, love, God, it bears within itself, the seed of God present in all human kind. He stands for liberty, for trust and toleration in a day of unchallenged religious and civil antagonisms and authoritarianisms. He stands for love, for the essential harmony of the creation in a day when warfare was the unquestioned and “divinely-appointed” method of settling international differences, and litigation and debate the accepted steersmen of private relationships. III.This particularist genius and his fellows represent the keenest moment in one of those periods in its religious experience when humanity becomes aware of the wider life to which it belongs, when working on, God-led and God-inspired, part blind, part seeing, making in dark and desert places the uttermost venture of faith, suddenly, on an instant, it finds God. It is just at this turning moment, in the dawn-light of this new liberating contact, world-wide this time, free altogether from the swathing bands of cloister and cult that we begin to have a clearer understanding of the message of the mystics in general and in particular of the challenge of our own George Fox. IV.Fox’s message found instant response from the heart of the most vital religious life of his day. From the midst of the small isolated groups who—surrounded by the institutional and doctrinal confusion following immediately upon the decentralization of authority in the art and science of the religious life, and persisting throughout the post-reformation century—were feeling their own way to God, his followers came forth. They, these friends of truth as they 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.” 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 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. |