At the heart of the Quaker church is “meeting”—the silent Quaker meeting so long a source of misunderstanding to those outside the body, so clearly illuminated now for all who care to glance that way, by the light of modern psychology. We have now at our disposal, marked out with all the wealth of spatial terminology characteristic of that science, a rough sketch of what takes place in our minds in moments of silent attention. We are told, for instance, that when in everyday life our attention is arrested by something standing out from the cinematograph show of our accustomed surroundings, we fix upon this one point, and everything else fades away to the “margin” of consciousness. The “thing” which has had the power of so arresting us, of making a breach in the normal, unnoticed rhythm of the senses, allows our “real self”—our larger and deeper being, to which so many names have been given—to flow up and flood the whole field of the surface intelligence. The typical instances of this phenomenon are, of course, the effect upon the individual of beauty on all its levels—the experience known as falling in love and the experience of “conversion.”

With most of us, beyond these more or less universal experiences, the times of illumination are intermittent, fluctuating, imperfectly accountable, and uncontrollable. The “artist” lives to a greater or less degree in a perpetual state of illumination, in perpetual communication with his larger self. But he remains within the universe constructed for him by his senses, whose rhythm he never fully transcends. His thoughts are those which the veil of sense calls into being, and though that veil for him is woven far thinner above the mystery of life than it is for most of us, it is there. Imprisoned in beauty, he is content to dwell, reporting to his fellows the glory that he sees. The religious genius, as represented pre-eminently by the great mystics—those in whom the sense of an ultimate and essential goodness, beauty, and truth, is the dominant characteristic—have consciously bent all their energies to breaking through the veil of sense, to making a journey to the heart of reality, to winning the freedom of the very citadel of Life itself. Their method has invariably included what—again borrowing from psychology—we must call the deliberate control of all external stimuli, a swimming, so to say, against the whole tide of the surface intelligence, and this in no negative sense, no mere sinking into a state of undifferentiated consciousness, but rather, as we have seen with Fox, a setting forth to seek something already found—something whose presence is in some way independent of the normal thinking and acting creature, something which has already proclaimed itself in moments of heightened consciousness—in the case of the religious temperament at “conversion.”

Silence, bodily and mental, is necessarily the first step in this direction. There is no other way of entering upon the difficult enterprise of transcending the rhythms of sense, and this, and nothing else, has been invariably the first step taken by the mystic upon his pilgrimage. Skirting chasms of metaphor, abysses of negation and fear, he has held along this narrowest of narrow ways.

But the early Quakers and the old-time mystics knew nothing of scientific psychology. They arrived “naturally” at their method of seeking in silence what modern thought is calling “the intuitive principle of action”—“the independent spiritual life fulfilling itself within humanity”—“the unformulated motive which is the greater part of mind.” Like every seeker, on whatever level, they were led by feeling. Feeling passed into action. Thought followed in due course, and was deposited as doctrine. They spoke, groping for symbols, of “the seed,” “the light,” “the true birth.” In other words—lest we go too far with psychology’s trinity of thought, feeling, and will as separable activities “doing the will”—they “knew the doctrine.” From this standpoint of obedience to the “inner light” they found within, they “understood” what they saw around them, and brought a fresh revelation to the world. “I was afraid of all company,” says Fox during his early trials, “for I saw them perfectly where they were, through the love of God which let me see myself.” For them the keynote of life is what an independent uninstructed French mystic, Brother Lawrence,[10] has called “the practice of the Presence of God,” and the man to whom the practical spade-work of the mystics, the art of introversion and contemplation, the practice (very variously interpreted) of purgation, the pathway that leads to “unknowing” and to union with what men have called God, has not been entered on as a matter of living experience, is no Quaker, no matter how pious, how philanthropically orthodox, how “religious” he may be. In a meeting for worship he is a foreign body, an unconverted person.

Side by side with the meeting for worship is the business meeting—a monthly meeting which is the executive unit of the society. It is held under the superintendence of a clerk, whose duty it is to embody the results of discussions in a series of minutes (voting and applause are unknown), and to send these up to the larger quarterly meeting of the district—a group of monthly meetings—delegates being appointed by each monthly meeting to secure representation. The meetings are open to all members and to outsiders on application. Most local questions are settled by the quarterly meetings, whose deliberations are on the same plan as those of the monthly meetings. Questions affecting the society as a whole, and matters otherwise of wide importance, go up to Yearly Meeting—the General Assembly of the Society—where, as in the subordinate meetings, decisions are reached by means of a taking by the clerk of the general “sense” of the gathering after free discussion. The decisions of Yearly Meeting are final. It issues periodically a Book of Discipline, in which are embodied, in the form of epistles and other documents, the general attitude of the society as a whole in matters of belief and conduct. A number of sub-committees are perpetually at work for special ends—social, philanthropic, etc.—and there is attached to Yearly Meeting a standing committee known as the Meeting for Sufferings, established in 1675 in the interest of the victims of persecution. It is composed of representatives of quarterly meetings and of certain officers. It is always engaged in the interest, not only of members of the Quaker body in difficult circumstances, but of sufferers all over the world. It does an enormous amount of unpublished work. Notorious, of course, is the history of the party of Quakers who arrived in Paris on the raising of the siege[11] with food and funds for the famine-stricken town; less known is the constant quiet assistance, such as that rendered to famine and plague districts and at the seat of war in various parts of the world. There are two offices in the Quaker body: that of Elder, whose duty it is to use discretion in acting as a restraining or encouraging influence with younger members in their ministry; and that of Overseer, exercising a general supervision over members of their meeting, admonishing them, if it should be necessary, as to the payment of just debts; the friendly settlement of “differences” about outward things; the discouraging and, as far as possible, restraining legal proceedings between members; “dealing” with any who may be conducting themselves, either in business or in private life, in a way such as to bring discredit upon their profession; caring for the poor, securing maintenance for them where necessary, and assisting them to educate their children. When any person has been found to be specially helpful in a meeting, and his or her ministry is recognized over a considerable period of time as being a true ministry, exercised “in the spirit,” such a one is, after due deliberation, “acknowledged” or “recorded” as a “minister.” This acknowledgment, however, confers no special status upon the individual, and implies no kind of appointment to preach or otherwise to exercise any special function in the society. There is, apparently, to-day a growing feeling against even this slight recognition of ministry as also against the custom hitherto prevailing of the special “bench” for Elders, which is usually on a raised dais, and facing the meeting. Men and women work, both in government and in ministry, side by side. Until the year 1907 they held their Yearly Meeting separately,[12] with occasional joint sittings. Since then all Yearly Meetings are held jointly, though the women’s meetings are still held for certain purposes.

The superficial structure of the society has existed, together with its founder’s system of the methodical recording of births, marriages, and deaths, much as we know it to-day from the beginning.

The distinctive Quaker teaching—with its two main points, the direct communication of truth to a man’s own soul: the presence, in other words, of a “seed of God” in every man; and the possibility here and now of complete freedom from sin, together with the many subsidiary testimonies, such as that against war, oaths, the exclusion of women from the ministry, etc., depending from these points—has also survived through many crises, and, in spite of the perpetual danger of being overwhelmed by the Calvinism amidst which it was born, and which to this day takes large toll of the society, and perpetually threatens the whole group, is still represented in its original purity.

The Quakers have never, in spite of their deprecation of the written word and their insistence on the secondariness of even the highest “notions” and doctrines, been backward in defending their faith. They sat at the feet of no man, nor did they desire that any man should sit at theirs; but when they met, not merely at the hands of the wilder sectaries, but from sober, godly people, with accusations of blasphemy, when they were told that they denied Christ and the Scriptures, they rose up and justified themselves. They were fully equal to those who attacked them in the savoury vernacular of the period, in apocalyptic metaphor, in trouncings and denunciations. Bunyan, their relentless opponent throughout, is thus apostrophized by Burrough: “Alas for thee, John Bunion! thy several months’ travail in grief and pain is a fruitless birth, and perishes as an untimely fig, and its praise is blotted out among men, and it’s passed away as smoke.” But throughout the vehemence of the Friends’ controversial writings runs the sense of fair play—the fearlessness of truth; the spirit, so to say, of tolerance of every belief in the midst of their intolerance of an “unvital” attitude in the believer. Their positive attitude to life, their grand affirmation, redeems much that on other grounds seems regrettable.

By the time the classical apologist of Quakerism—Robert Barclay, a member of an ancient Scottish family, liberally educated at Aberdeen College and in Paris, who had on his conversion forced himself to ride through the streets of his city in sackcloth and ashes—had published his book,[13] any justification of Quakerism had, from the point of view of the laity at large, ceased to be necessary. They had had some thirty years’ experience of the fruits of the doctrine; they knew the Quakers as neighbours; had scented something of the sweet fragrance of their austerity; had wondered at their independence of happenings, their freedom from fear, their centralized strength, their picking their way, so to say, amongst the externalities of life with the calm assurance of those who hold a clue where most men blunder, driven by fear or selfish desire. They knew them, moreover, as untiringly available outside their own circle on behalf of every sort of distress. The custodians, amateur and official, of theology still preyed upon them, though many of these were, no doubt, disarmed by the Puritan orthodoxy of the background upon which Barclay’s rationale of the Quaker’s attitude is wrought.

There is ample evidence that he was widely read, both in England and abroad, and the fact that no one took up the challenge, though Baxter and Bunyan were still living and working, may perhaps be accounted for by the absence in the Apology of any clear statement of the real irreconcilability between Quakerism and attitudes that are primarily doctrinal or institutional.

He accepts the scriptures as a secondary light, saying that they may not be esteemed the “principal ground of all Truth and Knowledge, nor yet the adequate primary rule of faith and manners,” that they cannot go before the teaching of the very spirit that makes them intelligible. He maintains that the closing adjuration in the Book of Revelation refers only to that particular prophecy, and is not intended to suggest that prophecy is at an end. The ground of knowledge is immediate revelation, which may not be “subjected to the examination either of the outward Testimony of the Scripture or of the Natural Reason of Man as to a more noble or certain Rule or Touchstone.”

He considers that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin was called out by his zeal against the Pelagian exaltation of the natural light of reason. He admits that man in sin—the natural man—can know no right; that, therefore, the Socinians and Pelagians are convicted in exalting a “natural light,” but that, nevertheless, God in love gives universal light, convicting of sin, and teaching if not resisted. He qualifies the Quaker claim to the possibility of absolute present salvation from sin by adding that there may be a falling off.

The whole of his argument displays the impossibility of rationalizing the position to which the Quakers had felt their way in terms of the absolute dualism of seventeenth-century philosophy. He places the doctrines of natural sinfulness and of universal light side by side, and so leaves them.

The logical instability of Quaker formulas due to the limitations of the scientific philosophy of the day (not until the dawn of our own century has a claim analogous to theirs been put forward on the intellectual plane)—due, in other words, to the characteristic lagging of thought behind life, while comparatively immaterial in the founders and leaders of the Quaker movement, who were all mystics or mystically minded persons, a variation of humanity, peculiar people gathered together, with all their differences, by a common characteristic, seeing their universe in the same terms urged towards unanimous activity—began to bear fruit in the second generation. Mystical genius is not hereditary, and to the comparatively imitative mass making up the later generations the Inward Light becomes a doctrine, a conception as mechanical and static as is the infallible Scripture to the imitative mass of the Protestants.

We may not, of course, apply the term “imitative” in too absolute a sense. All have the light. We are all mystics. We all live our lives on our various levels, at first hand. But a full recognition of this fact need not blind us to the further fact that, while those who have mystical genius need no chart upon their journey, most of us need a plain way traced out for us through the desert. Most of us follow the gleam of doctrine thrown out by first-hand experience, and cling to that as our guide. But if the Quaker message failed as theology, and the later generations swung back to the simpler doctrine of Protestantism and re-enthroned an infallible Scripture, something, nevertheless, had been done. Within the precincts of Quakerism certain paths backwards were, so to say, permanently blocked. A fresh type of conduct was assured. The world, the environment in which the new lives of the group were to arise, had been changed for ever.

The working out of the logical insecurity of the Quaker position is interestingly shown in the person of George Keith, intellectually the richest of the early Quakers, a man whose writings have been acknowledged by his fellows, and would still stand if he had not left the group, as amongst the best expositions of the Quaker attitude.

He was a Scotch Presbyterian, and seems to have joined the Quakers while still a student at Aberdeen University. For nearly thirty years he was under the spell of the Quaker reading of life, and lived during this time well in the forefront of public discussion and persecution. We find him writing books and pamphlets in and out of prison, full of the ardour and the joy of his discovery that there are to-day immediate revelations, speaking with delight of the meaning and use of silence, defending his new faith before Presbyterian divines and University students, declaring that he found Friends “wiser than all the teachers I ever formerly had been under.”

It was not until after the death of Fox, when the first generation of “born Friends” was growing up, that he began to express his sense of the danger he saw ahead. Then we find him accusing Friends of neglecting the historic evidences of their faith, of sacrificing the outer to the inner. His main doctrinal divergence from them was his assertion that salvation is impossible without the knowledge of and belief in the historic Jesus. But doctrine was not his only difficulty. He went to the very heart of the situation. He saw that the Quakers could never become in the world what they hoped to be—a mystical church, a body of men swayed without let or hindrance by the Divine Spirit, pioneers for the world upon the upward way—unless they were willing to pay the price of the saintly office. He begged for the abolition of birthright membership, for an open confession of faith for incoming members, that the children of Friends should come and offer themselves as strangers, their spiritual claims weighed and considered; that marriage should not be celebrated according to the Quaker rites between those who were not faithful Friends; that a sort of register should be kept of those who, in and out of meeting, were live and consistent Christians. His view of the situation, though put forward with a violence and bitterness which prejudiced it with his hearers, and brought his own spiritual life under suspicion, is largely justified by the subsequent experience of the society. His challenge attracted a large following in America, whither he had gone as headmaster of a Friends’ school. The other leaders of the society, both in London and Pennsylvania, denied his assertion of the neglect by Friends of the historical Christ, while protesting that we must believe that the light of Christ reaches every man, whether he have heard of him or no.

In 1692 the matter came before the Yearly Meeting, and Keith and his large body of followers were condemned in writing of the “spirit of reviling, railing, lying, slandering,” and of mischievous and hurtful separation. So the schism was formed, and a new sect arose, which established many meetings amidst controversy and bitterness. The following year London Yearly Meeting, considering his case in sittings that sometimes lasted for days, finally declared him to have separated himself from the holy fellowship of the Church of Christ, and disowned him. His following gradually disappeared. For some years he travelled about in America, visiting meetings and protesting against his disownment. Later on he became an Independent, then an Episcopalian. He died as a minister of the Church of England. There is a story, which most authorities consider to be well authenticated, representing him as saying before he died that if God had taken him while he was a Quaker, it would have been well with him.