Part I. On the Principles of the Quakers and of the Other Religious Bodies Which Have Arisen since the Reformation, and on the Systems to Which They Have Given Birth

Chapter I. Quakerism

Section I. On the Positive Doctrines of the Quakers

The Indwelling Word—The Spiritual Kingdom—Spiritual Influences

In Mr. Gurney’s work on the religious peculiarities of the Society of Friends, we are told that the doctrine “which lies at the root of all their particular views and practices, is that of the perceptible influence and guidance of the Spirit of truth.” This author maintains in a previous passage that “a measure of the influence of the Spirit is bestowed upon all men whereby they are enlightened, and may be saved.” But it is obvious that he does not look upon this principle as in any degree so important or so characteristic of the Quakers, as the other. I do not see how a mere theory respecting the condition of the world generally can ever seem so important to any man, as a principle which concerns his own conduct and responsibility. But I question whether the old Quakers would have stated the latter doctrine precisely in the terms which Mr. Gurney has used; I think they would have given it a much more practical form and signification, and that by doing so they would have exhibited the relative position and value of these two portions of their creed very differently.

Anyone who reads Fox’s Journal will find that he adhered most literally and practically to a belief in perceptible impressions and influences. His whole conduct was regulated by the conviction, that he was commanded to do certain acts and utter certain words; wherever he went, whomsoever he denounced, whatever tone or manner he gave to his discourses, he believed undoubtedly that he was obeying a divine instigation. But, however strange this conviction may seem in our days (and some of the results of it would seem strange to the Quakers themselves), no one who is at all acquainted with the history of the period between 1645 and 1660 will fancy that Fox or his disciples were in this particular distinguished from a number of other religious men. There were hundreds, perhaps I might say thousands, in Cromwell’s army who lived and acted as much under this belief, and who followed it out as consistently, as any Quaker could possibly do. Fox himself was frequently brought into collision with such men. He speaks, again and again, of a body of Ranters who gave him much trouble, on this very ground that they all believed themselves under perceptible spiritual influences. And in one very remarkable passage of his Diary, he says that a convert of his, Justice Hotham, told him, that he (Fox) had been raised up to utter a principle which discomfited these Ranters, and that but for this principle they would have overrun the whole land and destroyed it.

I. This principle, and not the doctrine respecting perceptible influences, must then, one would think, have been the central one of Primitive Quakerism. Nay, a really earnest Quaker would have been willing that the truth and value of his spiritual impressions should be tried by their conformity to it or disagreement with it.¹ What then was this principle? William Penn, in his preface to Fox’s Journal, expresses it in the following words: “They were directed to the light of Jesus Christ within them as the seed and leaven of the kingdom of God; near all, because in all, and God’s talent to all. A faithful and true witness and just monitor in every bosom, the gift and grace of God to life and salvation, that appears to all, though few regard it.” (Page ix.) This, he says (page xix.), was “their fundamental principle, the corner-stone of their fabric, and, to speak eminently and properly, their characteristic or main distinguishing point or principle;” this principle of “the light of Christ within, as God’s gift for man’s salvation, is the root of the goodly tree of doctrines, that grew and branched out of it.”

That this doctrine was the ground of Fox’s teaching every page of his Diary proves. It might be a conviction, that he was sensibly led by the Spirit, which induced him to break forth in this or that steeplehouse, or to attack this or that Independent, Baptist, Presbyterian, or “Common-Prayer man.” But, when he did speak, the words he uttered were, “Brother, there is a light within thee: resist it and thou art miserable; follow it and thou art happy.” And he again and again expresses his assurance that these were the words which produced a real moral effect upon his hearers; that whatever else he said was valuable only as it arose out of them, or tended to illustrate and enforce them. He believes that he spoke to something which was in those to whom he spoke, and that, being there, it answered his appeal.

It was not from the teachers or popular books of the day that Fox learnt this doctrine. The language in which he describes his early life is remarkably unlike that which we meet with in Puritan biographies. “At eleven years of age,” he says, “he knew pureness and righteousness;” while he was a child he was taught how to walk to be kept pure; when he grew up and “was put to a man that was a shoemaker by trade, and that dealt in wool, and used grazing, and sold cattle, and a great deal passed through his hands, he never wronged man or woman, for the Lord’s power was over him to preserve him… people had generally a love to him for his honesty and innocency.” The conflicts of mind, which he describes afterwards, had no relation to any of the controversies, religious or political, by which England was then torn asunder. Of Prelacy or Covenant, King or Parliament, he knew nothing. The awful question, What am I?—what have I to do in this strange confused world? occupied his soul. It is one which must be new to each man, though thousands may have been vexed with it before him. Those whom Fox consulted about it afforded him little help; he withdrew from the society of his fellow-creatures, and studied his Bible. Even that seemed not to tell him the secret which he wanted to know: one thing however he learnt; there was in him that which shrank from this inquiry, and would fain forget it altogether, and there was that in him which would have no rest till he found the answer to it. Now, was not this in itself a great discovery? Did it not show him (in part at least), what kind of being he was? He had desires which drew him down to things which he saw, and tasted, and handled; he had desires which aspired after something with which his senses and appetites had nothing to do. And was there not another discovery contained in this? They were actual earthly objects which attracted him towards themselves; his nature inclined him to them, yet, when he obeyed that nature, he seemed to lose what was most real in him. Must there not be a counter-attraction, a power as real as any of those things which he beheld, raising him out of them, urging him to seek something above himself, a real substantial good? Must not that power be in truth greater, though the contrary might seem to be the case, than all which were resisting it? Could he not obey that higher influence, and, by obeying it, obtain life and peace? He felt that he could; that he was meant to do so. The light was stronger than the darkness. He was privileged to dwell in it.

But was this light, then, afforded only to George Fox the shoemaker? How could this be? Did it not witness to him, that whenever he was setting up himself he was resisting it, not following it; when he was obeying his selfish inclinations, he knew that he was flying from this great teacher; when he desired to be led by it he knew that he was a man? Surely, then, this must be a light vouchsafed to him, because he was a man; it must be “a light which lighteneth every man who cometh into the world.” A terrible majority might be striving against it, but their very strivings proclaimed the truth; the kind of misery which men experienced showed the happiness which was intended for them.

When he arrived at this conviction, the Bible seemed to him a new book altogether. From first to last it witnessed to him of that invisible good which men are to seek after, and against the visible idolatries which are drawing them away from it. The lives of the patriarchs, of Moses, of the prophets, were the lives of men who were following the light, the teacher of their hearts, the Lord of righteousness, and were resisting the evil inclinations and appetites which would make them the slaves and worshippers of outward things. On the other hand, all the records of the sins of the Jewish nation, or of heathen nations, were records of revolts from this mysterious guide and teacher, by men who chose darkness rather than light, the outward and apparent good rather than the real and inward. As might be expected, the darkness became continually more gross in each individual who gave himself up to it, and the light brighter and clearer in each one who steadily pursued it. And so it had been in each new period—greater blindness and sensuality, greater and more immediate illumination: Jews and Gentiles becoming more estranged from Him who was yet revealing Himself to them both; holy prophets holding more wonderful converse than their fathers had done with the Word of God rising more above outward emblems and institutions, obeying more implicitly his inward suggestions. Such, or nearly such, was the form in which the Old Testament history seems to have presented itself to Fox; and therefore the words at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John appeared to him to stand in the most natural connection with all the records to which they refer. And St. Paul’s declarations, in the first and second of Romans, that the Gentiles knew God, but glorified Him not as God, and liked not to retain Him in their knowledge; and that the Gentiles as well as the Jews, if they sought for glory and honour and immortality, would obtain eternal life; while the Jews as well as the Gentiles, if they were contentious and obeyed not the truth but obeyed unrighteousness, would have tribulation and wrath—far from containing a puzzle, which it required critical ingenuity to surmount, appeared to him the simple announcement of a truth with which all the rest of Scripture was in agreement.

II. But how was the condition of men affected by the appearance of our Lord in human flesh? This was a question which probably did not at first present itself to Fox; but by degrees he and the other Quakers found an answer to it. Men having foregone their spiritual privileges and given themselves up to the flesh, were not indeed forsaken by their heavenly Teacher, but they could not be treated as spiritual. By outward emblems and images, the elements of the world, they were trained: to the Jews was given a direct intimation of the nature and purpose of their discipline; the Gentiles, through a thicker film of sense, and with fewer helps to penetrate it, might yet, if they would, discover their invisible guide. But these were preparations for a clearer day. Christ, the Living Word, the Universal Light, appeared to men, and showed in His own person what processes He was carrying on in the hearts of all; subduing the flesh, keeping Himself separate from the world, submitting to death. This manifestation was the signal for the commencement of a new dispensation; sensible emblems were no longer to intercept man’s view of his Lord; national distinctions were to be abolished; men might be treated as belonging to a higher state than that which they lost in Adam; they might attain a perfection which did not exist in Adam.

The Scriptural testimonies to this doctrine seemed to them most numerous. Stripped of the fantastical covering in which they were sometimes enveloped, few readers will think that they received a forced or unnatural construction. The announcement by the Prophets of a dispensation which should have these two characteristics above all others—spirituality and universality; the evident annulling, in the Sermon on the Mount, of rules and maxims which had been previously current and the substitution of a spiritual principle for them; our Lord’s constant declaration that He came to establish a kingdom, and that that kingdom was to be within us; the announcement of the Evangelists that His parables were the discovery of mysteries which had been hidden from the foundation of the world; His own words that He would yet show His disciples more plainly of the Father; the language of the Epistle to the Galatians, affirming that a spiritual covenant had succeeded to the formal Jewish covenant; the language of the Epistle to the Ephesians, affirming that an economy hidden from ages and generations was then made known to His Holy Apostles by the Spirit; the exhortations in the Philippians and the Hebrews to press onwards to perfection—exhortations evidently grounded upon the new position into which those who were addressed had been brought: these are only specimens of the evidence which every page of the New Testament seemed to the Quakers to contain of the doctrine that our Lord came to bring in a universal Light, to establish a perfectly spiritual Kingdom, and to encourage men to seek a perfectly spiritual Life.

III. It is implied in the very idea of this constitution, that men are brought under a directly divine government or influence. Those who yield themselves to the light, and become members of the spiritual kingdom, recognise this influence in all their acts. They will not move without it; they will be ready to move anywhere at its bidding. The sacrifice of all personal inclinations, energies, will, in short self-annihilation in its highest form, is their duty and their privilege; so they become fit to utter the divine voice, and prompt to perform the divine will.

In support of this doctrine the Quakers would plead the words of John the Baptist, announcing the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire as the great promise of the new covenant; the ignorance of the Apostles till they received the gift from on high; the silence and waiting that were enjoined upon them till it arrived; the whole tenor of the Apostolic history, shewing that the first ministers of Christ believed themselves to be acting under an immediate inspiration, and to be incapable of acting without it; the principle so often asserted, and everywhere implied, that the kingdom was to be everlasting, and that those who first witnessed its establishment were to be patterns and precedents of all who succeeded them.

Section II. Objections to the Quaker Theology Considered

I am far from saying that the early Quakers acknowledged no theological principles except these three. In a sense they admitted most of the doctrines which other men embody in creeds or articles. But these three principles determined that sense; these had been realised in their minds; the rest hung loosely about them, and at one time might be heartily recognised, at one time almost rejected, as they seemed to square with the primary truths or to contradict them. These three doctrines, then, may be said to constitute the positive theology of the Quakers; from these their system has been deduced. Before I inquire what that system is, and how far it is legitimately connected with the principles of which I have spoken, I may state in a few words why I cannot join some conspicuous opponents of Quakerism in denouncing these principles—why I believe them to be either truths or hints of truths which are most vital and important.

I. There are three objections usually taken against Fox’s doctrine of the Inward Light or the Indwelling Word. First, it is said to be mystical; secondly, it is said to be unscriptural; thirdly, it is said to be unsupported by fact, or by any authority, save that of an ignorant mechanic and his credulous disciples.

1. I shall not evade the first charge, by saying that the word mystical may mean anything, everything, or nothing; that it may be applied - has been applied - against the most recognised principles in physics as well as in morals; that if mystical and mysterious mean the same thing, all science is mystical. I will at once give the word a sense which may be a legitimate sense, which at all events is a common one. The tendency to invest certain feelings, consciousnesses, temperaments of individual men with the sacredness which belongs only to such truths as are of universal character, and may be brought to a universal test, is often designated by the name Mysticism; it is unquestionably one to which religious men in all ages have been prone; and I do not know any records which contain more frequent instances of it than those of the early Quakers. But the question is, whether, if this be the definition of mysticism—and I know no definition which distinctly condemns it except this—the doctrine we are considering be not essentially unmystical, nay, whether we might not almost venture to call it emphatically the antagonist principle to mysticism. For surely it disclaims, more vehemently than almost any, exclusive appropriation; it submits itself more directly than most to a universal test. Fox did not say, “This light is mine;” he said, “It is yours as much as mine: it is with you; and in the healthiest, truest, soberest states of your mind, you know that it is with you.” This principle stood out, then, in marked contrast to those peculiar experiences and interpretations upon which he often laid so much stress; attesting its difference from them by the effects which it produced, and obtaining at least some sanction in its being forced upon the conviction of men whose characteristic infirmities would have led them to an entirely different conclusion.

2. The notion that the doctrine is unscriptural has derived support, partly from the opinion that Fox and his followers habitually disparaged the Scriptures, partly from his own confession that he knew the doctrine before he saw it in the Bible, though afterwards he learnt how to support it from the Bible. How far the general charge against them is true I may consider presently; that it does not affect this particular case is evident from the appeal which they make not to a few isolated texts merely, but to the whole tenor and context of the inspired volume, in defence of their position. Neither can I see in Fox’s account of the mode by which he arrived at an apprehension of this principle anything different from the statements which are common in writers who are the most opposed to him; that, after they were spiritually awakened, the Bible, which had been a dead letter to them, seemed to be full of meaning to them, the only wonder being that they had not perceived it before—language which I believe is very simple, reasonable, and accordant with the experience of most earnest men, no wise derogatory to the Bible, and not at all incompatible with the belief that the study of it may have been one of the principal instruments whereby that capacity which makes its words comprehensible was called forth. And surely no considerations about the course of thought which another man has followed, need hinder us from inquiring whether the view which he takes of a book do throw a light upon it, and render the contents of it more coherent and intelligible. I have stated a few of the reasons which have led others, and, I acknowledge, compel me, to believe that the denial of Fox’s doctrine makes the scheme, the spirit, and the letter of Scripture alike perplexing. If it were necessary to add further proofs, I should find them in the violent and tortuous expedients to which critics have resorted for the sake, as they profess, of escaping from the extravagances and absurdities of mystical interpretation. When, for instance,² I hear a grave, learned, and (so far as hostility to Socinianism is a title to that name) orthodox interpreter, suggesting that ὁ λόγος in the first verse of the Gospel of St. John means only ὁ λεγόμενος (the person talked of promised), supporting the gloss by the question of John’s disciples, Σὺ εἶ ὁ ἐρχόμενος; and treating the two phrases as equivalent; when I find such an opinion as this adopted by respectable scholars, as a convenient refuge from mysticism—I am constrained to think that I am not likely to preserve my respect for the letter of the inspired volume more uncorrupted, or my apprehension of what is reasonable in human language more clear, by determining not to believe that the Word of God before He came in the flesh was the light which lightened all men—a principle as much confirmed to me by the evidence of profane as of sacred history.

3. I speak of this evidence, for I believe that the third objection to this doctrine is quite as untenable as the other two. It has been said, and I think justly, that if Fox’s assertion respecting the light which the heathens possessed were well founded, there would be very clear indications of the fact in the records of their acts and thoughts. Such indications, it is added, would not be contained in a few fine sayings, scattered here and there amidst heaps of evil and offensive matter; they could not be gathered from the works of a rhetorician like Seneca, who lived after the advent of Christ, and might have availed himself of some Christian notions; they ought to be something different from the mere notions about immortality, and an indestructible part of our nature, which have been floating in the minds of civilised and savage men, and which acquired a sort of argumentative consistency but no practical influence in the minds of the Roman Stoics and Academicians; they cannot be drawn from the mere denials of the polytheistic creeds into which some of the Greek philosophers were led, and which issued only in an atheistic or at best in a pantheistic theory: even the instance of a man practically, and with some steadiness, recognising a standard of right, would not be satisfactory if it should appear that his thoughts, and those of all heathens who preceded or followed him, were moving in directly opposite lines. I fully admit the justice of these maxims and I take them for my guide when I state the reasons which induce me to think that Fox, though he knew nothing about the men of the old world, was right in the judgment which he formed respecting them.

In the best and most recent works³ on Greek philosophy its history is divided into the periods before and after Socrates. That this arrangement is the true and natural one, I think everyone will admit, who has compared it with older methods, and has observed what light it throws upon the growth and sequence of speculations which had been regarded as independent of each other. Yet there would seem at first sight to be insuperable objections to it: Socrates left no books; the difficulty of ascertaining which of his disciples reported his opinions most correctly, what his opinions were, nay, whether he had any, has been a subject of frequent complaint; all the interest of his doctrine has been said to be contained in his life. How is it then possible that he should be a centre to the theories and systems of his countrymen?

The answer seems to me to be this: Whatever difference there may be in the accounts of him which have been delivered to us, they all testify—the satirical one by the comedian of Athens, as clearly as the narratives of Xenophon and Plato⁴—that he saw in the life of man the struggle between two principles, one tending downwards, one upwards; one belonging to the earth, one claiming fellowship with something pure and divine. Those who suppose him to be a mere ironist or sceptic cannot deny that whatever his words do not mean, they do mean this; those who are most inclined to reduce his thoughts and those of all other men to a system, must yet admit that this doctrine lay at the basis of his system, and that it is one which must find a more complete exposition in a man’s acts, or in his familiar intercourse with persons of different tempers and pursuits, than it can ever find in a formal treatise. Accordingly, it seems not strange that one observer should be struck chiefly with the efforts which he made, in the discipline of his own mind and in that which he recommended to his scholars, to overcome sensual inclinations, and to raise his spirit, by all means, the traditions and faith of his country among the rest, to higher and purer apprehensions: that another should have been shocked by the tendency, which such attempts to deliver himself and others from the worship of outward things must have had, to weaken his and their respect for the gods of his country: that another, of deeper and more earnest meditation, should have perceived, in the conviction which governed his master’s life, distinct and personal as it appeared, the hint of a method by which men might be led out of their vagueness, their superstitions, and their unbelief, into the pursuit of permanent truth; by which also the imperfect hints, crude generalisations, and seemingly contradictory discoveries of previous thinkers might be interpreted, quickened, and reconciled. This last notion may easily have occurred to anyone who felt how he himself, and noticed how other young men of the day, were compelled to acknowledge Socrates as the interpreter of the feelings which were at work confusedly within them, and of the objects at which they were blindly aiming. It makes itself good to us by the experiment to which I alluded; we are able, by taking Socrates as our guide, to understand what the Greeks, for many generations before and after his time, were in different directions pursuing. But if so, we must admit that while the worth and peculiarity of the life of Socrates consisted in this, that he pursued stedfastly, of course amidst many inconsistencies, a pure and invisible good, and sought to overcome the obstacles in himself and in the world which hindered him from apprehending it, this characteristic does not separate him from the thinkers of the old world, or entitle us to view him as a prodigy; but rather enables us to see, what we otherwise should not have seen so clearly, that the like struggle was going forward consciously in every better and truer man—unconsciously, in all. Such, I believe, is the witness which the records of Greek philosophy bear in favour of Fox’s doctrine.

It may, however, be said that this testimony is not complete; for that whereas Fox uniformly spoke of a personal teacher of men, the doctrine of Socrates goes no further than to the acknowledgment of a search or appetite in man after a supreme good which need not be personal, or if personal, may not necessarily have originated these desires, or even have taken any interest in them.

I believe no one who attends carefully to the language of Socrates, or of his greater pupil, will suppose that he doubted whether the longings and movements of his spirit had a divine source and were subject to a divine impulse or no. His deep conviction that he was under the guidance of an attending dæmon, the continual reference which he makes to traditional stories, his firm faith in divine interpositions and judgments, are proofs that he was not merely seeking to apprehend “The Being,” but also acknowledging often, if not habitually, that a Being had first taken cognisance of him. I admit, however, that the remark has a certain degree of force; I admit that so far as Socrates was simply a philosopher (in the sublimest sense of that word), so far he was acting merely as the seeker after what is true and good, not as the receiver of an influence from it. His high merit was, that he acknowledged the need of something besides philosophy in order that he might realise the meaning of philosophy; a very peculiar merit, indeed, setting him and Plato at an immeasurable distance from those who followed, and from most of those who preceded them; but still, perhaps, the very merit which makes him of such importance as the interpreter of other schools. Be that as it may, there is one fact which is well worthy of notice in reference to this point. So soon as a Jew was able to study and understand the writings of the Greek philosophers, the defect which is complained of was supplied. Philo recognised all the cries of the wiser heathen after light and wisdom and truth, as genuine indications of the feelings which the writings of the prophets had prepared him to expect would be in all men, and as produced by the teaching and inspiration of the Divine Word. So much has been written of late respecting the general purpose and character of his writings, that I need not multiply words. A few are given in a note, merely as specimens of a tone of thinking which could not have been so habitual in one man, if it had not been adopted by many.⁵

Some modern critics have maintained, that the study of Philo is the proper introduction to the study of the Fathers. I do not mean to discuss the truth or limits of that proposition. The ground of it is unquestionably the discovery of a close resemblance between the language of one class of the Fathers, those who lived in Alexandria before the period of the Arian controversy, and that of Philo respecting the Divine Word.⁶ This resemblance has generally been acknowledged; any inconvenient inferences from it being avoided, by describing these Fathers in particular, and often the Fathers in general, as the Platonizing doctors, who mingled the pure truths of Christianity with Gentile Philosophy. It is very difficult to encounter such phrases, for this reason, that they are phrases merely. Those Fathers who were brought into immediate contact with the Philosophers, told them, as they believed on the authority of Scripture, that the Divine Word had been speaking to the conscience and reason of men in all ages, and by various acts of discipline had been urging them to turn from their idols and seek Him. They affirmed, that whenever any man had exhibited any kindly or affectionate feeling, any earnest zeal for truth, this Invisible Guide had inspired him with it. They showed no mercy to the fables of Paganism or to the conceits of philosophers; they merely declared that all error was the forsaking of God’s guidance—all sincere and good thoughts the obeying it.

The question, whether in using this language they rendered more honour to mere human wit and judgment, than the persons who attribute to these alone all that was generous and true in the acts or feelings of heathens, I leave to the understandings of my readers: the question whether it is wise or decorous to attack men, whom I may venture, I suppose, without offence, to call pious and venerable, not by showing wherein they contradicted Scripture, but by affixing to them the nickname of Platonizing—I leave to the consciences of those who are in the habit of using such language. One thing at least is evident, that Fox, the shoemaker of the 17th century, was not the first person who understood the verses at the beginning of St. John’s Gospel in a literal, not a metaphorical sense. Before I quit this part of my subject, I must take leave to remark, that the kind of charge which is brought against the Fathers who adopted this doctrine shows very clearly whence the main objection to it has been derived. We are told, and sometimes in a very solemn manner, to beware how we corrupt the simplicity of the Gospel by philosophy and vain deceit. Perhaps the caution may be less applicable to Fox and the Quakers, than to some others; for he hated Greek and Philosophy most cordially, and his followers have in general retained this part of his opinions with great fidelity; still, it is an important caution, which those to whom it is offered should receive gratefully, and for which they cannot show their value in any way so effectually as by returning it. I believe that anyone, who is at the pains to investigate the origin of his own opinions, will discover that neither reverence for Scripture, nor a great love for simplicity, but precisely the addiction—I must call it, the slavish addiction—to a certain system of philosophy which established itself in this country about the time of the Revolution, is consciously or unconsciously the cause of his dislike to a principle which has been recognised by the humblest and most ignorant men, as well as by the most profound. Ever since the position was adopted as a new and surprising truth (which previous thinkers had looked upon as one of the most plausible, most natural, and most degrading forms of error), that there is no knowledge but that which comes to us through the senses, the idea of a communion between the Divine Word and the heart and conscience and reason of men has been of course rejected. The subject will often recur in the course of our inquiries.

II. I need say very little about the two other main articles of the Quaker faith; first, because the principle of them is contained in that which we have been examining, and secondly, because they are admitted to a certain extent, and under some conditions, by nearly all Christians. The proposition, for instance, that Christ came to establish a spiritual kingdom, a kingdom not of this world, different from the Jewish, in being less carnal and more spiritual, is constantly proclaimed by those English dissenters who are most inclined to denounce Fox’s primary tenet as unscriptural and false. Only they think that he pushed this truth to an extreme. They think the kingdom is spiritual but not quite so spiritual as he fancied. So also with reference to the gift of the Spirit and the subordination of man’s powers and utterances to His government—they believe that what Fox said was true up to a certain point, but that there is great danger of going beyond that point. I shall have opportunities of examining the plea for these restrictions hereafter. At present, I will only say that, far from thinking that the Quakers have carried their principles to an excess, I believe all their errors have arisen from the narrow imperfect and earthly notions which they entertain respecting the nature of a spiritual kingdom, and from the low estimate which they have formed of that transcendent gift which God bestowed upon His creatures when His Holy Spirit came down to dwell among them. My meaning will appear more clearly when I have spoken of the negative articles of Quaker Theology.

Section III. The Quaker System

1. It is not difficult to imagine in what way the principle of an inward light must have affected the mind of a man educated as Fox was, provided he were perfectly earnest and sincere. I have spoken of his doctrine—unquestionably it was his doctrine, for it was that which he taught wherever he went; if I had called it a dogma I should perhaps have described very exactly that which it has become to modern Quakers; but assuredly neither word would have seemed to him the correct one. He had actually discovered a law to which he himself was subject—to which every other man was subject; would anyone tell him that this was a mere notion like those about justification, sanctification, final perseverance, and so forth, which he had heard proclaimed from the pulpits of the day? The language of the preachers and of the books might be about something which concerned him and all men; but he had discovered the very thing itself; he had a fact to proclaim, not a theory or a system. From the very first therefore he began to denounce dogmas and formulas as corrupting and misleading. The young mechanic told the preachers, who had been trained in all the distinctions and divisions, which the Westminster Assembly with such infinite labour and discussion had wrought out, that they knew nothing about the matter they were talking of. Those who had silenced their brethren for their want of spiritual knowledge were rebuked, and sometimes silenced (by the voice of a man, not the vote of a trying Committee), for the self-same sin. But if formulas were evil things, could forms be better? Here were men professing outward acts and ceremonies, and between these and the Christian life they said or signified that there was an intimate connexion. Strange, almost incredible blindness! Did not the Christian life consist in following an inward Guide, an invisible Teacher, in eschewing that which was visible and sensible? What could these outward things have to do with that? The argument was irresistible. It was a main part of Fox’s vocation to bear witness against such idolatries.

2. Possibly the thought may sometimes have occurred to one who studied the Old Testament diligently, that forms had been in the olden time the very testimonies for this light, the very means by which the Jews were warned against sensual worship; that they were converted by those Jews into excuses for the indulgence of a natural idolatry; but yet that being God’s appointed protests against it, and the means which He had devised for delivering men from it, they were actually appealed to, from age to age, by the prophets who were raised up to tell the people of their sins; these prophets being in fact far more diligent observers of the forms than the sensualists and the hypocrites whom they denounced for neglecting their meaning. I say, such a thought as this may have glanced into the mind of Fox, and with it the reflection, that possibly a method which was good once might be good still. But he was able to silence such suggestions, or to dismiss them as proceeding from an evil source, by the second doctrine of which I spoke. Till the appearance of Christ this might be true; but He came to establish a Spiritual and Universal Dispensation. A spiritual dispensation; therefore outward institutions, like that of circumcision, like that of a passover, like that of a priesthood, like that of an outward sacrificial worship, like that of particularly sacred seasons, are abolished. But are not Baptism, the Eucharist, a Ministry appointed by imposition of hands, and divided into three permanent orders, Liturgies, the observance of Fasts and Festivals, equally visible and outward? On what plea then have you substituted one set of ceremonies for another, when you profess to be members of a spiritual kingdom?

Moreover, the dispensation is to be universal as well as spiritual. National distinctions, therefore, are no more; they belong to the economy of the world. War has been the fruit of these; under a spiritual and universal dispensation, war is a sin. Nations have always, the Jewish nation as much as the rest, invoked God as the witness of their ordinary transactions; Oaths are forbidden under the new dispensation. Nations have generally made a provision for the ministers of religion, and regarded them as parts of the commonwealth. Such arrangements are altogether inconsistent with a spiritual and universal dispensation.

3. As the Quakers turned away with disgust from all confessions whatsoever, it was not likely they would distinguish between the dogmatic articles which were drawn up in later ages of the Church, and the creeds which had been adopted in its infancy. At all events, even the simplest of these creeds was objectionable to them, because it directs our thoughts to the outward acts and events of our Lord’s life upon earth, rather than to His presence in the heart. It was a more difficult question how they should regard the Scriptures. These recorded actual events, and appeared to have an outward character. Yet the Bible was the only book of which Fox and several of his brethren knew anything. In it he had found the strongest confirmation of all that he believed. The language, therefore, of the Quakers became more tinctured with the phraseology of Scripture than that of any sect; while, nevertheless, they described it in language which the members of no other sect would have ventured to use. The reading of it was said to be rather a luxury than necessity to the believer, and nothing was more important than that he should derive his knowledge from the inward teacher, not from the outward book. No doubt warnings about the danger of trusting in the letter, and still more about the impossibility of finding a meaning in it without help of another kind, had been common in the writings of learned doctors before, and even since, the Reformation. But it was evident that they acquired a new and much stronger meaning among the Quakers. That meaning was deduced from the doctrine concerning Spiritual Influences. He only was a true teacher who had been called by the inward voice; he was only teaching rightly at any moment when he was obeying that voice. How then, they argued, can he be at the same time subject to the dominion of a book? He may read it, and passages in it might be brought to his mind; but he will only apply them properly when he feels in the position of those who wrote the book; speaking by the same inspiration which actuated them. The book may be the best of all books, but it must be valuable as an instrument, not strictly as an authority. Such seems to have been their practical conclusion, though the words in which it was expressed might often vary.

It seemed to follow still more obviously, from this belief of an immediate spiritual influence, that preparatory studies for the work of the ministry were unlawful and faithless. Studies as such might not be positively forbidden, but as the teachers were in some sense the standards of thinking and feeling, it was impossible that a sense of the inexpediency, if not the sinfulness, of any high mental cultivation should not have diffused itself among the disciples generally.

A body asserting the positive doctrines, and having the negative characteristics I have described, gradually formed itself, and assumed to itself the name of The Society of Friends. This Society, its members believed, was called into existence to exhibit the features of that kingdom which Christ came into the world to establish. Without wishing to be uncharitable, or denying that there might be good men who did not belong to it, yet they practically looked upon it as the Church of God on earth—the witness against the world. They were, therefore, to keep themselves entirely from the habits of this world, from its varying fashions, from its amusements, and, as far as might be, from its phraseology. With these, the so-called Christian body had become defiled; nay, the very devices by which it had seemed to assert its existence were themselves earthly and sensual, bearing no testimony whatever to the distinction between the light and darkness, to the spirituality and universality of the kingdom, and to the presence of the Spirit.

Section IV. On the Practical Working of the Quaker System

We are now to inquire whether this body has fulfilled the office to which its founders believed that it was divinely appointed. Let us see what evidence is admissible in this case, and how much it will prove. Quakers are agreed with us in believing that one of the characteristics of a divine Church is permanency. It was never intended to last only for a generation; on the contrary, it exists to testify against a changing, capricious world. Neither we then, nor they, are entitled to plead the ordinary law of decay in human bodies, as an excuse for the Church failing to perform the functions to which it has been appointed. Both of us must suppose that this tendency has been foreseen by Him whose handiwork the Church is, and that in some way or other its effects have been counteracted. The peculiarity of the Quakers is, that they suppose permanent institutions, permanent symbols, which man may misinterpret from time to time, but which continue to testify, in spite of his misinterpretations and against them, are not the remedy or even one of the remedies which has been provided against this danger. The condition of a spiritual body, according to them, is, that it rests in the faith, the purity, the vitality of its individual members. This being the case, it must, I conceive, be admitted, that all confessions by them of degeneracy from an older standard are very startling. They can intimate little less than this, that the constitution or kingdom which God has set up in the world, has been overcome and crushed by the world’s kingdom which is opposed to it. Yet such confessions are most numerous in the writings, not of one but of all the different divisions of Quakers in the present day. They take different forms according to the views of the persons who make them; but in one form or other they may be traced everywhere. Still I am far from thinking that such evidence as this, however much it may excite the anxious inquiries of Quakers, could be sufficient of itself to prove, either to them or to us, that the experiment had failed. The indications of that fact should be very palpable; they should not rest upon the feelings or observations of any particular persons, however impartial or even however prejudiced in favour of the system, and they should be clearly and obviously connected with the form and order of the Society; otherwise I think they ought not to be produced, at least for the purpose of disturbing the confidence of anyone who still cleaves to it.

1. One such indication must, I think, suggest itself to every thoughtful person. All, said the Quakers, who are not walking in the divine light, who do not recognise the presence and the guidance of an invisible teacher, are of the world. The pure and holy company, the Church, the Society of Friends, must consist of all who are led by the Spirit to perceive their connection with the invisible Guide, and to follow Him whithersoever He may lead them. Seeing that there was no body of men answering to this description, such a body must be formed; and all who did not attach themselves to it must in practice be treated as belonging to the world. Thus far all seems easy. One might fancy there was a little exclusiveness; that a few persons were treated as aliens, who might possibly be citizens of the household of God; but this could not be helped. There was need of a palpable distinction between the true men and the false. If the distinction were not perfect, it was at least good so far as it went; and faithful men must expect that the Spirit of God would, in due time, bring all to see that this was the Society to which they should belong. But soon a difficulty arose, for which the founders of the Society seem to have made no provision. Children are born to the members of it. What are these? Friends or world-citizens? The consistent answer would have been, “They are of the world; they are not consciously following the light; till they do so, it is a mere dream and contradiction to reckon them in the Society.” But feeling, and, as I believe, conscience, gave a different answer. They said, these must by all means belong to the Society; if not, it is a sin to have been agents in giving them existence. The only resource was to use all possible means for separating these children, outwardly at least, from the surrounding world. The parents would then feel that they had done their best, and they would think as little as possible of the falsehood which lay at the root of the whole proceeding. But it is only for a certain time that any falsehood can be hidden. This one is now making itself palpable. The younger Quakers look about, and ask themselves what it means that they are kept from the world? If the world means those who do not walk in the light, there is a world within the Society as well as without it. Would not their fathers have been right to exclude the idea of consanguinity from the Society altogether? For it is evident that between the law by which human society is propagated, and the law which governs this body, there is no connecting link. The heavenly kingdom has nothing to do with earthly relationships. Unless the body could be continually recruited by conversions from the ranks of the world, it seems as if it could never escape from the penalty of constantly violating the very distinction for which its presence was meant to be the abiding testimony.

2. But the Quaker Society was to be the witness for the existence of a Universal Kingdom. In this faith Penn went forth and preached to the Indians. He was satisfied that they had in them a sense of right and wrong, that the Word was speaking to them as well as to other men. I believe the results of his very interesting mission show how true the conviction was which encouraged him to undertake it. But what else do they prove? Did the settlement of Pennsylvania become the nucleus of a great missionary society? Did it attract to itself the aboriginal Indians and the English settlers? It grew up into a colony of prosperous traders, maintaining a very creditable position in the States, distinguished by certain badges of dress and manners from the neighbouring people, increasing according to the ordinary rate of increase in the population, indifferent beyond the rest of the sects to missionary enterprises. I speak of America, because it cannot be said that the system has not been fairly tried there. But whether you look at Quakerism in that country in which it flourished by persecution, or in that where it had the greatest opportunities for expansion, I ask what witness has it borne for universality, what signs does it make to prove that it is the universal kingdom which was to be set up on earth?

Perhaps it may be said that the philanthropy of the Quakers is a testimony to that feeling of fellowship with the whole human race, which their principles of a universal light and a universal kingdom were likely to foster. I am very far indeed from wishing to deny the existence of this philanthropy, or to detract from its merits. I can have no motive to do so, for I inwardly and heartily subscribe the doctrine which is supposed, and I think rightly, to be the only ground of sympathy with man as man. I have no doubt that it is that principle, or the tradition of it, which has brought forth whatever has been sound and good in the feelings of the Quakers for their white and black brethren. But the question which we are now considering is, How far is the Quaker system a witness on behalf of that principle? and to this question, I fancy, the mode in which the benevolence of Quakers, in late years especially, has displayed itself, is a most striking and conclusive answer. For the moment that they began to do anything besides bearing individual testimonies, the moment they attempted to perform some general, social, organic acts on behalf of their fellow creatures, that moment they found it necessary to fraternise with the members of other societies. They became members of societies for distributing the Bible, societies for emancipating the negroes, societies for promoting universal peace. Assuredly Fox and Penn would have done no such thing. They would have said: ’Our Society being raised up and constituted by God Himself to be the witness for what is spiritual and universal against that which is earthly and national, is the Bible society, the emancipation society, the peace society; we know of no other—there can be no other.” The notion of uniting with the world for the sake of promoting spiritual objects would have seemed to them most monstrous; and yet their followers have adopted this method as the only one they know of for carrying out the Quaker principles.

3. Among the benevolent projects of this day, there is none which has interested the Quakers more than the progress of education; they have been almost the founders of the British and Foreign School Society, and its greatest supporters. The present is not the opportunity for discussing any point connected with this subject in which I may differ from them. I refer to their exemplary zeal in reference to it for the purpose of noticing how much it clashes with the Quaker system, so far as that system puts forward an assertion of the doctrine of spiritual influences. The Quaker minister speaks only when an immediate perceptible impression determines him that he ought to speak. To prepare for his work, to receive any regular appointment to it, to be paid for it, is incompatible with the spiritual nature of the function. But the Quaker teacher, or the teacher whom the Quaker supports in a school, must have a formal appointment, must prepare regular lessons, must receive a regular salary. It follows either that the spiritual minister is not appointed to educate, or that education is not spiritual. If education be as important as the Society of Friends and as I think that it is, what testimony is borne here to the spiritual economy, or to the spiritual influences which go forth that men may be able to administer that economy? Education, which is to have so mighty an influence upon society, is to be conducted upon principles precisely the reverse of those which are proclaimed to be the only spiritual principles.

“But the Quakers,” it is said, “have borne a more consistent testimony than others against the habits and maxims of the world.” I do not mean, at present, to inquire what precise meaning we ought to attach to this word world—I take the signification which it bears among religious people generally, and the Society of Friends especially. Now the world, in their sense, though it may be built upon one common evil principle, assumes many shapes and appearances; and it must be admitted, I think, that the body which is raised up to protest against it at any particular period, or in any particular locality, ought to bear witness mainly against the form or appearance which is most characteristic of that time or locality. A society which should testify against gladiatorial exhibitions in the nineteenth century, or against cannibalism in Europe, might be entitled to the praise of great prudence, but could scarcely allege any strong evidence of a divine vocation. The position of the Quakers has been exclusively or almost exclusively in Great Britain and the United States of America during the period between the Civil Wars and the reign of Queen Victoria. I ask any plain person to tell me what he thinks has been the characteristic sin of these two countries during this time especially. That there have been persons, a large body of persons in each, who have been devoting themselves to amusements of one kind or other, and have made them the end of life, I do not doubt; but assuredly no one, comparing England and America with France or Italy, would affirm that the pursuit of pleasure has been the especial sin of us and our Transatlantic children; least of all, that it has been the especial sin of that part of our respective populations with which the Quakers are brought into contact, and whose evils therefore, they ought most to have denounced. Again, it is indisputable that a certain number of persons have pursued literature and mental cultivation as the end of life, and have, for the sake of it, overlooked higher and more universal ends. But certainly this has not been our chief infirmity; other European nations have been far more tempted by it. One deep radical disease has been infecting our two countries, and during the last two centuries has been entering deeper and deeper into our constitution, till it has now nearly reached the vitals of both. Will not everyone say that it has been money-getting? How, then, has the Society of Friends borne witness by its habits and constitution against this sin? It says, indeed, that no portion of the wealth of the body is to be set apart for the support of its ministers; that their subsistence is to be entirely precarious. This may be construed into a proof that money has nothing to do with that which is spiritual. But I confess I do not see how this testimony is to act upon the world, when they find that Friends—believing all amusements, and many branches of mental cultivation, to be necessarily evil, to be actually incapable of being sanctified to a good purpose—believe that the acquisition of wealth is not only a safe and lawful thing, but is to be emphatically, and by the very nature of the community, the business of everyone who enters it. A Society, the members of which are, to all outward appearance—its ministers as well as others—principally occupied in trade, nay, which till lately had a fear of being occupied in anything else, is to be the witness against a world, which has for its most characteristic, most irreligious distinction, the worship of mammon.

But has the existence of such a body as the Society of Friends had no influence at all in inducing men to believe that the heart and spirit of men are intended to converse with holy and invisible things? I hope that it has had this effect. I cannot believe that any system is permitted to exist which is not working some good; possibly there are minds (out of the Society I mean; of course, there must have been many in it) to whom Quakerism has suggested thoughts which nothing else would have suggested. But yet it seems to me that the positive witness which it has borne in favour of spirituality is of the most equivocal kind. I am afraid if the majority of Quakers were asked wherein the peculiar spirituality of their body consisted, they would answer: “In our not baptizing, not keeping an outward feast, not offering up prepared prayers, not having an outwardly ordained ministry.” And unquestionably this answer would express very much the feeling which the sight of such a Society communicates to indifferent persons who behold it from a distance. A man of the world, who thinks the ordinances of the Church troublesome or unmeaning, observes, perhaps, to himself now and then, that the Quakers contrive to dispense with these ordinances; and yet are a very religious and thriving people. But at another time he will be equally struck with the observation, that though they have none of these indications, they have others which seem to him not less outward and visible. They have no fixed forms of prayer, but they have a fixed form of dress; they have rejected sacraments, but they retain a peculiar kind of language. Surely a man who is inquiring with some confusion what spiritual Christianity means, must be somewhat puzzled when he is told: Those are the marks of a formal earthly body; these of one essentially spiritual and divine.

It may be supposed that these are mere accidents of the Quaker profession, which show what a tendency to formalism there is in the human mind, but which may be laid aside by those who understand the true objects of the Society. There cannot be a greater mistake. The younger Quakers are probably very impatient of these restrictions; but it is not because they have an insight into any essential principles; on the contrary, indifference to the outward badges is very generally accompanied by indifference to the ideas on which Quakerism rests, or by an attachment to them only as far as they are opposed to something else. All the older and more earnest members of the Society maintain, and I believe on the most just and philosophical grounds, that these peculiarities, unimportant as they may seem, cannot be safely abandoned; that the very existence of Quakerism is involved in their preservation. They assert, it seems to me with equal truth, that every relaxation of the rules which the first Quakers laid down respecting amusements, or literary pursuits, tends to make the existence of the body less intelligible; nay, tends to a directly immoral result, by exhibiting all restraints upon self-indulgence as hard and unnecessary burdens, which are to be avoided as far as prudence and the opinions of others will permit.

I do not venture to predict how rapid may be the process of decay in a body which exhibits these symptoms. At present Quakerism is threatened from without on two sides—on the Evangelical side, and on the Unitarian. Here in England the younger Quakers desire, in general, to be more like those who profess what are called the doctrines of the Reformation; in America they have been powerfully attracted in the opposite direction. It is quite possible that these feelings may not lead to any great secessions from the Society, besides those which they have caused already. But one or other of these influences will be henceforth predominant; Quakerism will have less and less a basis of its own. All its grand pretensions are at an end; its greatest defenders speak of it now not as the Church or Kingdom of God, but as the best of the sects which compose the religious world. Such language can never satisfy those who retain any of the old Quaker spirit. They must believe that there is a spiritual kingdom somewhere; if they cannot find it in the Society of Friends, they will look for it in those opposing systems of which I have spoken. Let us inquire what prospect they have of being rewarded for their search.