Eye - 31 March 2017
From petrol to Tolstoy
Mind your Ps and Qs
The use of fossil fuels and the challenge for travelling Friends is far from a new concern.
Friends in the 1940s were perplexed as to how to deal with a very immediate problem: an unobtainable spirit.
Jennifer Milligan, senior library assistant at Friends House library in London, recently spotted an intriguing page in the Friend archives commenting on the conundrum.
A Friend, writing only as ‘Watchman’, penned a piece in the 25 September 1942 edition that begins: ‘We are often told to mind our Ps and Qs, and certainly at the present time we are forced to give attention to the P of petrol and the Q of Quakerism.’
The writer describes the problems of public transport provision and procuring enough petrol when supplies were short.
They highlight that: ‘Intervisitation is the very life blood of Friends, and always has been. Individual visits, family visits (not so many now as in the old days), and visits to Meetings have played, and still play, an incalculable part in maintaining our Society’s health.’
Watchman laments: ‘Many Meetings must be suffering, or at any rate feeling their isolation acutely. Those who have a concern to visit are often prevented, and so the people are in danger of being “famished for words” – and, what is far worse, famished for fellowship and communion in worship.’
However, obstacles can also be viewed as opportunities: ‘Perhaps the very difficulties will prove a challenge and stimulus to us. Perhaps life has become too easy for us, and something deeper will be evolved from us in these more arduous times…
‘But most of all we must rely on deeper spiritual experience, a greater power of worshipping with others at a distance, a stronger sense of sympathy. This involves sacrifice on our part, more reading and study, more prayer, deeper thinking and deeper feeling. But it can be done – at a price. Possibly, for instance, if we cannot visit a Meeting in person we might let the Friends of that Meeting know that on a certain date we should be specially worshipping with them in spirit, either in our own Meeting or in solitude.’
Watchman urged determination: ‘We must in some way get over this difficulty, sublimate it, and not be beaten by it. We must try to rise above the limitations of time and space, and increasingly get to know one another in that which is eternal.
‘Christians should remember that petrol is not the only spirit available; they have also the spirit of God. They should also remember that petroleum means Rock Oil, oil that comes from the rock, from the Petra, “and that Rock was Christ”… So, even if the material petrol runs short, the Rock-of-Ages-Oil is inexhaustible, “the same yesterday, to-day and for ever.”’
Tolstoy’s last novel
The news of the sale of a former Quaker printing firm, Headley Brothers (17 March), prompted John Lampen, of Stourbridge Meeting, to tell Eye about one of the company’s historical achievements… the publication of Leo Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection, in 1899.
‘The Russian censors would not have let it be published there because of its attacks on their church and legal system. But a disciple of Tolstoy’s in England found an old compositor who could set Cyrillic type, Headleys printed it and the Quakers financed it. Royalties went to help a persecuted Russian sect, the Doukhobors.
‘It caused a public sensation because Tolstoy had said he would write no more novels.
‘It caused another sensation among British Friends the following year, when the English translation appeared and they found they had financed an account of a prostitute on trial for murder.’
In John’s book, A Letter from James: Essays in Quaker history, he explores this further and reflects the reaction of Meeting for Sufferings, which ‘resounded with shame and outrage that Friends had been associated with [the book]’.
However, the true extent to which this was due to the content rather than the medium is uncertain as at that time ‘weighty’ Friends did not read novels.
John explains that the Yearly Meeting, in 1764, had added the following advice to their book of Christian Doctrine, Practice and Discipline. It remained up until the 1871 edition:
‘This meeting being sorrowfully affected under a consideration of the hurtful tendency of reading plays, romances, novels and other pernicious books, earnestly recommends to every member of our Society to discourage and suppress the same.’
