‘In commemoration of George Fox’: an edited extract from the tercentenary celebration in the Friend

‘This man has become part of the history of England.’

Of George Fox it cannot be said, to use his own words, that ‘the dead make dead ways for the dead to walk in.’ His spirit is alive today, perhaps more alive than at any time since his death. His immortal message is as greatly needed all through the world now as it was in the tumultuous days of the seventeenth century; ten generations have passed since he first uttered it, but their experience has only confirmed its validity, proved its vitality, and enhanced the depth and reality of its truth. With all his limitations, his poverty, his lack of learning, with all his faults and miscalculations, persecuted as he was through the length and breadth of the land, imprisoned eight times and summoned before courts of justice some sixty times, despised, solitary and rejected – this man nevertheless has become part of the history of England. He belongs to the grand race of the reformers who have extended the bounds of freedom, and to the school of the prophets who have seen that which is invisible.

Happily, as it happens, we are strangely and peculiarly ready to join in remembrance of George Fox. Never before in its long history has there been a deeper understanding in the Society of Friends of the facts and meaning of its origin and purpose. The Society has in the last fifty years been steadily shedding many of the artificial accretions of the eighteenth century, many of the mannerisms and formalisms and some other ‘isms’ which had accumulated in the 150 years which followed Fox and which concealed the fresh, upspringing evangel of the early days; best of all, the Society has in the last two generations undergone something of a new birth, something of a return to the visions of George Fox, some fuller understanding of the wider service which awaits it. ‘It has rediscovered’, as Neave Brayshaw has well said, ‘neither easily nor quickly, the truth that it exists not for itself but for the world’s healing. With increasing boldness, its timidity not at all cast aside, it ventures along new paths which lead to strange places’.

This is the contribution, the debt owing from the Society of Friends at this auspicious time, that in grateful commemoration of the wonderful three centuries it will rededicate to its errand, and that its sons and daughters will once more rally to the standard of George Fox and ‘the pleasant sound of his trumpet’. For with all his incongruities and anomalies as we may fancy to conceive them, the founder of our fellowship was the bearer of a universal commission. Unquestionably, he was one of God’s great servants; solemn, rugged, austere, tender-hearted; built on the large scale, his presence a religious majesty, yet not abused; ‘a discerner of others’ spirits and very much master of his own’; a man, a strong man, ‘a new and heavenly-minded man, a divine and a naturalist, and all of God Almighty’s making’. Above all and in all, Fox was a convinced man; and this is perhaps the first lesson we find in him. He may have been right or wrong, but he was convinced, he was sincere, and what he believed he did. Bishop Temple [then of Manchester, later of Canterbury] said the other day that ‘George Fox has exercised through the Society of Friends, a most powerful influence on English Christianity. We believe him to have been mistaken in some of his strongest convictions; but we are sure that his mistakes have been beneficial, for he redressed a balance unduly inclining the other way. He is one for whose very errors we have cause to be thankful.’

‘With all his incongruities and anomalies as we may fancy to conceive them, the founder of our fellowship was the bearer of a universal commission.’

Well, this may be as it may. But the fact remains that Fox convinced men because he was himself convinced. This is a rarer attribute in our day, and we are the weaker for it. English Christianity is suffering, and the Society of Friends with it, for lack of conviction. How did Fox become a convinced man? Not by book learning, not by the arguments of others, but by his own experience. He tried Christianity and found it to work. His knowledge was not about it but of it, and he adds, ‘this I knew experimentally’. 

In brief, Fox was, in philosophy, a pragmatist. His long personal travail and search for the truth, his own discovery of one who could speak to his condition, his inward baptism, this is what marked his life and gave him that undying assurance and confidence, which separated him from ‘deceitful professors without possession’ and made him more than a match for every service and occasion.

Then, in the second place, we may learn something from the fact that Fox was an evangelist. Being convinced, he set about convincing others of the new life which had come to his own soul. It altered everything for him, it was the dayspring from on high; it put him ‘atop’ of his troubles, it warmed his heart and filled him with joy, it gave him a sense of mission. Having all this, he itinerated these islands, ceaselessly, preaching and protesting as no man had done before. He wore out his clothes, his horses, his critics, his persecutors, and eventually himself. He bent his life to this one task of proclamation. In strange places and at all times he bought his testimony to all classes of persons, from the Lord Protector to the kitchen maid, and from the judge to the convicted thief. He was every man’s chaplain. He was never for a sect, did not establish a church, did not even institute membership of the Society of Friends. He was a universal evangelist. 

The Journal is an amazing record of the journeyings and experiences of this daring and persistent evangelist. As one reads it one is not surprised that it takes its place among the great religious autobiographies of the world – it is so human, dramatic, arresting; so full of the vicissitudes, risks and perils of seventeenth-century England; so pregnant with the meaning and power of the tremendous religious struggles then joined; so sure and certain in the face and spirit of this convinced evangelist. It is a very great book, carrying its reader from the darkness and depression of Drayton-in-the-Clay up the celestial hills, through fire and sword, in palace and cottage and prison, across the seas, in good report and ill, inferior and in triumph, and at last, after fifty years, ‘over the sands and safe to Swarthmoor’. It is a great book, above all, because it is filled to the brim with an overcoming gospel. How pure and empty and aimless and dead is the human life without an evangel!

Thus we come in the third place to the central lesson of George Fox. What was it he taught? And of what does his message really consist? The vast cloud of words, the often ineffective attempts at explanation, and the dualistic and theological attitude of mind which characterised the seventeenth century have done much to conceal the relatively simple truth which Fox had to declare; and it must be added that his own temperament and personality have sometimes added to the confusion. Shorn of non-essentials and excrescences the burden of his message is clear and precise – no careful reader of the Journal and of the collected evidence of his friends can miss it. It is this:

• one, he believed that a divine light, the indwelling Christ, existed in every man, which gave a new illumination and interpretation to all the facts of life
• two, he believed that no spiritual experience was effective or transforming which was not acquired at first hand, direct, experimental and personal – without dependence on external authority, book, creed, priest or church
• three, he believed, and lived and acted on the belief, in the practice of the presence of God.

These cardinal beliefs – the being and spirit of God around men, always and everywhere; Christ within men; man’s soul its own arbiter – were not new, many other men had shared them before Fox; many others after him knew them, like he did experimentally, Isaac Penington, Lady Guion, William Law. But Fox rediscovered them for himself, and declared them all through England. He added to them, argued about them, interpreted and reinterpreted them, gave them a quasi-theological setting, organised a fellowship upon them, wove them into a service for others. The promulgation of such beliefs brought Fox into antagonism with doctrinal and external authority on all sides, and his life became a continuous conflict. But amid the darkness, the clear, steady light of the candle burns.

‘Swinging away as he did from the prevailing theories of human depravity,’ says professor Rufus Jones, ‘he went far over to the other extreme and took a strikingly optimistic view of men. Set him free from tyranny and oppression, liberate him from full series of life, draw out his potential capacity by a true education, awaken him to a consciousness of God within him, and there are no limits to his spiritual possibilities.’

That is the core of his case. It does not centre in a church, or a sect, or a creed, or any kind of ritual or formulary. It centres in God and in man. 

Is it needed today, this emancipating gospel? That is the question which WJ Ferrar [a contemporary Anglican author] asks us: ‘Can we say that all the music and all the preaching and all the energy expended in getting people to come to church has much real result in waking into life the seed of the soul which Fox said was the Presence of God? In which direction is the world of national religion tending? What sort of a revival do we look for? One that will lead men into a rich expression of their feelings in ceremonies, one that will deepen and intensify their intellectual expression of the certainties of faith? Or should we look for some spiritual convulsions such as Fox went through, a direct experience of the cardinal certainty, a new sense of the Presence of God? Fox and his disciples gained that. It was a pearl of great price, and all the others’ pearls were given to secure it. Historic continuity, elaboration of doctrine, sacraments, aesthetic worship, all were resigned. But the Kingdom of Heaven with persecution was secured instead.’

‘His life became a continuous conflict. But amid the darkness, the clear, steady light of the candle burns.’

In 1649, when Fox was twenty-five years old and had become convinced, he began his social service. He turned his convictions into practice, and like so many imprisoned persons had the courage of them. He started with the problem of servants’ wages in a little Midland town, but it led in the end to the principles of Penn’s Frame of Government of Pennsylvania, and to a couple of centuries of social reform. Though an organiser Fox was not a statesman, nor did he think imperially. Yet his message was worldwide and led him very definitely into two forms of social service. First, he was against every form of oppression – ecclesiastical, military, proprietary, or municipal. He had a history of temperance, education, industrial betterment, religious toleration, common and equal justice in the courts for rich and poor alike, leniency of penalty, prison reform. He was in favour of apprenticeship and of the registration of the unemployed. 

He inspired his friends and disciples to undertake social service in many directions, and he set the standard of social sympathy for his fellowship. Then, secondly, he was an internationalist – for peace, for the propagation of a universal faith, and against aggrandisement and the selfish oppression of any race or people. He travelled in Ireland, in Holland, and in the American colonies. Fox’s social conceptions and integrity became in the course of years a tradition and a practice which has given character to the Society of Friends, and even to the English people.

Here then we have the lessons of Fox’s life and work for which we may always be grateful and which, though we cannot imitate, we may hope to emulate or at least commemorate in our own day and generation. We can only prove our gratitude by honestly speaking the truth as he saw it and by living up to it as he did. We can only really commemorate his service by fulfilling our own.

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