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The power of Quaker worship
We should conduct ourselves compassionately around Friends with electric energy says Roger Seal
How, it is interesting to speculate, would someone in the seventeenth century describe electricity. Of course they lacked completely the analytical grasp that allows us today to explain and exploit this amazing thing: in their awe quite possibly the closest they could get to it would be ‘a secret power’ or ‘life’, or even ‘Life’, for its palpability and potency. So it is interesting and illuminating to find that Robert Barclay, writing in 1678 and quoted at 19.21 of Quaker faith & practice, uses those exact terms to describe what he discovered and what happened to him when he found himself among God’s people. And perhaps it would be allowable therefore to paraphrase what Barclay wrote introducing such further analogous concepts as current, contact and charge: they could convey something of the force of what he was writing.
