Image generated by OpenArt, an artificial intelligence tool, with the prompt ‘George Fox, aged 28, wearing a hat, standing on Pendle Hill
Vagabond journey:the ‘psychological abnormalities’ and ‘religious genius’ of George Fox
‘He made trouble his career.’
If you’re thinking of tackling George Fox’s Journal before the quarter centenary commemorations next year, then I recommend William James as a reading companion. Born in 1842, James was a philosopher, and perhaps the first psychologist of the religious sensibility. He is an enthusiast for Quakerism. Take this, for example, from his The Varieties of Religious Experience: A study in human nature (1902): ‘The Quaker religion which [Fox] founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England.’
