Rufous Jones: TSPOQ Introduction

From: The introduction to "The Second Period of Quakerism." Introduction by Rufous Jones

In The Beginnings of Quakerism we were dealing at every point with a “movement.” It was creative, at a enthusiastic, and full of surprises. In this volume Quakerism is still a movement, but it is plainly in the stage of organization, consolidation, and congealment. When the creative leaders of the great period pass off the scene, as they do toward the end of this volume, we find that the movement is pretty well stiffened and arrested, and that a system is emerging. are passing from dynamic to static Quakerism. So long as the world continued hostile to it, and endeavoured to suppress it or transform it, it revealed an amazing vitality and energy of endurance. The men and women who shaped the Quaker history of the creative stage were sublimely indifferent to consequences. They were possessed of a vision and dedicated to a mission which made everything else on earth secondary and more or less unimportant. That situation makes an heroic story, but the very success of the policy of uncompromising endurance makes the later epochs of Quakerism less heroic and less interesting. The work of forcing back the sea and building the dykes makes necessarily a different type of persons from those who are “born to peace in the lee of the dykes.” All movements of every sort undergo some such change of type.

It would seem appropriate that this Introduction should deal in the main with the transforming effect of consolidation and organization, since this is the peculiar aspect which forms the connecting link between the preceding volume and the final succeeding volume of this series.1

My preliminary researches, in Studies in Mystical Religion and in Spiritual Reformers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, have conclusively shown that there was a long historical preparation for the Quaker movement, and that it was a legitimate outcome of this painful travail of lonely souls and persecuted groups who were striving for an adequate spiritual reformation of the Church. One of the most remarkable features of this historical preparation was the almost complete absence of organization throughout the entire period. The movement went steadily forward by the propagation and transmission of ideas, by personal inspiration and by what, for want of a better term, we call contagion of ideals. Nobody during this time appeared with a genius for organization. In fact, the aspirations of the spirit of the movement were positively unfriendly to organization. As is the case with all movements which are at heart profoundly mystical, the leaders of this movement were afraid of the hampering, contracting effects of method and system, and, as a consequence, it maintained its fluidity for more than a hundred years without ever losing its power of propagation or its contagious growth.

The Church which the spiritual reformers aimed to create was an invisible Church, rather than a visible, organized, and empirical one. They took the early unorganized stage of apostolic Christianity as their model. They no doubt somewhat idealized and glorified this apostolic Church of saints, but so, too, did all types of reformers idealize the primitive Church and set it in sharp contrast to the Church with which they were familiar. Luther himself, in his early reforming period, conceived of the true Church as a spiritual congregation, composed only of the new-born, transformed persons, possessed of faith and insight, and all together ministering to the spiritual life of all. “I believe,” he wrote, “ that there is on earth, wide as the world is, only one holy universal Christian Church, which is nothing else than the community [Gemeinde] of the saints.”2 This conception always remained as the ideal of the spiritual reformers. The mediaeval Church, with its creeds, its hierarchy, its magical sacraments, its compromises with the world, its external imperial authority, its ambitions, its corruptions, its multitude of nominal or titular members, seemed to these high-minded idealists “an apostate Church,” incapable of being reformed. It was to them a work of misguided “Babel-builders.” They utterly disapproved of the course which they saw the great reformers, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, taking to correct and remedy the intolerable situation. The alliance with the State, which was a feature of all reformed Churches, seemed to them an unholy alliance. The survivals of untransformed theology, the preservation of ancient superstitions, the continuance in the new Churches of unspiritual, nominal members, the exaltation of the letter of Scripture, and the use of persecution as a method of forcing uniformity appeared to them to be regrettable relics of paganism and apostasy. They would have none of it.

They were determined to create, or rather to restore, a wholly different type of Church. It was to have no connection whatever with the State. It was to have no infallible creed. It was to be governed by no authoritative hierarchy. It was to have no essential forms, rites, ritual, or ceremonies. It was not even to be an “organization” in the strict sense of the word. It was to be a fellowship, a society, a communion. All persons in all lands and in all ages who have been born of God, who partake of Christ’s spirit, who are united in the bonds of love, who are travailing for the Kingdom of God, who experience the communion of the Holy Spirit, belong to this Church. It is thus both visible and invisible. It is on the earth but at the same time a super-temporal communion. It is the bride of Christ, the organ of the Spirit, the entire congregation and assembly of the saints. It is tied and bound to no fixed and unchanging external system or order. It is the growing, expanding revelation of God through men, and its one essential mark is life, but always life revealing itself through love and sacrifice and service. As Sebastian Franck (1499— 1542) enthusiastically declares “ It is neither prince nor peasant, food nor drink, hat nor coat, here nor there, yesterday nor to-morrow, baptism nor circumcision, nor anything whatever that is external, but peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, unalloyed love out of a pure heart and good conscience, and an unfeigned faith.”3These men, though trained in the universities of their time, were childlike in their naive simplicity. They assumed that religion as a living, inward experience would take care of itself in the world. It would need no external supports nor contrivances. Christ, the eternal Word, the Spirit of Truth, the Light shining immediately in the human soul, would guard, guide, protect, create, construct His own Church, if only men would let Him work unhindered. Once more as in the creative apostolic days, the Spirit would fall upon the obedient, responsive, faithful believers, endow them with gifts, endue them with power, and through them continue His revelation of Light, Life, Love, and Truth. Their Church was thus to be spontaneous, free, vital, expanding, joyous, and potentially universal, because it was to be the one body of Christ.

There can be, I think, no question that George Fox began his mission with that ideal in mind. He became convinced that all existing Churches were in"apostasy.“ The preface to his Great Mistery(1658), though actually written by Edward Burrough, clearly expresses Foxs mind and position. This remarkable document says: "As our hearts inclined to the light which shined in every one of us we came to know the perfect estate of the Church; her estate before the apostles days, and in the apostles' days, and since the days of the apostles. Her present state we found to be as a woman who had once been clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet who had brought forth him that was to rule the nations but she had fled into the wilderness and was there sitting desolate! Again it says: "As for all Churches (so called )and professions and gatherings of people, we held you all in the apostasy and degeneration from the true Church, not being gathered by the Spirit of the Lord, nor anointed thereby, as the true members of Christ ever were, but to be in a form, and in forms of righteousness without the power, and in imitations without life and perfect knowledge.” This preface boldly declares that no true reformation has yet taken place, and that the existing Churches lack a true worship, a real religion, and practices that have life and power.

George Fox and his early followers believed that they were called to carry out the true reformation, to restore apostolic Christianity, and to make a fresh beginning in England of the Church of Christ. They never thought of themselves as a “sect,” or as one “Church” among many Protestant “Churches.” They thought of themselves as forming a group, a fellowship, a society they called it, of persons who were a living part of this true Church of the ages. All saints who have ever lived and who have shaped their spiritual lives by the light of Christ were members with them and with them constituted the true “Seed of God,” the one Church, with Christ as its Head and Life. They believed that this Church was as wide as the world, and they went forth with unbounded faith and enthusiasm to discover in all lands those who were true fellow-members with them in this great household of God and who were the hidden Seed of God. It was not to be a man-made or a man-governed institution. It was to be a Christ-made and a Christ-governed society or body. It was in conception a living organism rather than an organization. It was in ideal to be the work and creation of the Spirit of Christ, operating from within and not the work and creation of human hands, building from the outside. In theory the Society had no visible head. Nobody managed it, nobody directed it. Every step was taken, however momentous, however trivial, by the entire group acting, as it believed, under the direction and guidance of the Spirit. All ministry was, in ideal, Divinely initiated and given through unordained persons who had listened and heard and who spoke because the word of God had come to them. All the work of propagation, the efforts to reach and gather the hidden Seed of God, were undertaken by men and women who were “called"out and qualified for this Divine business.

It is a mark of the wisdom and sanity of George Fox that, mystic and idealist as he was, he faced the facts of life, he learnt from experience, he came to see that disembodied spiritual movements cannot succeed and do a permanent work in the world; and, when the hour came for it, he took the leadership in organizing the Society of Friends for its abiding, expanding mission. This was obviously a delicate and difficult undertaking. It was in some degree a surrender of the original ideal, perhaps we had better say of the primitive dream. John Wilkinson and John Story, the leaders of the opposition to the organizing work of Fox, were endeavouring to stand uncompromisingly for the “pure” primitive ideal. They were the champions of an abstract liberty, theorists who refused utterly to regard consequences or to take account of things as they are. They defied experience. Fox, on the other hand, yielded to the pressure of unescapable facts. He had been a keen observer of events and tendencies within the fellowship of which he was the leading spirit. He noted the disintegrating forces. He saw the necessity for co-operation, even though it might involve some surrender of individual privilege. He was willing to adjust to the conditions and requirements of social or group existence, though it meant a reduction of his early ideals. There was no way of going forward at all without some compromise of abstract theory. Usually “stiff as a tree,” in the words of his Scarborough jailers, he bent in this crisis and thus gave his movement the possibility of a successful future. Deep-seated troubles and hampering limitations lay concealed in the system of organization that was gradually worked out for the growing Society, but any type of organization that might have been adopted would have brought its peculiar difficulties and its limitations to this enthusiastic, spiritual undertaking. To organize is to come under the sway of habit and custom. It more or less locks up a movement and turns it into a system. Initiative decreases. Plural possibilities are eliminated. Enthusiasm wanes. A cooling process succeeds. Conservatism and loyalty to the status quo become powerful forces. The very things which make life possible entail at the same time perils and dangers.

It must be said, however, that the primitive form of organization which was gradually worked out by George Fox and his helpers for the Society of Friends was admirably fitted to the genius of the movement. They gave as much scope as was possible under any system for the free, unhindered circulation of the Spirit. They got as far away as possible from the model of the state-Church, the Church as conceived and constructed by the great Protestant reformers. They kept close to the ideal of a fellowship of believers, living in obedience to the Spirit revealed within them. Their Society was in idea a complete democracy, that is to say no imposed official or head was ever to interfere with any member’s individual liberty. And yet it was to be a democracy of a new type. The individuals composing the Society were no longer to be thought of as bare, isolated, self-seeking units, acting capriciously. Each member of the Society was, in their thought, an over-individual. He was to be a partaker of the life of the Spirit; he was to be an organ of the in dwelling Christ; he was inwardly to be raised into new and corporate life with all the other members. It was thus in thought and purpose a Divine democracy, a real communion of saints, living here below but sharing the life and mind of the eternal, invisible Christ. It was in essence a miniature kingdom of God, a little visible part of the whole family of God, a tiny fragment of the invisible Church. It had no constitution, no creed,no sacraments, no clergy, no ordained officials, no infallibilities, except the infallibility of the guiding Spirit. With all its limitations, this Society, organized in the Restoration period, against the protests of the pure idealists, has proved to be the most impressive experiment in Christian history of a group-mysticism, a religious body practising corporate silence as the basis of worship and maintaining a fundamental faith in Spirit-guided ministry.

The formulation of Quaker doctrine was, in my judgment, not as happy, was not performed in a manner as accordant with the genius of the movement as was the form of the organization of the Society. The main diffculty with the formulation of doctrine in general is that it must always of necessity be done in terms of the prevailing metaphysics of the period. It is an obvious fact that systems of metaphysics are doomed to become out-dated and inadequate with the process of thought. Fashions in metaphysics are notoriously subject to change. The result is that the religious truth of a movement, once locked up and encased in a system of thought which dies and gets left behind, is itself in danger of crystallization and arrest. Just this common course of events has occurred with the formal declaration of the Quaker principle. In the first stage Quakerism remained experimental, vital, unformulated. George Fox was naive, spontaneous, and unreflective. He knew no school meta-physics. He simply called men to that of God in themselves. He took almost exactly the position of the spiritual reformers. He assumed that universal experience bore witness to a Divine light within man. He rested his entire faith upon the native testimony of the soul Wherever man is found some moral and spiritual truths are revealed in him. How the Divine and human can be conjunct, how God and man can correspond and co operate, did not greatly concern him. He was satisfied with the clear fact. He was ready to trust the soul. But in a world of endless debate and conflict, the problem of the Divine-human relationship was sure to arise and become urgent. Controversy was inevitable; it was the very air men breathed in this seventeenth century. There could be no continuous propaganda of the faith without a definite exposition and defence of it. That meant that sooner or later it must get into the common theological terminology of the time. This work of translating the Quaker faith into a contemporary system of thought was performed by Robert Barclay of Scotland. He was a highly endowed person, of rare natural gifts. He was broadly educated and carefully trained as a scholar. He was typically Scotch in his bent and fondness for exact logical comprehension. He bears his frequent testimony as a convinced Quaker that experience is everything and system almost nothing, and yet, in spite of that personal testimony, he goes insistently forward with the development of his elaborate logically-linked system as though -however his heart felt- his mind believed that truth could not maintain itself and prevail without the solid armour of logic. He was above everything else a good man; pure, high-minded, noble, dedicated. He does not understand the common people by native instinct as George Fox does. His blood and nurture separate him from the rank and file, without his intention of having it so. He is most at home and at his best when he is talking with Princess Elizabeth or writing to her. This Stuart princess was one of the most learned women in Europe, the intimate friend and correspondent of Descartes, a combination of philosopher and saint and, in her later life, almost persuaded to become a Friend.

Barclay possessed a beautiful inner spirit. His character was one peculiarly marked by sweetness, though at the same time not lacking in firmness and strength His religion went all through him. His soul was reached by a real experience, and all the springs of his life were fed by his experimental discovery of God. With noble purpose and with the loftiest intentions he undertook the difficult task of expounding the truth of the inward Light, as a universal religion.

The Apology for the True Christian Divinity, as the same is held forth and preached by the People called in scorn Quakers, was written when Barclay was twenty-eight and is an extraordinary book. The range of Barclays knowledge of Scripture and of the Fathers and Reformers of the Church, and the depth of his penetration, compare favourably with the same qualities in the first edition of Calvin’s Institutes, written when Calvin was twenty-six. A primary difficulty with the Apology, however, lies in the fact that the writer of it belonged to a fundamentally different school of thought from that in which the leaders of Ouakerism moved. These early Ouaker founders had broken away completely from the theological doctrines which the Protestant Reformers inherited and re-formulated They cut straight across and left on one side the whole loop of theological “notions,” They proposed to leave the old behind and to make a new beginning. The theological concepts about which men preached and debated seemed to them hollow, empty, and dead. They were as opposed to restoring these outworn “notions” as they were to reviving the superstitions of the mediaeval Church. “The dead might bury the dead,” their business was proclaiming a gospel of Life and Light. They plainly meant to keep religion in the warm and living currents of experience; to have their message and their entire proclamation spring out of realities discovered within the purview of their own souls. The Calvinistic account of God and man and salvation was to them an unnecessary appendix to the eternal, living Word of God; an unwarranted supplement to apostolic Christianity. They lived and thought in another world of ideas, they were the inheritors of the long labours of mystics, heretics, martyrs, and spiritual prophets, and it was their peculiar mission to transmit this type of inner religion, at length freed from the encasing bonds of man-made doctrines.

Barclay on the contrary, decides to find out how Quakerism stands with Reformation doctrines, and to adjust the new as far as possible with the old. He reveals at every point an intimate and minute acquaintance with the entire history of theological doctrine. He knows, as I have said, the writings of the Fathers, the Schoolmen, and the Reformers. What he does not know, at least not intimately or profoundly, is the line of spiritual predecessors who have prepared the way in the wilderness for Quakerism. He had never travelled over this highway. He had missed the little books which came out of the deep experience of the great mystics. He was not familiar with the spiritual contemporaries of Luther and Calvin and Arminius, who essayed to mark out a new path to the Kingdom. He had not read, and one can but wish he had done so, the fresh and liberating interpretations of Christianity given by the Cambridge Platonists, Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, and their friends. Here was a way of thought kindred to the spirit and genius of the Quaker principle and ideals. But Barclay’s intellectual world attached elsewhere. He undertook not to reinterpret the Quaker principle in terms of this wider, fresher, deeper movement of thought, but rather to challenge the prevailing Protestant system of thought, and to show how this system would look when adjusted to fit the principle of the Inward Light. That course, judged historically, seems to me a pity. It was done with real genius, but a wholly different type of interpretation would have been far better for the “truth.” It was unfortunate to lock up this new idea in that old system.

We find ourselves in the Apology back again with the ancient conception of man, so familiar in the theories of the dogmatic theologians. Friends had begun their movement with a bold challenge to this Augustinian dogma. Fox, speaking out of his own experience, says that he had gravity and stayedness of mind as a child; he was from his earliest days kept pure, and when he was eleven years old he knew pureness and righteousness.4 His experience of God in his own soul enabled him to take a fundamental view of man very unlike that of the speculative theologians. He trusts experience for his theory of man and passes by on the other side and leaves behind the dogma about man, as his spiritual predecessors had also done. The mysticism of George Fox is characteristically affirmative. He testifies elsewhere to a first-hand consciousness of God. He knows of nothing to prevent God and man finding one another and enjoying one another. Death and darkness abound, but God still more abounds and is over them. There is a busy Satan at work in the world, but God is “atop” of him, and “the Seed of God” is a reigning, victorious thing. Fox emphatically belongs in the anti-augustinian movement. Barclay, however, goes back to the accepted dogma about man, and adopts it as his basis, and then endeavours to alter it to fit his view of the Inward Light. “Man by nature, man as he is man,” Barclay says, “is corrupt and fallen, "No real good proceedeth from his nature as he is man, "A seed of sin is transmitted to all men from Adam”; a seed is propagated to all men which in its own nature is sinful and inclines men to iniquity. “No good, he declares, should be ascribed to the natural man; he is "polluted in all his ways”; he is “void of righteousness and of the knowledge of God”; he is “out of the way and in short unprofitable”; he is “unfit to make one step toward heaven.”5 A good illustration of Barclay’s argumentative method is found in his comment upon the text Genesis viii. 21, “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” “From which,” he proceeds, “I thus argue:

“If the thoughts of man’s heart be not only evil, but always evil; then are they, as they simply proceed from his heart, neither good in part nor at any time.”

“But the first is true; therefore the last.”

“Again,

“If man’s thoughts be always only evil, then are they altogether useless and ineffectual to him in the things of God.

“But the first is true; therefore the last.”6

This proposition regarding the dogma of man’s sinful nature is established, after the usual manner of dogmatic theologians, by a judicious selection of Scripture texts, treated in a similar way to that employed by Calvin to prove his theories of “man.” The Adamic story is taken as factual history; the theory of the transmission of “a seed of sin” as taught by Calvin is accepted as though it were an essential part of the gospel.7 No attempt is made to sound the deeps of human experience itself. It does not occur to him that this is a question to be settled by the testimony of the soul, and that first of all one ought to investigate actual human life as it is and to build the theory on facts of experience. He piles up instead a structure of texts and considers that the far-reaching conclusion has been proved.

Barclay means by “the natural man” man as he would be if he were stripped of all altruistic traits, of all spiritual potency, of every upward-striving tendency, a being who is a bundle of selfish instincts and passions. He is, for theological purposes, reduced to his lowest terms, “He differeth”, Barclay says, “as he is mere man, no otherwise from beasts than by the rational property,” and it quickly appears that the “rational property” is nothing but a logical faculty, a cognitive capacity to form conceptions about the external world and to argue from them to other conceptions equally external. There is nothing in this natural man “that can in any degree appreciate or apprehend spiritual truth. In his own nature he can discern nothing of the things of God; he can do no good thing; he is utterly carnal and a continual prey to evil propensities. It needs hardly to be said at this date that there is no such being as this so-called "natural man.” He is an artificial construction. He is no more real than the Jabberwock is. He is an abstract figure, existing nowhere outside of books. Real man in his native fundamental being is both altruistic and selfish, both sympathetic and egotistic. It is as natural for him to love others as it is to promote self-interest. It is as instinctive to be social as it is to be individualistic. Man as man carries in the very ground of his nature a self- transcending spirit. Something from beyond his finite limits is bound up in him and for ever pushes him out of himself and draws him on. Every revelation of the real nature of God that has come to us has come through man Man’s spirit is a candle of the Lord and can burn with a revealing flame. God and man for ever belong together, and only by an arid and artificial metaphysics are they so sundered that man is reduced to this poor thing called “mere man.” “The truths of God are connatural to the soul of man,” Benjamin Whichcote was saying in the very period when Barclay was writing his Apology, and the soul of man makes no more resistance to them than the air does to light.8

It is peculiarly tragic that the fresh discovery of spiritual truth which Friends made should so quickly have been attached to the ancient dogmatic theory of “man,” because it is a sound principle that “there can be no true doctrine of God that is not based on a true doctrine of man.”[1^] If man is not, in his real nature, a being through whom God can reveal Himself, then our world is doomed to be a Godless world, for there is no other way for revelation to come. As soon as we turn to experience, however, we are at once reassured. Man, with all his faults and failures, with all his blunders and sins, is a being who lives by ideals which come from beyond himself, who organizes all the facts of his experience under universal forms of thought that ally him at once with a deeper universe of spiritual realities. He is always living for values and by visions that raise him out of the category of “mere man.” Something not of matter nor of space and time, something drawn from a realm of Spirit, is woven into the very structure of his soul and makes him akin to God whether he chooses to be the conscious child of God or not. The presence of the eternal reality, that gives permanence to any of our facts of experience, is indissolubly joined to our consciousness of self. We never possess the whole of ourselves. We are organic with a wider inner life than we have yet consciously made our own. The margins of our souls stretch farther than we dream.

And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, Still leagues beyond those leagues, there is more seal.9

It is possible, no doubt, to draw a narrow boundary around an abstract self and call the poor thing “mere man,” and then to demonstrate that of itself it has no spiritual powers -only in every case it is man himself who makes this mere-man creation. It is not one of God’s real men!

When once this fatal reduction or truncation of man has been made, the theologian must of necessity have recourse to miracle to make such a being spiritual. Salvation can then, of course, be effected only by some form of supernatural mediation. Here one discovers the peculiar ingenuity of the particular theologian. Some vehiculum Dei-i.e. mechanism by which the remote God is miraculously brought into operation in the otherwise unspiritual soul-must be contrived. Barclay’s ingenuity is here of a high order. He admits “the miserable and depraved condition”10 of mere man, but he is confident that there is an adequate supernatural provision to meet this impasse. Christ by His death purchased for man “a universal Light or Divine Seed. "Through the merits of this death” this Divine Light is conferred upon every person born into the world, and puts all mankind into a capacity for salvation,“11 "The Lord hath been pleased,” Barclay says, “to reserve the more full discovery of this glorious and evangelical dispensation to this our own age.”12 In other words, he believes that the great discovery which “the Children of the Light” have made is this provision of salvation by means of a work of Divine grace within the heart of man. It was, according to his exposition, just this gift of light and grace which Christ “purchased” for man on the Cross of Calvary. Only it seems passing strange that there was any necessity to “purchase” at such a price a grace which one would suppose would have spontaneously flowed out from the heart of a loving Father-god.

This Light, bestowed on man, as we have seen, through the purchase of Christs death, does not in any sense belong to man’s own nature, for “the natural man is wholly excluded from having any place or portion in his own salvation, by any acting, moving, or working of his own.”13 This Light, he further says, “is not any part of man’s nature, nor yet any relic of any good which Adam lost by his fall.” It is a “distinct, separate thing from mans soul and all the faculties of it. It is not only distinct but of a different nature from the soul of man and its faculties. It is to be distinguished even from"mans natural conscience, for conscience being that in man which ariseth from the natural faculties of man’s soul may defiled and corrupted.”14

The Divine Light is thus wholly supernatural and put into man by a miraculous act, similar to that which sacramentarians attribute to the supernatural transubstantiation of bread and wine by which these elements are changed into the Divine body and blood of Christ, and which furnish the soul with “Grace.” This Seed or Light becomes, in Barclay’s own words, a vehiculum Dei15 -a supernatural vehicle, or device, by which a distant God can operate in a soul that of its own nature has no spiritual capacity. This Light is placed in the soul at its creation, as “ a spiritual Seed,” after the same manner as innate ideas were supposed by Descartes to be injected by God into the substance of the soul. The supernatural Seed lies, “as a real substance,” hidden away and dormant in the natural soul, as naked grain lies in barren, stony ground.16 The natural man can “resist” this Seed, even slay and crucify it, or he can “receive it in his heart, suffer it to bring forth its natural and proper effect, until Christ be formed and raised within the soul, as the new man,”17 -and this is salvation.

The division of natures, the dualism between God and man, is here stated as sharply and violently as it can be stated. His initial account of man compels Barclay to resort to a supernatural scheme by which everything that can be called spiritual is derived from the other world and is no part of man. Barclay is strongly opposed to the doctrine of the damnation of infants and to the election scheme of Calvin, but it is not easy to see how he logically avoids these two unpleasant conclusions. If a child has nothing “spiritual” in his own nature and can become spiritual “only by actively and voluntarily receiving the Seed into his heart and suffering it to grow and develop within him, and he dies before he has arrived at a capacity to do this, he would appear-unless a miracle is worked somewhere else-to remain for ever unspiritual and so unsaved. Again, it is difficult to see why, when we are all alike unspiritual and depraved by nature, some of us receive and respond to this "Seed” and so become saved while the rest of us never do respond to it but go on living as if it had not been hidden in our nature. None of us can save ourselves, and yet some are saved and some are not. The “election” is somehow a mysterious fact Barclay implies that it is due to the fact that God visits some at favoured seasons and does not in the same way visit others. There are some persons, he positively admits, who receive Grace18 in such a measure and with such prevailing power that they cannot resist its saving operations. In such a special manner He worketh in some, in whom Grace so prevaileth, that they necessarily obtain salvation: neither doth God suffer them to resist. If it is true that Divine Grace does in some instances manifest itself in irresistible prevailing power, one wonders why it works more feebly in others so that they can consequently resist its saving operation. The problem of free-will is difficult in any system of thought, and all theologians have found it hard to avoid some form of “election.” Barclay supposed that he had escaped the net, but it is not obvious to the modern reader that he has done so. There is, of course, no way of securing or guaranteeing human freedom if it be taken for granted that the natural man is inherently and essentially unspiritual and incapable of any operations that contribute to the spiritual life. In fact, if man is wholly unspiritual by nature and can be saved in any case only by miracle, the lost would appear to be lost, not through man’s conscious fault but because the miracle was not worked in their case or at least not worked sufficiently to save them.

But the graver difficulty with the entire scheme is found in the fact that we are left by this device with no criterion or test of truth. We are given in this foreign and supernatural Seed a religious principle which has no genuine ground in the nature of reason, and is incapable of correlation with reason. The Light, or Seed, is of a wholly different nature from the rational soul of man. It has no likeness or similarity to the natural faculties with which we are endowed, and by which we live our normal life. It is injected into man from another sphere, and is as foreign to our life as an archangel or seraph would be in our municipal politics. It is not commensurable with any native power of ours or with any facts or features of the world in which we are placed. It is not a product of experience. It is not the result of any known process. We possess nothing in our mental outfit by which we could ever pass judgment upon the pronouncements or the revelations of this Light. Only by miracle could the “openings” thus made to us from another sphere fit the scenery and circumstance of our natural world with its historical problems and its social issues. We are bound all the time to live and think and work with natural men and with societies of natural men, and we must face tasks that have grown out of natural sociological and ethical movements - and yet our only guide, beyond that of instinct and unspiritual reason, is a Light wholly distinct from and unrelated to the world where the concrete problems arise. This is as strange and as difficult to rationalize as was Descartes'double-world scheme which absolutely sunders into two unrelated spheres the mind in man from the external world where man’s life is lived. Descartes scheme furnishes no basis for explaining how the mind inside can ever know any outside fact. Every act of knowledge becomes miraculous. So, too, in Barclay, every spiritual action is miraculous. Man could not do it if it were not done for him and through him.
Man is thus treated as a thoroughfare through which distant mysterious forces, unlike any known forces in this world, supernaturally operate.

These intellectual difficulties, which have for many generations been allowed to pass unanalysed and unnoted, might well have been left still unchallenged were it not for the important fact that they have carried along through all these same generations grave historical consequences. Somewhere something happened which profoundly altered the entire character of the Quaker movement. Its mysticism shifted from the dynamic affirmation mysticism of the first period to a passive and negative type. A Quietism which nobody detects in the early days settled down upon it and utterly transformed it. It has been supposed that this Quietism came from the continent of Europe and was due to foreign influences. Friends did show great interest in continental Quietism, and were at a later time strongly influenced by it, as we shall see in he next volume of this series, but the unescapable fact remains that Friends had settled into a confirmed Quietism long before they discovered and used the writings of the great Quietists of France and Italy.

It will not do, of course, to attribute the appearance of Quietism in the Quaker movement to one sole influence. Group-attitudes and habits are subtle things and can seldom be traced to one isolated cause. But it is a plain and patent fact that Barclay’s formulation is charged and loaded with the essential conditions and tendencies of Quietism. The entire basis and framework of Quietism are already there.

All forms of Quietism start with a despair of the natural man. They begin with a recognition of the spiritual bankruptcy of mere man. Every spiritual step, every act that has to do with religion and salvation, Quietism maintains, must be done in man by some Divine power beyond him. His only part in the transaction is a passive part. He ceases to resist the operations of God and waits in quiet for visitations, and for the coming of supernatural assistance. One does not need to turn to the continental Quietists for this teaching; it is all in Barclay, and is vividly and emphatically expressed there.

As we have seen, Barclay holds that natural man is “miserable,” “depraved,“ and “unspiritual” - “without capacity for salvation.” Every spiritual act of every sort is performed in man by a Divine vehiculum detached from his own nature and working through him. Man’s only part and sole contribution is passivity. His one single function in spiritual matters is not to resist the Divine seed, the imparted grace. “He that resists it not, it becomes his salvation: so that in him that is saved the working is of the grace [used for ‘Seed’ and ‘Light’], and not of the man; and it is a passiveness rather than an act.19 Barclay continues: "The first step is not by man’s working, but by his not contrary working.” At the “ singular seasons of man’s visitation,” “man is wholly unable of himself to work with the grace [i.e. co-operate], neither can he move one step out of his natural condition, until the grace [the superadded power] lay hold upon him; so it is possible for him to be passive and not to resist it, as it is possible for him to resist it. So we say the grace of God works in and upon man’s nature, which though of itself wholly corrupted and defiled and prone to evil, yet is capable to be wrought upon by the Grace of God.”20 There is thus no co-operation between man and the superadded grace. It works in its own way, accom plishes its own end. Man’s only act is a decision to lie passive and not resist it. Man of himself is powerless to bring about a “visitation” - “he must, "as Barclay says, "wait for it.” “He cannot move and stir [it] up when he pleaseth; but it moves, and strives with man as the Lord seeth meet.” “It comes at certain times and seasons, and he must wait for it.21 That is the essential basis, the distinguishing mark of Quietism. Barclay’s letters, especially those to the Princess Elizabeth, and his theological writings generally, use very often the Quietistic phrase, "pure love,” or “pure light,” “pure or naked truth,” “pure motion,” by which he means the “love” or “light” or “truth,” or “influence” Divinely imparted to the soul without any admixture at all of the human. He does not write to Elizabeth until he has a “pure” moving to do so: “I was not willing to do anything in the forwardness of my own spirit,” and he adds: “I shall be glad to hear from thee as thou finds true freeness to let me know how things are with thee.”22 His proposal of marriage to Christian Molleson contains a similar Quietistic note “I can say in the fear of the Lord that I have received a charge from Him to love thee.”23

There is, however, unfortunately, no safe and sound way on this basis of “pure truth” of discriminating between the true Divine motion and the motion which has a human and subjective origin. Reason has been ruled out as the arbiter. Experience is not admitted as the test. The Divine intimation, or pure moving, is supposed to be its own sure evidence, but we are never told by what infallible sign its Divine origin can be recognized. On a certain occasion Barclay himself felt impelled by an inward moving, which he felt to be “pure,” to put on sack- cloth, to cover his head with ashes, and to go through the streets of Aberdeen, crying to the people to repent. His own account of the strange incident, given in Truth Triumphant, is as follows:

“ … The Command of the Lord concerning this thing came unto me that very Morning, as I awakened, and the Burthen thereof was very great; yea, seemed almost insupportable unto me, (for such a thing, until that very Moment, had never entered me before, not in the most remote Consideration. And some, whom I called to declare to them this thing, can bear Witness, how great was the Agony of my Spirit, how I besought the Lord with Tears, that this Cup might pass away from me! Yea, how the Pillars of my Tabernacle were shaken, and how exceedingly my Bones trembled, until I freely gave up unto the Lord’s Will.”

This well illustrates the difficulty involved in this Quietistic theory. There is no test, no criterion. The moving is its own evidence. One must not question why, one must not ask for rational grounds. Reason is excluded. One must simply obey. But the mind of man is such a curious thing, with its subliminal suggestions, its morbid whisperings, its dreams and imaginings, its imitations and its auto-possessions, that it is never quite possible to assume that “movings” which burst with force into the sphere of the mind are on their own evidence “pure” and supernatural. Barclay admits that “the devil might form a sound of words, convey it to the outward ear and deceive the outward senses, by making things appear that are not.”24 It would seem, then, that this malicious spirit might even more easily inwardly deceive the most sincere and devout soul.

Quietism, having eliminated reason, has never told its adherents how to discriminate between the false light and the true. On its presuppositions there is no answer to the question. The Divine and the human belong to two different worlds and the higher cannot be tested and verified by anything in our lower world.

One who studies with care and insight the history of Quakerism through the two centuries succeeding Barclays formulation will see that many of the tragedies and many of the internal difficulties have sprung out of this assumed spiritual bankruptcy of man and this Quietistic contrivance for obviating it. All the controversies of later Quaker history involve Barclay. The development of each new issue has been made in reference to his positions. He was a sort of John Brown of the entire period of Quaker struggle. He died before the internal conflicts began, but his soul went moving on through the whole of them. If he had shaped the issues differently the entire trend of Quaker history would have been another matter. No Friend appeared for two hundred years who could give, or at least who did give, a searching examination of this interpretation of the fundamental basis of Quakerism and with one consent it was accepted as the final authority. The great controversialists, Elias Hicks and his orthodox opponents; Joseph John Gurney and John Wilbur; the Beaconites and their opposers, all took Barclay’s account of the natural man as though there were no further word to say about it. Their differences were upon the question of how God had met this existing crisis and how under prevailing conditions salvation could be accomplished. They never got beneath the ancient presuppositions. The deeper questions of the real nature of God and man and their fundamental relation to one another never got adequate treatment. We find nobody breaking loose and going down to the deeper level.

Robert Barclay is not to be blamed for the historical tragedy. The formulators of truth in any field are bound to use the psychology and metaphysics of their age. They must think, if they think at all, through the terminology of their time and in the concepts that prevail around them, and they invariably determine the line of march of human thought and even fix in advance the kind of in- tellectual questions that will be asked in succeeding periods.

What I regret most is that the early formulation of Quakerism should have been made as an adjustment with the Augustinian and Calvinistic system instead of following the fresh and transforming path which the spiritual reformers, the real forerunners and progenitors of “the Children of the Light,” had discovered. That latter course would have meant a different history and, I believe, a greater career for the movement - a real day-dawn and day-star rising for spiritual religion.

One other adiustment to the demands of the world and external history calls for a few words of comment in this Introduction - the adjustment to the State. When Quakerism burst in upon the world, its leaders took no account of consequences. They had, they believed, received an opening, a revelation, which had complete right of way. Everything else must stand aside for it, or at least take second place. The"truth" which possessed their souls involved a new venture of life, and they were ready to risk reputation, home, family, goods, and life in their holy experiment. They had no thought of compromising at any point, of yielding any ground or bending around any obstacles, or of ceasing the fight- they would have said ceasing to “bear their testimony”-

Till [they should build] Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

This rebel-attitude toward existing situations, this unyielding spirit, produced, as it always does, a remarkable - type of person and a highly dynamic and uncalculable movement. George Whitehead and those who joined with him in the patient work of securing “toleration and privileges” for Friends were, without knowing it, preparing for a different type of person and were passing over from a movement charged with potential energy to a stage of arrested development and cooling enthusiasm. Once more we cannot blame these sincere adjusters. They wanted to secure their right to life, liberties, and, if not “the pursuit of happiness,” at least the privilege to worship God as their hearts dictated. Why should they go on fighting further with their spiritual weapons if kindly - minded sovereigns and tolerant parliaments were ready to grant them a large measure of the claims for which they had suffered so much?

What they hardly realized, however, was the subtle though fundamental change of ground. The “Children of the Light” in their day had not been concerned for rights and privileges for themselves and were not concerned to establish claims of their own. They were champions of a universal truth; they were the bearers of a faith for the whole human race; they were contending for a new way of life for the entire world. To secure a modicum of their “truth” and to win the privilege of practising it by themselves within the peaceful area of their own homes and meeting-houses would have seemed to them no victory at all. They were the commissioned “apostles” of a new order, and there could be no stopping - place until the new kingdom was built. George Whitehead was a good man, and he was a real success in securing happy adjustments, but he marks, nevertheless, the end of an era, and is in his own person the exhibition of a changed ideal.

History itself is a revelation of God. Its processes are sometimes stern and tragic. Its judgments are often severe. But it is always cathartic and clarifying. It arouses attention. It awakens consciousness. It drives home great realities. It demonstrates moral laws. It unveils the truth and it makes the fact of God’s immanent presence as sure and certain as it can be made in a world like ours. This history deals with one small human movement, covering only a fragment of time, but, even so, it is, like all genuine history, charged with spiritual significance and will bring the patient reader an illuminating message of the way God works in the world.


Source: The Second Period of Quakerism, by William C. Braithwaite. Introduction by Rufous Jones

  1. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison’s The Idea of God (Oxford, 1917), p. 254.↩

  2. Sammtliche Werke (Erlangen edn.) xxii, p. 20.↩

  3. Paradox, Vorrede, Sect. 45.↩

  4. Journal, i.2. ↩

  5. These passages are found in Proposition iv. of the Apology.↩

  6. Apology, Prop. iv. Part I. sect. 2.↩

  7. For Calvin’s account of “the Seed of Win” see the Institutes, Book II. chap. i.↩

  8. Whichcote’s Aphorisms, 444.↩

  9. D.G. Rossetti, Sonnet 37, “The Choice.”↩

  10. Apology. Prop. v. and vi. sect 1. ↩

  11. Ibid Stated in the original form of the Proposition vi. and expanded in sections 4 and 25. ↩

  12. Ibid. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 10.↩

  13. Apology, Prop. v. and vi. sect. 11, Consequence 6th. ↩

  14. Ibid. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 16 ↩

  15. Ibid. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 15. Quest. 5. ↩

  16. Ibid. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 14. ↩

  17. Ibid. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 13.↩

  18. Ibid. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 18.↩

  19. Apology. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 17 ↩

  20. Ibid. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 17 ↩

  21. Apology. Prop. v. and vi. sect. 16 ↩

  22. Letter to Princess Elizabeth, 27th of 4th mo. 1676. ↩

  23. See M. Christabel Cadbury’s Robert Barclay (London, 1912), p. 33.↩

  24. Apology Prop. ii. sect. 6↩

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