It used to be supposed that Fox "appeared" on the scene suddenly, abruptly, without forerunners and with little or no vital connection with the spiritual travail and the historical movements of his age. His message was assumed to be unique and new-born. Sober history has corrected that impression. He came to his manhood at a time when rural England was in a state of religious ferment. The seventeenth-century collectors of heresy have given us impressive, even if somewhat foggy, accounts of the free and eager quest for new paths and freer ways of thought and practice that characterised the era of the Commonwealth. Numerous religious movements had been set going on the Continent by the mighty vortex currents of the Reformation, and many of these movements quietly, gradually invaded England; sometimes by the migration of a persecuted leader or a hunted group; sometimes by the return home of chance visitors who had contracted the "contagion" while on a journey abroad. Little by little books appeared putting into English the thoughts of Continental mystics and spiritual reformers, and as a result small submerged fellowships were formed in many counties and in widely sundered places in England. George Fox, from about the year 1648, began to give articulate expression to the dreams and faiths and hopes which lay, more or less unuttered, at the heart of the best of these movements and fellowships. He began at first as a "voice" crying in the rural districts, but he soon became a personal leader, an organiser and a vital interpreter--a prophet, in fact--of the mystical and seeking groups which abounded in the land and which were waiting for someone who could give them co-ordination, direction and vision. Just this Fox did. He rendered conscious, explicit and, visible in an organised form what had before been vague and more or less subconscious.
Fox reveals in his own biographical accounts an unstable psychic constitution, very much like that which comes to light in the biographies of many other mystics and prophets. Scholars have coined technical terms to describe the phases of this condition, but neither these terms nor the scientific diagnosis of his case and kindred, cases give us much real light on the peculiar condition which seems to favour the formation of a certain type of spiritual leader and which appears to make the person in :question uniquely sensitive to divine currents as well as a magnetic influence over other lives. There were times, especially in the early period of Fox's life, when there wee evident signs of profound disturbance in him, but his positive spiritual experiences steadily tended to ogranise and construct his life to give him poise, solidity, and power. In fact there are few more impressive cases of the power of endurance than his in his mature period. He learned to stand in a hostile world. He managed to endure along series of prison confinements that would have broken any constitution not well supplied with iron sinew. His journeys, when he was out of prison, were almost constant. They were usually difficult and dangerous and always full of occasions of exposure to the elements of nature.
The most striking thing about him is, I think, his absolute certainty that he had come into direct and immediate correspondence with God. It is the most important fact of his life, and at the same time it helps to explain all the other important facts of it. He revolted very early ;in life from what seemed to him an artificially built religion, i.e. a religion of dogma and doctrine, constructed, he used to say, like a new of Babel-tower, in the hope that God might be reached by piling up theological notions and theories about Him, and, as a lonely and distressed youth, he set out on a personal quest to see whether there were any other way, any true way, of finding Him. The turning-point in his life came when he that God is not above the sky, or at the end of a logical syllogism, but is a living spiritual presence revealed the soul, "I came to know God experimentally," he says, "and was as one who hath a key and doth open." From his own first-hand experience there emerged a profound conviction which lasted all his life that God and man are essentially related because their spiritual frontiers are continuous and undivided. There is something in man that is not of dust, or flesh, or time, but of God. Fox has many ways of saying this in his seventeenth-century phrases, but of the fact itself he had no more doubt than he had of the hills and fields and that faith gave him an exalted sense of infinite worth and preciousness of man, of every man of type and degree The Journal is largely the story of man's practical and costly testimony to these central faiths of his life. It is marked throughout by sincerity and simplicity. The reader feels at once that here is an honest man who has had a transforming experience and who is endeavouring to give a plain, straightforward account of what has happened to him. He is at his best when he is telling the incidents and giving the experiences of the creative period before the more complex stages of his mission emerge, but it is all graphically done and it holds the reader's interest to the very end, when the dying man says: "I am clear; the Seed of God reigns." It is the story of a brave and heroic character, of a rugged, unpolished man, battling with immense difficulties but revealing often a fine humour and always patience and a mighty faith.
I always wish that he had not taken so much satisfaction in the "judgments" which overtook many of the persons that persecuted him. It would have been better if he could have shown more tenderness and gentle sweetness toward those made his life thorny and dolorous, but this is to ask for a state of perfection to which few attain. It is, however, to be noted that in many cases he won the love and appreciation of his judges and jailers, and in quite a number of instances they became "convinced" of the truth of his message and joined his fellowship. He drew many of his followers from the rank of yeomen and labourers, from rural groups, as I have said, that had long been waiting and seeking for new light to break, but he also won to his cause some whose minds were well trained and who had everything to lose in a worldly sense if they accepted his way of life and threw in their lot with him. Margaret Fell of Swarthmore Hall, Thomas Ellwood, Isaac Penington, William Penn and Robert Barclay are some of the persons of this type who bore their testimony in very brave fashion and with their hearts' devotion to the convincing power and the personal influence bf Fox's life and spirit. William Penn very finely says of him: "He acquitted himself like a man, a new and heavenly-minded man; a divine and a naturalist, and all of God Almighty's making."
One of the outstanding features of his spiritual mission was his clear, sure insight into the moral and social condition of his time. His proposed remedy may not always seem sound and adequate to a generation that has had the advantage of scientific training in social problems, but it is interesting to see how Fox puts his finger with almost infallible certainty upon the sore spots and the evil tendencies around him. He was .as tender as a mother over all who were victims--and what a list it was and still is!--of man's brutality, injustice, stupidity, greed or carelessness. He hated every artificial fashion which contracted the full human life of any man or woman. He went about his task of liberating men and transforming society with an absolute confidence in God's guidance and in the power of His Spirit, and with an unlimited faith .in human possibilities and in the effectiveness of the spirit of sincere love and kindness when put full into practice. The results of his experiment on the whole bear out his faith. In any case, nothing else has ever worked any better than has this method of love and friendship, this transmission of the spirit of Christ.
The type of organisation which Fox developed for the groups of followers gathered around him indicates plainly enough that he was not a lonely dreamer but a practical leader of men, though here, again, he did not absolutely originate something wholly new and unique. He saw the latent possibilities in the simple types of group-fellowship that already existed and he expanded these and worked them out into new and fresh ways of expression. He produced not a new Church, not a new sect, but a new Society which was most happily called "the Society of Friends." It was marked almost utter simplicity of structure and method. There were no essential officials, no ritual, no programme, no outward and visible sacraments, no music, no paraphernalia of any kind. The groups of worshippers met in plain, unadorned buildings or rooms and sat down together in silence, with complete confidence that the Spirit would be a real presence among them and that Christ would be the Head of their assembly. There was the widest freedom and the greatest possible stretch of the principle of democracy. One might have supposed that chaos would have resulted, but it did not result. There emerged a rare type of spiritual leadership, leadership through the personal influence of the men and women who possessed prophetic vision, and for almost three centuries this group-fellowship and this gentle, unauthoritative leadership have weathered the storms and the stress and strain of the years.
Fox's Journal is of course not a new form of literature. St.
Augustine furnished the model of self-revelation in his Confessions,
and all religious autobiography after it, consciously or unconsciously,
has been influenced by it. Fox had certainly never read that famous book
and its influence on him was unconscious and indirect; but many of the
mystics and prophets between the periods of St. Augustine and Fox had told
the story of their life and their struggles, and the style and method of
procedure were well marked. And yet this Journal is not precisely
like any other autobiography. It is unique and it carries throughout the
peculiar flavour of a man who was not built on any former pattern. One
of the greatest of George Fox's contemporaries, John Milton, said: "A good
book is the precious life-blood of a spirit embalmed and treasured up on
purpose to a life beyond life." Here is a good book of that immortal type.
It was written by a man of little learning, of small station, of no external
position, but it embalms and treasures up the spirit and life-blood of
a brave and honest man, who "knew God experimentally" and who made his
life, as far as he knew how to do it, an organ of the living Christ in
seventeenth century England.
24th October, 1923.
WRITINGS
The Great Mistery of the Great Whore Unfolded, 1659; A Battle Door for
Teachers and. Professors to learn Singular and Plural, 1660; The Arraignment
of Popery, 1667; A New England Firebrand Quenched, 1678; The Journal, being
an Historical Account of his Life, Travels, Sufferings and Christian Experience,
prepared by Thomas Ellwood and a committee, 1694 (known as the Ellwood
Text), reprinted I709, 1765, 1800, 1808, 1827, 1831, 1833, 1836, 1852,
1891 (bicentenary edition, reprinted with enlarged indexes, etc., in 1901
and 1902; The Journal, edited from the original MSS. verb. et. lit.,
1911 (known as the Cambridge Text); The Journal, edited from the editions
of 1694, 1891 and 1911 (known as the Tercentenary Text); The Journal, being
the Short Journal and the Itinerary Journal, prepared in connection with
the tercentenary of the birth of Fox, 1924; The Journal abridged, 1881,
1886, 1890, 1903, 1904. 1905, 1908 (in German), 1910 (in Dutch); Epistles,
1698; Doctrinals, 1706; Works (including the Great Mistery in addition
to the Journal, Epistles, and Doctrinals), 8 vols., 1831; and about 340
smaller pieces of which only about a dozen have been reprinted since the
death of the author.
BIOGRAPHIES
Lives of Fox haw been written by Tuke,1813; Evans, 1837 (also in German, 1850, and Danish, 1853); Marsh, 1847; Janney, 1853; Post, 1854; Watson, 1860; Beck, 1877; Railton, 1881; Bickley, 1884; Hodgson, 1896; Taylor, 1907; Wood, 1912; Brayshaw, 1918; Jones, 1919; Knight, 1922.