Many a challenge has been given to our Society during the last year, and rightly so. Neither a Society nor an individual can claim to live on its past; the price of freedom is unsleeping vigilance. There is no longer room for complacency. The day of the gentleman in the popular song, who "gave himself a pat: on the back," is over. We want neither ourselves nor anyone else to pat us on the back: we want to face facts.
And so, in order to help us to a healthy self-examination and to enable our New Year resolutions to become living and practical, here are three questions I would like to ask myself and every member of our Society. They have been put to us during the last year in various forms by various critics, friendly and unfriendly alike, both in the columns of The Friend and elsewhere.
Question 1. Are we giving Christ his proper place? Nothing is further from my mind than the wish to impose a creed on our Society, but surely each of us longs beyond words that individually and collectively we may enter into a deeper experience of the Divine Love. It is a deeper experience and knowledge of God that we supremely need, and it is the simple fact that in the past at any rate such deeper experience has not come by discarding or depreciating Christ. The heart of the Christian Gospel is that "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Corithinans 5:19) and that reconciliation is still going on.
Many of us agree with our recent Roman Catholic critic that we do lack the "something more" of Truth that might be ours, only we differ from him as to the method by which we may get it. In proportion as we fight shy of Christ, or find him something of an interloper between man and God (and therefore to be outgrown and set aside), we are not only cutting ourselves off from historic Christianity, but we are missing one of the main avenues--personally I should say the main avenue--to the heart of God.
If it is indeed true that "the Inner Light now leads Quakers to Gandhi almost as often as to Christ," it is time to ask ourselves where we stand. It is no mark of disrespect to Gandhi to say this. To the early Friends, the Inner Light was the light of Christ: it was the spirit of Christ illuminating their hearts; God in Christ shining in and through their spirits. It was not any light: it was not a whim, a fad, an opinion, a phantom, a will-o'-the-wisp--it was God revealed in and through Christ.
And it seems to me that in essence that stands true to-day: any attempt to give us a Christ-less God, or to separate the Inner Light from the revelation of God-in-Christ, is to lead us away from and not towards a fuller understanding of the Divine Nature. And so, let us put to ourselves the question "Are we giving Christ his proper place?"
Question 2. Do we allow adequate weight to history? This question is, of course, vitally connected with the previous one. Christianity postulates a unique incarnation of God in Christ at a particular epoch, as part of the time-process, "in the fullness of time." It is not a mere abstraction of the human mind: it is a revelation of God in a historical person. If we try to cut loose from the Jesus of history in our attempt to create the Christ of experience, we do it at our peril; at any rate our resulting religion would not be Christianity.
We Friends, especially, need to emphasise the historical. In our "centering down" and our search for the God Within, it is easy for us to undervalue the experience of men and women in the past, and to hold too lightly to the tradition of the elders. We do not want to be slaves of tradition--true; but there is a middle course between slavery and unbridled licence. We need history, in the broadest and deepest sense, to keep us sane and balanced.
There is certainly some truth in a point often urged by non-Friends. Edward Shillito raised it in his article in The Friend last month, when he reminded us that our Society has always existed in close and friendly relationship with other Christian Societies which preserve more or less a completely a doctrinal and sacramental faith. He asked: "How far have the Friends owed something to this fact?" No one would deny that Catholics and other Christians have owed and still owe a deep debt to the Friends for their witness. Can it be said that the Friends in turn still owe something to those others who believe the "something more" about which this Catholic writer speaks?
Again, it is raised by A. E. Taylor in The Faith of a Moralist, when he says (Vol. 3, page 814): "The Society of Friends sprang up and has continued to flourish in the midst of a wider Christian community which is sacramental in its practice....Hence, though Fox and the Society he founded may not practise the Christian sacraments, his life and theirs could not be what they were and are but for the living influence of the sacramental tradition of the Church at large."
Now, if we are to deal with these points adequately we must do some thinking and self-examination. Hence the suggestion of the present question--Do we fully recognise our debt to the Christian tradition? Do we allow adequate weight to history? This, I think, is an examination for which every Quaker should enter, though possibly most of us would be ploughed!
Question 3. Are we allowing God to have His way with us? Or are we fencing and shirking, keeping back part of the price? Do we fear the consequences of full surrender to Him, and so miss the one thing that matters, the finding of the pearl of great price? [Matthew 13:45-46.]
To ask this question is to answer it. We know that this is the source of all our weakness--we do not make the full surrender. No further words are needed. But what a year this might be in the annals of our Society if each one of us could face up to the call of God, "Mv son, my daughter, give me thine heart!" We talk of consecration and dedication and the like, but in our heart of hearts we know we are not willing to accept the consequences of the fully surrendered life. "Give me chastity," prayed Augustine "but not yet!" "Send me where thou wilt, Lord," we say, "but not to such and such a place or to that particular job"--and so the whole prayer becomes meaningless. As we steep ourselves in the life of prayer and feel increasingly "the steady pressure of God upon the soul," we shall surely realise the impossibility of bargaining or hedging, and through His grace be enabled to make the full surrender that unaided we cannot make. So may Question 3 be in our minds continually until God Himself helps us to answer it aright, "Are we allowing Him to have His way with us?"
1. 1. The Friend (London) Vol. 91, No. 1 (6th month 1st) (January) 1933.