o war ill more Lecture

(Quakerism; A Religion of Life

-CU

Rufus M. Jones

_

\ STUQIA IN

Presented to
THE LIBRARY

of

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY

Toronto
by

Mr. R.W. Rogers

Swartbmore Xecture*

First Edition, 1908.

Second Edition, 1912.

(ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.]

Swartbmore Xecture,

QUAKERISM I

A RELIGION OF LIFE.

BY

RUFUS M. JONES, M.A., D.Litt.

Author of "Social Law in the Spiritual World" etc.

LONDON : HEADLEY BROTHERS,

EISHOPSGATE. B.C.

DA
1131

(912.

tMMANUEi,

HEAHLKY BKOTHFRS
PKIMKKS,

LOM-oX . AND AMiMiK

preface.

book is the first of a series of
public addresses to be known as the
Swarthmore Lectures. The Lecture
ship was established by the Woodbrooke
Extension Committee, at a meeting
held December Qth, 1907. The Minute
of the Committee provides for " an
annual lecture on some subject relating
to the Message and Work of the Society
of Friends." The name " Swarthmore "
was chosen in memory of the home of
Margaret Fox, which was always open
to the earnest seeker after Truth, and
from which loving words of sympathy
and substantial material help were
sent to fellow-workers.

6 preface.

The Woodbrooke Extension Com
mittee requested Rufus M. Jones, M.A.,
D.Litt., of Haverford College, Pennsyl
vania, to give the first lecture on the
evening preceding the holding of the
Friends Yearly Meeting of 1908. In
accordance with this decision, the
lecture was delivered in the Central
Hall, Birmingham, on May igth.

The Swarthmore Lectureship has been
founded with a two-fold purpose : firstly,
to interpret further to the members
of the Society of Friends their Message
and Mission ; and secondly, to bring
before the public the spirit, the aims
and the fundamental principles of the
Friends. This first lecture presents
Quakerism as a religion of experience
and first-hand reality a dynamic, prac
tical religion of life.

<auafeerfmn : H IRcliQion of Xtfe,

RELIGION has always been one of

the supreme concerns of the race, Pi>

manent

and, so far as one may prophesy from 3nteC8t
the nature of the soul of man, it always
will be a supreme concern of the race,
though it will undoubtedly wax and
wane as the central point of view shifts.
There are vast bends and eddies in the
onward current of progress. Some
times one, and sometimes another,
commanding interest sweeps into the
foreground, and religion may seem, for
the moment, to be a losing power.

Quahertem :

Discoveries of new physical forces and
of rich raw material resources bring on
eras of unwonted industrial expansion,
and the drift towards wealth and
materialism appears, for a time, to be
the main current of human interest.
The little prophets who mistake surface
waves for the ground-swell set of ocean
currents, begin prematurely to predict
the exhaustion of religion and the drying
up of its springs.

Scientific geniuses hit upon some cen
tral secret of Nature, and find a new
clue to the meaning of the riddle. New
methods of research are proposed with
amazing results, and men gather to the
quest with the keenest passion. Ac
curate knowledge, exact description,
formulation of unvarying laws, become
the foremost interests, and it seems

a tteliofou of Xtfe. 9

possible to explain every phenomenon
and event of the world system, and to
bring everything, from inmost centre
to farthest periphery, under the reign
of law. The history of religion again
seems to be winding up. Little prophets,
who mistake street lamps for perennial
stars, hurry to announce that religion
has about run through its circuit, that
its meteor flight, with its trail across the
world, is nearly spent !

But they all reckon ill. They have
used too short a plummet line. They
have sounded only the shoals and inlets,
not the deeps of the soul. The bend of
the current sweeps round a little farther
as history progresses, and the ancient set
of the shoreless sea is felt again, and
the soul is once more aware of its tides
from the nether springs of eternal life.

2

10 Quakerism :

Emerson was sound in his great pro
phecy that " we need not fear that we
can lose anything by the progress of the
soul. The soul may be trusted to the
end."

As in the past, so in the future, the
primary concerns of serious men will be
spiritual concerns : how to become
allied with God, how to enjoy Him for
ever, how to overcome the fleeting and
temporal by the power of the permanent
and eternal, how to build into reality
that unquenched faith in a Kingdom of
God which all true prophets have helped
to kindle. The curve is not backwards
but forwards. There is a steady, irre
sistible onward push toward further
development. We are not called to
fan a flickering flame or to nurse a dying
hope. It is not our mission to prop a

a Keligion ot Xtfe* n

tottering ark, or to bolster up an arti
ficial system. We have to deal, rather,
with the aptitudes and hungers of the
soul itself, and with religion grounded in
the very nature of tlu ngs.

The primary service of a religious body H
is therefore prophetical , its business is to
help men to find the clues to the meaning
and significance and power of life, to fur
ther the discovery of God, and to assist
men to draw upon the great reservoirs of
spiritual energy. The days of the priest
are over. The demand is now for prophets.
Men do not want sacred persons to " do "
their religion for them ; they want
illuminated leaders who can enlarge their
vision, who can interpret, in the language
of to-day, the eternal realities of the
Spirit.

12

" Would God," said a great leader,
" that all the Lord s people were
prophets." That is the ideal which
must always be in our eye a lay religion
with no sharp distinctions of class
or privilege, but producing spiritual
leaders, through whom God, stooping,
can show sufficient of His light for those
in the dark to rise by, until all see for
themselves.

This distinctly prophetical work has
always been the mission of Friends.
No one can read the account of George
Fox s visit to Oliver Cromwell without
feeling that Fox was there as a prophet.
Carlyle has happily put the great
Quaker s message to the Protector : He
had " much discourse with him concern
ing Life and concerning Death ; concern
ing the Unfathomable Universe in

H Religion of Xffe. 13

general, and the Light in it from Above,
and the Darkness in it from Below ; to all
of which the Protector carried himself
with much moderation." Yes,
George," adds Carlyle ; " this Protector
has a sympathy with the Perennial, and
feels it across the Temporary." That is
what the great Quakers of all generations
have, in one way or another, been trying
to do ; to discourse concerning Life
and Death, concerning the Unfathom
able Universe, with its Light from Above
and its Darkness from Below ; concern
ing the Perennial, which is revealed
in the Temporal, the Abiding in the
shifting aspects of Life.

" Still, as of old, in Beavor s Vale,

O man of God ! our hope and faith
The Elements and Stars assail.

And the awed spirit holds its breath,
Blown over by a wind of death."

rcacbtno
Spirit of
Earlp

Quak
erism.

14 Quakerism :

It is our business to-day to have a
message concerning life and concerning
death, which helps men to rest their
souls on God s

" Immortal Love and Fatherhood
And trust Him, as His Children should."

It looked for a brief period as though
Quakerism was to be a dominant type of
religion among Anglo-Saxon people.
Two hundred years ago, there were in
England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales,
approximately 75,000 Friends, 10,000
of whom were in the city of London
alone. In America, they formed the
chief religious force in Pennsylvania and
New Jersey. They had, for a gener
ation, been a leading factor both in the
religious and political life of Rhode
Island. In Maryland, they were next
in influence to the Roman Catholic

H tRelifltcm of Xtfe. 15

founders, and they had a large Yearly
Meeting in Virginia.

The Carolinas had already had a
Quaker Governor who had re-organ
ised the colony, and given its promise
of future greatness. In New York,
Friends were building a chain of
Meeting-houses parallel with the Hud
son, and were already one of the
leading denominations in the new
metropolis, and even in Puritan Massa
chusetts they were rapidly spreading in
all the settled parts of the colony. They
were everywhere robust and virile, with
great visions of spiritual conquest in their
eyes ; they undoubtedly cherished the
faith that God had raised them up to
restore primitive Christianity, and to be
the rebuilders of the Church the Church
of the Spirit.

16 Quakerism :

We are not concerned now with the
story of the slowing down and the
dwindling power. It is a dreary
chapter with some comedy, and much
that is tragic. Our great concern now is
to deal wisely, if possible, and with some
of that old time robustness and viril
ity, with present opportunities. Once
again, the out-reaching spirit of the early
days has broken out among us, a new
enthusiasm has quickened us, and some
of that old time white-hot conviction of
a prophetic mission has touched us. We
are swinging back to the " fiery posi
tive." The question, then, confronts
us : what are we here for ? To
what peculiar mission has God called
us ? What contribution have we to
make toward the spiritual progress of
the world ?

a tteltaton of Xtfe. 17

Our supreme testimony, as a Society, ZTbC 1Rcnl
has been the testimony to the real
presence of Christ, as an ever-living
Spirit who reveals Himself to all souls
of vision and loyalty. We have un
dertaken, as a people, to demonstrate
and exhibit that true religion is the
life of God in the lives of men, to
present a Gospel, growing, expanding,
progressing with the enlarging life of
the race, grounded in the central
truth that God is forever humanly
revealing Himself, suffering over sin,
condemning evil, making hearts burn
with His love and sacrifice, and
working now as He worked formerly in
Galilee and Judea. A Friends meeting
is organised and held in bold reliance
on the actual presence and communion
of the Divine Spirit. Friends have set

1 8 Quahertsm :

themselves the task of producing a
congregational church with no head
but the unseen Christ, the creation of
a religious fellowship which is based
simply on the response of the member
ship to this living, though invisible
personal Presence.

We cannot be the true successors of
the Quaker apostles of the Common
wealth era unless we can make this faith
in God as a present, immanent Spirit,
live and virile, unless we can give con
vincing evidence that He voices Himself
in the deeps of the human soul, and
that Divine revelation is a continuous
reality.

The religion which is to prevail, and
which is to nourish the heart of the ex
panding race, will be one that brings to
men the live faith that God is the

a lRclt0tou ot Xife. 19

environing Presence to all souls, and that
He is building an ever enlarging spiritual
city a republic of God not in the
distant heavens, but out of our lives,
and that the heart of the universe is
Love a love that triumphs just as fast
as it wins human lives through which
to express itself. We are thus called,
by the very obligation of our spiritual
pedigree, to be the bearers to-day of a
type of Christianity which is essen
tially inward, spiritual and mystical.

By mystical religion I do not in any
sense mean something dim, vague or
hazy ; something occult, that veils the
stars of our ancient faith in a blur of
fog ; some vapoury substitute for the
religion of Christ by which apostles and
prophets and martyrs and millions of

20 ^uahertsm :

" common people " have overcome the
world. I mean a religion of inward,
first-hand conviction, a religion rooted
and grounded in experience, a religion
whose authority is as little endangered
by science and criticism, as is the
authority of the multiplication table, or
the law of gravitation.

Few of us who are here can be unaware
of the situation in the world about us.
Our generation has passed through the
most profound and sweeping intellectual
transition I might almost say, revolu
tion that has ever been experienced in
a single generation; for even the Lutheran
Reformation did not, to anything like
the same extent, affect the minds of men.
This generation has witnessed " an
irresistible maturing of the mind " which
has made much of our old knowledge

a tteltoion of Xife, 21

look as outgrown as baby clothes on the
grown-up man.

Science is no longer a series of happy
guesses which may be right, and which
may just as well be wrong. It is now a
well-knit system of knowledge, tested
and verified by facts, so accurate that if
a new planet were suddenly hurled into
space, subject to all the complicated
attractions of the other heavenly bodies,
we could tell precisely where it would be
in its travels a thousand years from this
minute. The triumphs of science have
been due to an insistence on facts. The
victories have been won by turning away
from vague arm-chair speculation, and
by exact observation of what actually
occurs. The result of this laboratory
method is that the scientist now speaks
with an unparalleled authority. The

22 Quakerism :

eclipse, once assigned to the caprice of
evil spirits, is now explained by a well-
charted order of events ; and invisible
bacteria, obedient to biological laws,
have completely usurped the place of bad
demons as the explanation of disease.
The same thing is true in the domain
of history. The historian no longer
guesses, he has become scientific in his
methods. By patient, painstaking at
tention to the minute details of ancient
documents, and by searching scrutiny
of even the most insignificant features,
which for centuries meant nothing to
readers, the historian has made the past
live again, and has transformed most of
our ideas about the men and the move
ments of antiquity. He, too, speaks
with authority an authority rock-
ribbed with an array of facts.

H TCdfflion of OLife. 23

Well, to put a very great matter into
a very few words, this is what has hap
pened : a new interpretation of our
universe and of its history has come
among us. It is being given with an irre
sistible authority, compared with which
the authority of the Pope of Rome,
with his slowly builded system of dogma
and traditions, seems as ineffective as
would be an army with bow and arrows ,
against one with Maxim guns.

The youth of the present day are being
trained to think accurately and to accept
only what has the compelling, coercive
power of facts behind it. Whatever
we may believe on hearsay, or from habit,
custom and tradition, the generation
crowding behind us is going to carry
this reverence for facts, this demand for
verification and demonstration, to every-

24 Quakerism :

thing that affects their lives. This
spirit is already everywhere abroad
and must be reckoned with. And
the most significant result of it is
a tendency, everywhere more or less
apparent, to turn away from tradition,
from superstition, from religion of the
"ecclesiastical type," to an inward,
spiritual, more or less mystical, religion.
The centre of gravity in religious sys
tems has altered its place. Men are
asking for a religion which builds solidly
on the veritable facts of experience.
They are not satisfied to be told that
God once dealt directly with men,
in some remote dispensation when God
was more neighbourly ; that at the far-
off origin of this religion of ours, there
were facts of experience which proved the
Divine Presence, but that now it must

H IReliaion of Xife 25

be taken on hearsay and second-hand
authority ; that the only evidence of
God s love is the existence of certain
" letters " from Him, written when
the race was young, or the testi
mony of certain chosen priests who are
supernaturally raised above the human
level. They want to feel their own
souls burn within them with a sense
of His Presence now. They seek a
consciousness of finite spirit meeting
infinite Spirit, an inward testimony to
the Great Companion of our souls. They
ask for the evidence, the demonstration,
of a new creation, which enables a man,
once weak and sinning, to overcome
world, flesh and devil, and to live in
holiness and self-forgetful love. They
demand a Christ who is " warm, sweet,
tender even yet " a present Friend,

4

26 Quakerism ;

inspiring, drawing, feeding the soul
its spring and source of strength, making
it cry, whether in joy or in affliction :
" Abba, Father," and giving an earnest
of the power of the resurrection and
the dynamic of an endless life.

The type of religion which is to prevail
and which will support the individual,
and nourish the ideals of the nation in
these days of expanding knowledge and
of scientific attitude, is one of this
experimental sort one of inward
conviction, of first-hand authority, of
demonstration of the spirit and power.

It was as the bearers and exponents
of a dynamic religion of inward experi
ence and conviction that our founders
made early Quakerism so very power
ful. They had felt God s healing
drop into their souls. As they sat in

a Heliaton of Xife. 27

their Meetings, they felt the evil in them
weakening, and the good raised up, and
they spoke of what they knew. As
they walked the fields they were up
lifted with openings of the personal
love of God for them. Only by re
turning to a similar first-hand religion,
inwardly felt and buttressed on the
facts of the soul s experience, can we
speak to our age with power.

We are in the fringe, as I have said, of
a great movement of mystical religion.
It is well under way in almost all parts
of the world. Cheap substitutes for
spiritual bread are at a discount every
where. Dry and juiceless performances
in the name of religion do not speak to
the condition of men. The soul of man
is crying out for something real. As
always happens at such times, when, as

a8 Quakerism :

Milton says, men try to " purge and
unseal their long abused sight at the
fountain itself of heavenly radiance,"
there is much confusion, and some ten
dency to take will-o-the-wisps for celestial
lights. Unfortunately, it has to be
added that religious quacks abound,
and beguile the gullible in shoals.
The hunger of heart, the silent passion
for the living God, the ground-swell of
a deeper spiritual life, are good signs ;
but there was never a greater need for
genuine prophets and spiritual guides.
The easy-going solutions will not do.
There are no quick elixirs for the soul.
We can minister to our age only on con
dition that we become the bearers of a
religion which verifies itself in experience
as the laws of the universe do. We must
make our Meetings places where souls

H Ucliofon of OLife* 29

win their deliverance from sin feeding
places, too, for the hungry soul, and we
must be able to give the evidence and
demonstration of a Companion, Friend,
Saviour, Father, here-present now a
living, personal Spirit, who is " closer
than breathing, . . . nearer than
hands or feet."

But the utterance of this mystical
message is only one of our tasks. If we
are to be true prophets to our age, we - . .
must reinterpret the historical revelation Gospel.
of God, so that again it shall become
quick and powerful. It is never wise
or safe to sever the connection with his
tory. All our gains and triumphs, our
visions and ideals, have in them the
precious life blood of remote prophets,
and saints, and martyrs. The spiritual

30 Quakerism :

travail oi the ages is in our most modest
virtue, our most primary doctrine ; it
is a part of the necessary air we breathe.
Our generation needs, as truly as the
first century needed, the dominant ideas,
the compelling message of the Gospel of
Christ. In the war of creeds and under
the mummy-wrappings of " Church-
ianity " these revelation-truths have
too often lain obscured and forgotten,
like a precious pearl in a rubbish heap.
The world is so accustomed to a pagan
ised Christianity, and to a scholastically
transformed faith, that Christ s primary
truths still sound new and strange. I
cannot do more than name them here :
God is always and every where an infinite
Father. His nature is love and tender
ness. He shares Himself, He gives
Himself, He docs the best He can for all

H TRelioion of Xtfc* 3 1

His creatures, His method of redemption
is love and self-sacrifice. The Divine
Heart bears our sins and carries our
sorrows, endures the agony which our
sins involve, travails with us in the
crucible of pain, in the darkness of death,
and brings life and immortality to
light. All men are meant to be sons
of God ; they are potential sons they
bear in their being the mark and super
scription of God ; they never travel
beyond the tug of Divine love upon them.
They are intended for royal destiny.
This temporal sphere is only one stage
of life. The Father s house has many
storeys with ever heightening life and
ever wider freedom, as the spirit co
operates with the eternal nature of
things. But each person holds the key
to his own destiny, and his personal

3 2 Quakerism :

choice is of all things the most mo
mentous. Choices open doors up
ward or open doors downward, they
enlarge or shrink the life. Gravitation
is as real in the spiritual as in the
physical world. Those who ally them
selves with God, and join their wills
to His, form a continually expanding
society a kingdom of God, coming
to-day, coming to-morrow, and yet
always prophetic of farther future
fulfilment. There is a personal Mind,
a personal Heart, a personal Will working
in all things and through all things,
forever making man, bringing all things
up to better, and overcoming evil and
hindrance through love and good-will.
We have outgrown the intellectual
systems which sufficed in the days of the
Hebrew prophets, and under which the

a IRclioioti of Xife. 33

writers of the New Testament lived, but
the vision of God, which is revealed in
these Scriptures, the aspiration of soul
for His Kingdom, the loyalty of heart
to Him, the exuberant joy in His pres
ence, the discovery of deliverance from
sin, the certainty of eternal life, the
incarnation of God, the communion of
the Holy Spirit, these are the supreme
spiritual contributions to the life of the
race, the most precious legacy from the
past.

We can keep it only as we learn to put
it into the very life blood of our gener
ation, and carry it over in essence and
spirit, into the thought and prevailing
conceptions of our time. We must learn
to translate the Bible into one more
language, the language of life. We
must make Christ stand before our

6

34 Quakerism ;

generation as the true type and goal of
life, always girded for service, and
exhibiting at every point the meaning
of His own highest words : " For their
sakes I sanctify myself." And we must
go to our practical tasks with a faith
like His in the infinite worth of man.

Social There is nothing finer in the pro-

phetical work of primitive Friends than
their insistence on the worth of man.
They saw divine chances, and a possible
royal destiny in every human being,
regardless of colour, and however
hampered or blurred by sin and oppres
sion. They considered their main
business to be the emancipation of man
from everything that bound and
cramped him. By the right of primo
geniture, this high estimate of the worth

H IReliglon of Xtfe. 35

of man comes down to us as a sacred
legacy. William James has called
Quakerism " a religion of veracity, rooted
in spiritual inwardness," but that is not
enough. It must manifest its fruits in
spiritual outwardness.

There have been vast gains made since
the Commonwealth days, and, for one
who has the real perspective, the progress
of emancipation appears very great.
But even yet, we have no task before us
greater than the task to-day of helping
men and women to possess themselves.
The deepest cleavage in our modern
society is the cleavage between the
rich and the poor a wide gash which
cuts straight down through humanity.
Most of us have neighbours who get
hardly more out of life than did the primi
tive cave-dwellers human fellows so

36 (^uafeertsm ;

low down that they have to reach up to
touch bottom, and neighbours at the
other extreme, among " the unemployed
rich " who, like lotus eaters,

" Live and lie reclined
On the hills, like gods together,
Careless of mankind."

We have learned, after centuries of
experiment, that this social trouble is
too deep to be cured by the easy method
of flinging alms to poor beggars, or by
systems of organised charity. The
millionaire who, in his business, fosters
iniquitous social conditions and turns
men into cogs in the vast machinery of
industry, and then tries to wash his soul
and his reputation by enormous gifts to
charity, philanthropy and education,
is not solving the problem. The woman
who gives freely to vagrants and to

a TRcltQiou of Xifc. 37

public charity, and then does nothing
to show her own human personal
interest in those who labour and are
heavy laden in the circle of her own
household, and the wider circle of her
neighbourhood, is not helping to solve
the problem.

But we must not take the short cut
and shipwreck on the shoals of abstract
theories. The society toward which we
are toiling and aspiring will not come
by the proclamation of socialism or
by any other cure-all scheme. No
system of sharing goods, or of sharing
profits, in itself, will accomplish the
end in view ; nothing short of the sharing
of life, the spirit of love and brotherhood,
the personal consecration, not only of
our wealth, but of ourselves, to our
fellows will make a good society. The

38 Quahertsm ;

millennium will not come by express
to-morrow.

Any sharing of goods that is to be effec
tive must spring out of a genuine spirit
of love and brotherhood, a spirit that
finds joy in sharing. No quick panacea
will transform society, no reshuffling of
leaden atoms will make a golden group.
We must, to be sure, make use of every
sound economic and sociological principle
which comes to light to change the
conditions of life and the social environ
ment of men. In the work of bettering
the world and of spiritualising humanity,
we can no more ignore the structural
principles of society than a bridge-builder
can ignore the laws of mechanics in his
work, but there is no sane and efficient
programme which does not include the
old-fashioned Quaker faith in the

a tReliflton of Xtfe. 39

personal worth of the individual, a faith
that a man is more precious than the
gold of Ophir, a vision of the potential
child of God in the submerged toiler,
and, with that faith and that vision,
the readiness to identify ourselves as
friend with those who need us, the be
stowal of personal care and sympathy,
the sharing of the self as well as the
sharing of money, the cultivation of the
spirit of consecration to the tasks and
needs of the neighbourhood group in
which we live. In the great words of
the Quaker prophet, John Woolman :
" We must make it the business of our
lives to turn all we possess into the
channel of universal love."

We must meet the problem of " the
submerged tenth " with " a vicarious
tenth," steadily growing into a vicarious

2>ct>otiott
to

national
3oeals.

4 Quafeertem ;

church. Instead of being content with
preaching about a God who once vicari
ously suffered for man s redemption, it is
rather our task so to live in the life and
power of that Divine love, that Divine
self-giving, that our lives, kindled and
aflame with that passion, shall again
make Christian love real, practical and
dynamic, and shall exhibit the beauty
and joy of service, as the Master did.

The great prophets of the race have
always been great patriots. They have
brought to their people a vision of the
country as it ought to be, they have been
loyal to the ideal nation. They have
loved their country too much to spare
national sins or political blunders or
short-sighted opportunisms, but their
main service has always been their

a ffielfoion ot Xife. 41

unerring vision of the ideal city, the
perfect state, the new Jerusalem, the
city of God with righteousness domin
ant.

Friends have sometimes been dull of
vision for national ideals and they have,
at some periods, been too absorbed in
" individual states of mind " to take up
the prophetical mission to the nation,
but the pillar Quakers have been
prophets of the ideal nation, devotedly
loyal to the country that ought to be.
It is unmistakably a part of our modern
mission, not to build dreams of new
Jerusalems in the skies, but to live, and
if necessary, die for noble national ideals,
to make righteousness prevail in the
nation, here on the solid earth, to enlarge
the scope of freedom and to promote
peace through the heightening of national

4J Quakerism ;

honour and the expansion of national
justice.

Spirit Ot Our Quakerism must, then, be nothing

ptilH* short of a religion of life, a real experiment
in the application, the reproduction, of
Christ s religion. Neither form nor the
absence of form ; neither creed nor the
absence of creed will avail, but a kind of
life which is Divinely begotten, inspired
and fed from within. It is not " views "
that are wanted, but the evidence that
in the hush of our Meetings we find a
living God, that in our human tasks
Divine streams of Grace are raining into
our lives, and currents of spiritual
energy are coursing through our deeds
and purposes. And withal we must go
to our day s work with sunlight on our
faces.

H TCeliQfon of Xtfe. 43

Let those who work the muck-rake
for sensational news or for commercial
literature have a monopoly of " seeing
yellow " ; we must, like the seer of
Patmos, do our work with a vision of
the rainbow round the throne of God,
a vision of hope and promise every
lime we look up, with an invincible
faith in the inexhaustible assets of God
and the ultimate triumph of the Spirit.
" I saw," says the first prophet of
Quakerism, " that there was an ocean of
darkness and death ; but an infinite
ocean of light and love flowed over the
ocean of darkness. In this, I saw the
infinite love of God." Nothing can
overwhelm a man with a vision like that.
Let us stop assuming that the great
days of Quakerism were in the seven
teenth century, and that we are a tiny

44 (Siuakertsm ;

remnant left behind to chronicle the
story of spent fires and dead issues.
The great days of Quakerism are to be
in the twentieth century. This is the
best " dispensation " that ever was, the
best era that has yet dawned. The
momentous question is, shall we quit
ourselves like men and do, in the high
spirit of early Friends, the work of this
age.

Let us once more raise the white
banner for a genuine spiritual religion ;
a religion which finds a present God,
and has the power of first-hand experi
ence of Him ; a religion which sees a
possible son of God in every, person
about us, and which sends us out with
holy fervour to bring many sons to
glory ; a religion which takes up the
burden of the world s suffering, and

a ttelfoion of OLife. 45

carries refreshing and gladness into
darkened homes and cramped lives
everywhere ; a religion not confined
to the narrow area of a church building,
but permeating the entire community
and making for the transformation of
the state into a holy commonwealth ;
a religion not personified in a priest or
pastor, but embodied and exhibited
in a fellowship of saints, a congregation
of ministering members.

On one day of Easter week each year,
multitudes of eastern Christians throng
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem to wait for the descent of
fire from heaven. They crowd about
with eager faces, and with genuine faith
that the miracle will be granted.
Within, by the empty tomb, stands a

*6 Quakerism :

priest with an unlighted torch. Again
and again he thrusts it into an opening
in the tomb, and draws it out still un
lighted. Suddenly, as he pulls it forth
once more, it kindles into flame. Those
crowding about believe that it is actual
Divine fire. Instantly every man in the
crowd near by rushes with his torch and
kindles it from the priest s torch, and
they, in turn, pass the flame on to light
the torches of those about them ; and
then each man with his lighted torch
starts running to kindle the torches of
those who remained behind in the city
and field, until the light has spread
throughout the land.

My figure is taken from a religion in
which superstition plays a great part,
and one feels afraid that the way of
lighting that first torch would hardly

a IRclioion or Xtfe* 47

bear investigation ; but, nevertheless,
this great eastern pageant of Jerusalem
suggests a method which will work in
spreading a true religion and a genuine
Divine fire. Instead of going to the
empty tomb, we must go to the living
Christ who triumphed over the tomb,
and instead of lighting a physical torch,
we must have our own spirits kindled
to burning passion by His Presence in
us, till " the love of Christ constrains
us," and then, with unveiled faces,
reflecting, as from a mirror, the glory of
the Lord, we can make men see and
believe in the Christ who is transforming
us by the Spirit of the Lord.

48 (Slualtertem ; H IRclioion or Xite*
Rote.

For the help of readers who desire
more detailed information on the history
and belief of Friends, the following books
are recommended :

George Fox s Journal (abridged), edited

by P. L. Parker, is. and is. 6d. net;
Thomas Ellwood s Autobiography, is. 6d.

and 25. 6d. net.
John Woolman s Journal, Introduction by

J. G. Whittier, is. 6d. and 2s. 6d. net.
The Rise of the Quakers, by T. E. Harvey,

M.A.. is. 6d. net.
The Story of Quakerism (for young people),

by E. B. Emmott, is. and 35. 6d. net.
Quaker Strongholds, by Caroline E. Stephen,

is. and 2s. 6d. net.
Authority and the Light Within, by Edward

Grubb, M.A., 2s. net.
Social Law in the Spiritual World, by Rufus

M. Jones, M.A., as. 6d. net.
The Double Search, by Rufus M. Jones, M.A.,

is. and 2s. net.
A Dynamic Faith, by Rufus M. Jones, M.A.,

6d. and is. net.
Essays and Addresses, by John Wilhelm

Rowntree, 53. net.
The Guiding Hand of God, by J. Rendcl Harris,

M.A., is. 6d.
John S. Rowntree : His Life and Work, 6s.

net.
Poems, by J. G. Whittier, Oxford Edition,

2s. and 33. 6d.