Division BXKd76> Section • ^ ^-~^> THE PECULIUM. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/peculiumendeavouOOhanc_0 THE PECULIUM; AN ENDEAVOUR TO THROW LIGHT ON SOME OF THE CAUSES OF THE DECLINE OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS, ESPECIALLY IN REGARD TO ITS ORIGINAL CLAIM OF BEING THE PECULIAR PEOPLE OF GOD. BY / THOMAS 'HANCOCK. LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 1859. [The right of translation is reserved.'] " Mane nobiscuni, Domine, Et nos illustra Lumiue, Pulsa mentis caligine, Mundum replens dulcedine. Quando cor nostrum visitas, Tunc lucet ei Veritas, Mundi vilescit vanitas, Et intus fervet Caritas." S. Bernabdi Jubilus Rhythmicus de Nomine Jesus. " What Scripture of the New Testament can you read that does not prove this to be the Gospel state, a Kingdom of God into which none can enter but by being born of the Spirit, none can continue to be alive in it but by being led by the Spirit ; and in which not a thought, or desire, or action, can be allowed to have any part in it, but as it is a fruit of the Spirit ? " William Law, M.A., Address to the Clergy. h CONTENTS. PAGE Advertisement ix Preface xiii BOOK I. The Idea of Quakerism. CHAP. 1 1 II. The Divine Seed in Christian Sects and the Ways in which it is conditioned by outward Causes . .10 III. The Divine Principle of Quakerism, and the two leading Quaker Doctrines 18 IV. The Principle of the Quaker Church . . . .37 V. The ^Reflection of the Quaker Idea in Modern Quakerism 4* BOOK n. The Quaker Schism ; or, Formal Quakerism. I. The Divine Element, or Contribution, in Quakerism 59 II. The Foxite Contribution 67 III. The Secular Contribution 82 BOOK III. The Discipline of Quakerism. I . .96 n . .104 m H3 IV 124 b 2 VUl CONTENTS. BOOK IV. Quaker Conduct. CHAP. PACE I. The Principle of Early Quaker Conduct . . . ■ 135 II. Enthusiasm of Early Quaker Conduct . . . .145 III. Fanaticism of Early Quaker Conduct .... 158 IV. Intensity of Early Quaker Conduct .... 174 V. Reflection of Early Quaker Conduct in Modern Qua- kerism " 182 BOOK V. The World Without : External Causes of Quaker Decay. I. Sympathy and Antipathy of the Eighteenth Century . 191 II. Quakerism and the Nineteenth Century . . . 202 in. Ibid 215 IV. Ibid 226 ADVERTISEMENT. A few sentences only are needful to explain the origin of the accompanying Essay. In the month of March, 1858, there appeared in the public prints the following announcement: — SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.— PRIZE ESSAY. A GENTLEMAN who laments that, notwithstanding the population of the United Kingdom has more than doubled itself in the last fifty years, the Society of Friends is less in number than at the beginning of the century ; and who believes that the Society at one time bore a powerful witness to the world concerning some of the errors to which it is most prone, and some of the truths which are the most necessary to it ; and that this witness has been gradually becoming more and more feeble, is anxious to obtain light respecting the causes of this change. He offers a PRIZE of ONE HUNDRED GUINEAS for the best ESSAY that shall be written on the subject, and a PRIZE of FIFTY GUINEAS for the one next in merit. He has asked three gentlemen, not members of the Society of Friends, to pronounce judgment on the Essays which shall be sent to them. They have all some acquaintance with the his- tory of the Society, and some interest in its existing members ; and as they are likely to regard the subject from different points of view, he trusts that their decision will be impartial ; that they will not expect to find their own opinions represented in the Essays ; and that they will choose the one which exhibits most thought and Christian earnestness, whether it is favour- X ADVERTISEMENT. able or unfavourable to the Society, whether it refers the diminution of its influence to degeneracy, to something wrong in the original constitution of the body, to the rules which it has adopted for its government, or to any extraneous cause. Eev. F. D. MAURICE, Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn ; Pro- fessor J. P. NICHOL, Glasgow ; and Rev. E. S. PRYCE, Gravesend, have agreed to act as Adjudicators. The number and ability of the Essays which this announcement elicited, while it afforded gratifying testimony to the interest which the subject has ex- cited, added greatly to the labour and responsibility of the adjudicators. The illness of Professor Nichol, which has since terminated in his lamented death, was one of the " unforeseen hindrances" which occa- sioned the delay of the adjudicators' decision. It was given in August, 1859, in the following terms : — SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.— PRIZE ESSAYS. The adjudicators of the Prizes for the best Essays on the Causes of the Decline in the Society of Friends regret that they have been prevented from arriving at an earlier decision by unforeseen hindrances, hy the large number and extent of the Essays submitted to them, and by their exceeding desire to deal justly. The terms of the original proposal do not permit the adjudicators to specify more than the two Essays which appear to them to have the superior claims ; but they feel it right to bear testimony to the great ability displayed hy many of the other writers, and* to record their conviction, that the publication of what they have written, by the individual authors, would, in many cases, be advisable, and for the public advantage. In performing the painful duty of setting aside so many estimable and elaborate productions, the adjudicators have necessarily been influenced by various classes of con- siderations: they have been deterred, in some cases, by the ADVERTISEMENT. xi presence of irrelevant disquisitions, and they have been espe- cially solicitous that the spirit manifested by the successful can- didates be such as seemed most in accordance with the object for which the prizes were offered, as plainly set forth in the general advertisement. It has, after careful consideration, been deter- mined that an Essay, bearing a motto from a report of the York Quarterly Meeting of the year 1855, should receive the first prize ; and one bearing the motto verbum, vita, lux, the second prize. A degree of hesitation having been expressed by the adjudicators as to the relative place which ought to be assigned to the two successful essays, the donor of the prizes has generously offered to make the second prize equal to the first. The writers of these Essays evidently belong to different schools, and contemplate the subject from entirely different points of view. No one of the adjudicators wishes to be held responsible for the sentiments of either writer. But they are unanimous in hoping that, in choosing both, they are doing their best to promote the objects of the giver of the prizes, and to fulfil their trust. J. P. NlCHOL. F. D. Maueice. E. S. Pbyce. The Essay to which the second prize was adjudged is printed in the present volume. P E E F A C E. Whateyeh hope I may have had when I com- menced, — when I had finished the following Essay I certainly had no hope at all of seeing my name set forth as one of the successful competitors. I felt convinced that my work could not answer to the real heart's desire of the generous offerer of these prizes. His ultimate hope must have been that some expedient might be brought forward by which Quakerism could be saved. The whole tenor of my Essay goes to prove that its salvation is impos- sible. The donor " laments that the Society of Friends is less in number than it was at the begin- ning of the century." The reader will see that my own convictions, as expressed in this Essay, compel me rather to rejoice. I know that this language must seem strange (perhaps pitiable) to those who have been born, xiv PREFACE. who have been trained, who have lived their life in Quakerism ; to those to whom it has been the universe, who have known nothing outside of it ; to those, above all, who have found God within it and through it — found Him as their loving Father, their hourly Teacher and Saviour. Perhaps, too, they will be surprised to find that which they be- lieved to be peculiarly their own, their Society's, here spoken of as least so. Perhaps they will be still more surprised to discover so many and such vital points of affinity between themselves and those whom they have always fancied to be (and who, in one sense, are) at the very greatest distance from them. I should, indeed, be glad if I could but know that this Essay would make any Quaker feel that there are fewer obstacles than he supposes (even in the principles of his own Society) to the universal union of all Christians. But I dare hardly hope so much as that this Essay will lead any one Quaker to take, as his first step toward the re-binding of Christians, that step which our Blessed Lord Himself made the visible bond (as his indwelling Spirit is the invisible bond) of Christian union — the humble and solemn reception of Holy Baptism PEEFACE. xv in the Name of The Father, The Son, and The Holt Ghost, at the hands of those whom He, hj the rulers and throne-holders of His Spiritual Israel, has appointed. Any union that comes from our wills, our compromises, our intolerant tolerations, will have no binding power, will soon snap. A Baptism that is dependent upon our conversion, our repentance, our faith, our excitement, our conscious- ness, our choice — whether, like that of the Anabap- tists, it be a baptism of water, or, like that of the Quakers, a baptism of imaginary fire — will derive its virtue from us, and not from the Holt Ghost — will be (as each of these baptisms has been) the cause of another separation, instead of the bond of union. The purport of this Essay is historical rather than doctrinal, a consideration which has made me keep out of it any dissertation on that Regeneration by Baptism of which the profoundest and holiest of the first Quakers have written.* Their constant Idea of Baptism is the Idea of the Catholic Church, the Idea expressed again and again by S. Augustine. I will give two instances, both of them from his * Especially the Baptismologia ; or, Treatise concerning Baptisms, by Thomas Lawson. xvi PKEFAC& Homilies on the Gospel of S. John. " It may be," he 6ays, "a minister baptizes who belongs not to the number of the sons of God, since he lives wickedly, and acts wickedly; what, then, shall console us? He it is WJio baptizes."* Again, " We confess that both good and wicked men are in the Church, but only in the manner of grain and chaff. Sometimes he who is baptized by the grain is chaff ; and he who is baptized by the chaff is grain. Otherwise, if he who is baptized by the grain does well, and he who is baptized by the chaff does ill, then it is false, — He it is Wlio bap- tizes." f No words, no man, could make a fitter passage for me to that second class of readers whom I hope my Essay will reach : I mean my fellow Churchmen. They will soon see with what hope and thankfulness I look upon that great revival of the Church and of churchliness which is giving so marked a character- istic to our own century. Puritanism, Quakerism, * " Licet baptizet minister, &c. &c. Hie est qui baptizat." — Horn. rii. c. 4, p. 6, torn. xv. [Ed. Caillau.] f " Nos fatemur in Ecclesia et bonos et malos, &c. &c. Hie est qui baptizat." — Horn. vi. c. 12, pp. 472, 473, torn. xiv. [Ed. Caillau.] Omnia Opera S. August. PREFACE. xvii Methodism, did great good to special times, to spe- cial classes, to special places. But a revival of the Catholic Church must bear blessing for all men, all peoples, all places, all future time. This thought it is, which makes me dread lest we should, by any fault of ours, cripple this Catholic work by mere Sectarian limitations. The Adversary's work is always close to the Redeemer's work ; wherever we see the Good Seed falling, we may be sure that the Sower of Tares is not far off. Brethren, we do not belong to ourselves, we are not our own witnesses : we belong to the whole world, our witness is in every man's conscience. Our came is not Protestantism, Puritanism, Quakerism, nor Methodism, — but one Body. Brethren, every man, woman, and child in this world was created by the Father to be baptized into the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Jesus Christ has given all man- kind to Her; He has given all mankind a claim upon Her. Our charity, as her children, ought to be greater than the charity of other men ; our tolera- tion ought to be wider, more tender, more inviting than the toleration of Separatists. The Catholic Church called the Donatist schismatics " brethren." xviii PREFACE. She had none the less hatred of Schism. The more the Charity of God is shed abroad in our hearts, the more hateful Schism will be to us. She, the living Representative of Jesus in this world, ought to be to men all that He was. No assumption, no pride, no untender or insulting phrases, ought to pass her lips in her dealings with the Samaritans who sur- round her. No forgetfulness that she is the everlasting Judah, the real Kingdom of the Son of David, need be involved in her acknowledging as the gift of her King all the grace and the piety that she finds in Samaria. Samaritans will not more truly rise up in judgment against Jews, than will Separatists against Churchmen. Oh, that we could always remember that the Separatist mentioned in the Gospel was casting out devils in the Name of Jesus, when the Apostolical College could not cast them out ! I should be very thankful if this little book would lead a few Churchmen to know one section of Schismatics better ; to find in them more to love, more to reverence ; to recognize in them the gift of that Son of God who was Incarnate in all Flesh ; Who tasted death for every man ; Who lighteth PREFACE. xix every man that cometh into the world ; in Whose Mystical Body, as we are saying at this season, Almighty God has knit together His elect in One Communion and Fellowship. Nottingham, Thursday in the Octave of All Saints, 1859. THE PECULIUM, BOOK I. THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. CHAPTER I. i. Introductory — Necessary Decay of Human Societies — Pre- sumptive Decay of the Quaker Society. ii. Decay of Spiritual Societies. iii. The Catholic Church, the Universal Society, alone exempt from the Law of Social Decay. it, Testimony of all Christian Societies to this Exemption — What is the Catholic Church ? v. Quaherism originally claimed to be the Catholic Church — Modern Quakers have given up the Claim — This Concession a Prognostication of Quaker Decay. Ti. Difficulties of Modern Quakers from this Concession — Quakers have lost faith in Quakerism, vii. Decay of Quakerism to be expected. i. It is the lot of societies made up of men and women to be subject to a law of decay. No age or nation lias ever given birth to a body, guild, associa- tion, or church, fitted for every time and all races. Indeed, times and nations themselves, being but 1 2 THE PECULIOI. [BOOK I. greater societies, are always obeying this very law. The old Ethnic age died a natural death; the Renaissance could not revive it — it only galvanized an imitation of it. The Mediaeval age could not keep itself alive; and all the earnest and romantic men in Christendom, striving unitedly, would never revive it. Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Gothic king- doms died, as our friends have done — as we our- selves shall do — because they must. So far as Quakerism is a society made up of men and women, we should expect to see it obey the uni- versal law of social death. It would appear strange and disorderly if it alone continued fresh, lively, and bearing fruit. ii. Nor does the comprehension of a diviner purpose and of spiritual strength exempt any society from this imperturbable law. The State and the Church have been served and thwarted by society after society, which begun in the spirit and ended in the flesh. Old philosophical schools, Hindoo and Chinese brotherhoods, early anchorites and monks, the Benedictines, the Franciscans and Dominicans, the first Protestants, the Puritans, the Methodists, banded themselves together to know wisdom, to do the will of God, to fulfil all righteousness, to become the most utter and unresisting organs and instru- CHAP. I.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 3 meats of the SriKiT, to save the world, to reform the Church, to live an entirely spiritual life, to taste the eternal life into which death cannot enter; yet these awful intuitions, these sublime purposes, could not preserve them ; they are all either dying or dead. The morbid and unspiritual societies which Quakerism arose to witness against, had assumed at their birth that very position toward older socie- ties which Quakerism was assuming toward them. They believed and proclaimed the same things against prior societies which Quakerism was pro- claiming against them. "We should naturally expect that Quakerism would follow them, and that it is even now marching with more or less haste, over- taken by some, but overtaking others, in that valley of the shadow of death where the old spiritual societies of the world are either lying dead or dying. It would be wonderful indeed, if, like the prophet Ezekiel in the valley of dead bones, Quaker- ism alone were seen living and vigorous in that most solemn of all the pathways of history and society, the way of pei'petual decay and death. I know only one premiss upon which such a sight is possible. iii. For there is a Society above the reach of this law, uncontemplated in the promulgation of it, and unaffected by any of its penalties. The Elect Body 1—2 4 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. of wliicli the Divine Uniter of God and mankind is the Head, lias the promise of eternal continuance. If it appears (as it has appeared a hundred times) to weary, decay, or die, in one time or one place, it is only to revive or blossom forth in another. As the Asiatic and African branches of the Church sicken with idolatry or worldliness, or are cut down by Mahometanism, the European branches are re- formed ; as heresies canker and blight one fair bough or another of the great tree of the Church, vigorous shoots sprout out in unexpected places, and races who have never known anything but weariness, rest themselves and are refreshed under the shadow of Christ. This is the Catholic Church, the Peculium, the Lord's Body, the People of God, the Holy Nation, the Spiritual Israel. iv. All the Christian Societies which have ever existed, agree in acknowledging the everlasting con- tinuance of the Catholic Church. They differ when they come- to determine what the Catholic Church is. Some say it is one of these societies — their own society; all of them have, at some part of their history, claimed, or do now claim, to be the Church. Others say that it consists visibly of all societies except those they like least — most likely of all except Romanism and Unitarianism ; invisibly, of all those CHAP. I.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 5 in a state of grace in any of these societies, even in Romanism and Unitarianism. Others declare that no society existing is the true Seed and People of God ; and, consequently, proceed to found the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church upon their own fancies, upon private experiences, upon mis- read history, upon the Bihle, or upon all together. v. The first Quakers announced this claim for their Society in its most uncompromising and in- tolerant form. Many of the Quaker leaders would not grant even the name of Christian to any one who worshipped apart from themselves. Quaker and Christian were mere interchangeable terms. Common-prayer-man and Christian, Presbyterian and Christian, Independent and Christian, Anabaptist and Christian, Ranter and Christian, were not inter- changeable terms.* The distinction is of immense importance. No one can understand the decay of * Edward Burroughs' Works, fol., 1672, p. 416.— "All you churches and sects, by what name soever you are known in the world, you are the seed of the great whore." And the whole of his tract, A Measure of the Times, 4to, London, 1657, pp. 40. See, too, A Testimony from Northampton Prison. By William Dewsbury, Joseph Storr, and John Whitehead. " The English Church held up by you, the English teachers (that is, the Puritan Schism of the Commonwealth), who are made by the will of man, those who are come to the Church of God, whom you call Quakers, deny such." 4to, London, 1655. Also, A Iieturn to the Priests (Ministers) about Beverly, 4to, 1653. — &c. 6 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. Quakerism, who leaves out this mighty contradic- tion which the sons give to the fathers of Quakerism. The primitive Friends said that Quakerism was the Church. Modern Friends say it is a part of the Church. Parts must die for the whole to live. If Quakerism be a part, it can only have a parti- cular, dependent, contingent life ; we can have little doubt of its ultimate decay, we can have no cer- tainty of its continuing life. " When that which is perfect is come," the Apostle says, " that which is in part shall be done away."* In the natural or physical sphere of the Kingdom of God we see it is so. The life of the body exhibits perpetual death and decay of parts: we cut off the boughs that the tree may live. So the Great Husbandman of the Church is perpetually lopping His own tree that it may bring forth more fruit. A time comes to every bousrh when it brings forth nothing, or brings forth leaves only. If Quakerism be merely a branch (and not alone the retractations of Quakers, but the course of the world also, sIioav that it is not the Church), a time will surely come when He will lop off Quakerism. It has certainly been pruned very many times. The schisms of Perrot, Penny- man, Keith, Bugg, the White Quakers, the Hicks- * 1 Corinthians xiii. 10. CHAP. I.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 7 ites, the Progressive Friends, are all indications of tlie pruning hand of the Lokd. vi. The full realization of this change of the relation of Quakerism to the Catholic Church must bring a great deal of conflict and doubt to any Quaker who has begun to search the early records of the Society for light on its present decay. He would scarcely know whether to retain George Fox and Edward Burroughs, or Joseph John Gurney and William Allen. He would soon see that he must give up the one or the other. They have scarcely anything in common but their name and their clothes. The two former are connected with astonishing suc- cess, with apostolic earnestness, but also with fana- ticism and intolerance ; they would lay a burden upon him which it would have been easier to carry in the seventeenth century than he would find it in the nineteenth. The two latter are connected with peace and serenity, with earnestness also, though of a weaker kind ; with the most placid tolerance, but also with evident decay. He would be inclined, per- haps, to doubt whether this determination of the later Quakers, that Quakerism is not the Catholic Church, but a part of it, is a desirable one. He might ask himself, Is it even one that can be made ? Who made the change ? Preachers of sermons, writers of 8 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. advices, yearly epistles, men and women with their " concerns " hither and thither ? Could men and women make such a change, not in the outward form, but in the very nature and essence of the Household of God ? Or, perhaps, an evangelical education might lead him to conclude that Fox and Burroughs were good men, but not well instructed in the doctrines of grace ; and that^ Gurney and Crewdson were improvers of Quakerism. These, then, are the two great characteristic fea- tures of the body in the periods of extension and decay : in the period of its growth it proclaimed itself to be the One Church, moved and guided by the Inspiring Light, to which every one who was led by that Light Avas sure to join himself ; in the period of decline it proclaims itself to be only a fraction of the One Church. In 1658 there was not a Quaker living who did not believe Quakerism to be the one only true Church of the living God. In 1858 there is not a Quaker living who does believe it. vii. Whether it be or be not a part of the Catholic Church, I neither ask nor answer here. It it be not, it is sure to decay ; if it be, it is likely to decay. No one will deny that the Church of Jerusalem was a true and living part of the Catholic Church, and yet the Church of Jerusalem has decayed. Decay, under CHAP. I.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 9 the first supposition, would spring from the necessary sentence and seed of death in the body itself ; decay, under the second supposition, would proceed from degeneracy. The purpose of this chapter is to show — first, that there is but one condition upon the exhibition of which Quakerism could continue perpetually, on which its decay could not be expected ; and, secondly, that Quakerism, by its own confession, does not exhibit this condition, and therefore the death of Quakerism must be expected. I shall not enlarge upon it here, because I believe all the after- part of this Essay will throw back light upon it. 10 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. CHAPTER II. THE DIVINE SEED IN CHRISTIAN SECTS AND THE WATS IN WHICH IT IS CONDITIONED BY OUT- WARD CAUSES. i. The Divine Seed. ii. This Seed the Source of all Divine Fruits in Quakerism. iii. The Divine Seed conditioned by the Human Sower — Indivi- dualist and Personal Influences instanced in Quakerism. iv. The Divine Seed conditioned by the Character and Changes of the Soil Without — The Eternal and Transient in Quakerism, v. The Divine Seed conditioned by a Divine Edict — Given for a time and in measure. i. Our Loud Jesus Christ compares the growth of the Kingdom of Grace to the growth of natural seed. He carried out the analogy so fully that I shall be in nowise departing from His method, but keeping most strictly in the line of it, if I take it as my guiding rule along the series of inquiries upon which we are now entering. The mystic theologians assert that the natural and supernatural seeds of God have affinities and points of touch more subtle and inherent than the unenlightened eye can perceive. CHAP. U.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 11 Whatever modern Quakers are, their earliest repre- sentatives were certainly mystics ; and, after the idea of Light, the idea of Seed is that hy which they most frequently express the working of the Divine Prin- ciple in the heart of a man or of society. ii. Of this seed of the Kingdom of Grace our Lord Himself has always been understood by Christian people to be the Provider and the real Sower. It has been His Spirit exciting and aiding prophets, apo- stles, missionaries, founders of orders, reformers, wit- nesses for righteousness' sake in every age, which has made them effectual sowers. The Seed they sowed was the Word of God ; that is, in the most solemn sense, the First Begotten of the Father, God Himself. But ivho could plant God in men's hearts ? None, except God Himself. God has been the true Sower. Wherever love, truth, wisdom, or righteousness, or any fruit of the Holy Spirit is found, there the Seed of the Holy SriRiT must first have been. No one, with only an hour's acquaintance with the lives and books of the Quakers, could honestly doubt that the true fruits of the Divine Spirit are found in Quakerism. Quakerism, therefore, contains a true Seed and Principle, one which existed before and apart from George Fox and the seekers of the Com- monwealth era, one which he himself declares he was 12 THE PECUUUM. [BOOK. I. given, and neither discovered nor made, but which the Light of Christ discovered to him in himself, and enlightened him to perceive in all other men. The causes of the decay of Quakerism cannot, of course, be found in this. The Divine Seed of its life and truth must be of the Divine nature, eternal ; it must not only be quite above all the conditions of time, alteration, and decay; but also, on the other hand, the very cause of life, growth, and fruition wherever it is sown. iii. But since the Divine Seed of the truth passes through the hands of men, and since men are so different, it could not be but that it is given a pre- paratory colouring, a mental chemistry of some kind, from the human sowei\ This may be more clearly understood in our time than it was in that of the rise of Quakerism. The claimants to direct revelations or illumination at that period, which was so full of them, were expected to manifest their claims in a non-natural and non-rational manner ; everything individual and characteristic about them was expected to be suppressed ; they were to be moved by the Divine Spirit as machines,* not as human * Thus Henry More defends himself from the charge of being an Enthusiast : " For God doth not ride me as a horse, and guide me I know not whither myself; but converseth with me as a Priend." — Second Lash of Alazonomastix. London, 1656. CHAP. II.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 13 spirits with a reason and a will. Multitudes of the first Quaker converts responded to this demand in the most extraordinary fashion. But the tendency of our own time sets in quite the opposite direction. Writers who firmly believe in the unity of that Spirit from Whom the Scriptures proceed, seem to take an almost pedantic delight in showing their discernment of the difference of manifestation : they tell us that this expression is Hebrew — I should say Hebraic; that this is Greek — Hellenic, I mean; that certain churches and times are characterized by the predominance of the Pauline, some of the Petrine, others of the Johannine element. However, the fact is true that the Divine Seed is affected in some degree by the human sower, and may grow or decay according to the method in which he handles, casts, modifies, interprets it, — internally, by the tone and character of his mind and circumstances of his life ; externally, by his energy and enthusiasm : first, as an opinion or doctrine ; secondly, as a grow- ing body or society. No one, I suppose, would be inclined to deny that original Quakerism carries very strong 'personal cha- racteristics upon every corner of its being. Its foi'in, its discipline, its language, its customs, are not the characteristics of any time or of all times, they bear 14 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK L the unmistakeablc mark of one peculiar century. Neither are they the form, discipline, opinions, or customs likely to arise from any spiritual man. They bear the characteristic marks of one peculiar and representative man. And, indeed, we might legitimately divide the history of Quakerism into periods or into schools, each time or each section being distinguished by the preponderance of some personal element. One period we might call Foxite Quakerism; another, Penn-and-Barclayite Quaker- ism; a third, Joseph John Gurneyite Quakerism. Or, we might name the first kind spiritual Quakerism ; the second, doctrinal or scholastic Quakerism; the third, Puritan or modern evangelical Quakerism. iv. Again. After this seed leaves the hand of the sower it has to accommodate itself to very different soils. After it has grown up into a plant of more or less strength, service, and grandeur, it has to endure and resist the lightnings, the rainy winds and tempests, the arid, dry seasons, and all the healthy and unhealthy alternations of the spiritual universe. There might be that both true and erro- neous in the hearts and minds of Englishmen in the middle of the seventeenth century, which demanded something like Quakerism, and to which Quakerism would appear to be the answer, — both the eternal CHAP. II.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 15 necessary truth in Quakerism, and the outward partial reflex of that truth, and all the lesser con- tingencies bound up with that reflex, the character- istics and individualities of its promulgators, and the loose, drifting opinions of the time. That craving may not exist in our time; or, rather, it exists in spirit alone, and needs its answer and satisfaction in a veiy (liferent reflex or form, with other kind of contingencies, with personal characteristics of men living and working among us ourselves, mingled with opinions and peculiarities of our time. For that which is eternal in Quakerism, its idea or principle, must be necessary to every time, because it is au effluence from that Life, a ray from that Light, Who is above and beneath, before and after all times, the Loed of all the seasons and changes of the universe ; He with whom a day is as a thousand years ; the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. The nineteenth century needs Him as much as the seventeenth, and needs as much each of the several principles or graces of His Being. States- men, priests, leaders of thought, artists, men of science in Victoria's reign, want faith in and use of the Quaker principle, just as much as the poor peasants in the Vale of Beavor and old Nottingham, under Cromwell and Charles the Second. The 16 THE PECULIOI. [BOOK L reflex or form of that principle may have been pecu- liarly adapted to that kind of men and kind of time, and yet as plainly unfit for us and our time. And so, indeed, actual history (that real recording hook of the judgment of God) proves it. Great eccle- siastical movements, changes in the course and temper of thinking, discoveries, " every wind of doctrine,"* are as much the ministers of God, and do His will in the spiritual world, upon His spiritual seed, and upon the growths from that seed, as do the natural wind, rain, and lightning upon His natural seed in His physical kingdom ; and it is these ministers of His which are destroying Quakerism. v. Lastly. The Seed sown may carry the sentence of death in itself: it may he meant for a time only. But I spoke of the seed of which George Fox was the sower, as containing a Divine and, therefore, an eternal element : if it did so, how can its life cease ? I will answer by transferring the Quaker proposition concerning the principle of Divine life in a man to the principle of Divine life in a religious society. " God," says Robert Barclay, "has communicated and given unto every man " (substitute " unto every reli- gious society ") "a measure of the Light of His own So>", a measure of grace, or a measure of the SrilUT, which * Ephes. iv. 14. CHAP. II.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 17 the Scripture expresses by several names, as some- times of the Seed of the Kingdom." * Every reli- gious movement and society, in so far as it is human and has had a man for its outward originator (other than the Divine Man), as such must die. God's Spirit may have been granted to him and to his society in very great measure ; all the good and vigorous fruition it has ever put forth must be the result of that grant; but it was granted by measure. A time will come, that time has come to all socie- ties that have any history, when its life will be languid, and the good fruits grow fewer. Only one Man partook of the Spirit without measure, the Son of God Himself; and only that Universal So- ciety which He began with the audible call of His own voice, and the imposition of His very hands, and the inspiration of His very breath, has, as we assumed in the commencement of this Essay, the Seed for an everlasting continuance. * Apology, Proposition xi. ch. v. p. 107. Baskerville, 4to, 1765. 2 18 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. CHAPTER III. THE DIVINE PRINCIPLE OF QUAKERISM, AND THE TWO LEADING QUAKER DOCTRINES. i. The Light Within. ii. The Light Within proclaimed by George Eox as the Central Truth of the Gospel — His Experience — Experiences of the Co-founders. iii. The Process of the Light Within upon the Soul — The Light the Principle of Conviction, of Salvation, of a New Birth, of the Church, of Ministry, of Doctrine, of Power. iv. The Light Within a Divine Person— The Living Word. t. This Person the Principle of Quakerism — Language of Fox, Penn, Nayler. vi. The Light in all Men — Universal Sympathies of the first Quakers. vii. The two leading Quaker Doctrines : (a) The Immediate Light Within, (b) The Universality of the Light Within. viii. Effect of Faith in these Doctrines on the first Quakers, ix. Results of Faith in the Immediate Light Within. x. Results of Faith in the Universality of the Light. xi. Witness borne by these Doctrines for the Race — Against the World. xii. Witness borne by them Against the Sects. xiii. Witness borne by them Against the Church. i. The distinctive idea or principle of Quakerism — the heart from which its first wonderful vitality proceeded — is to be found in its actual belief of the truth of Saint John's declaration: that the True CHAr. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 19 Light — the Woed and Son of God — enlightens every man who comes into the world.* From the very first, the doctrine of the Light Within has been felt to be the centre of the Quaker system. Against that doctrine all the acute controversialists who have attacked Quakerism through the whole course of its history have mustered and opposed their arguments. They saw that if they could disprove the truth of that, they would strike Quakerism at the very root. ii. The founder of Quakerism and his companions asserted this indwelling presence of the Divine Woed in all their appeals, and pointed to it as the reason of them. They put forward their belief in it as the first and central truth of the Gospel, as a full and sufficient justification for their forsaking all existing Christian societies. All the men and women in England at that time were excited about religion : it was not only the life and business of the pious — it was the daily chatter, the ordinary amusement of the worldly. Their king and bishops, in endeavouring to carry out a religion they fancied, had lost life and office ; the Commons, to carry out a religion they fancied, had overturned an old Church and State, and were trying to make new ones. To a man who desired above everything else to be, * St. John i. 9. 20 THE PECULIUM. [book L as George Fox says his own father was called, " righteous Christer" * and the sole husiness of whose life was the single-hearted endeavour to discover God, all this excitement ahout reformation of Church and State, and purification of doctrine, must have seemed a mere outside matter. The very Saviour, the object of then* purified doctrine, the Head of their reforming Church, was apprehended by them outwardly alone.f " The faith of the sects," said he, "stands in a Man who died at Jerusalem sixteen hundred years ago."^ What could this help him ? He wanted a deliverer for that year, for that hour, a light for every moment. He found in himself, he says, two contradictory thirsts, "one after the creatures, to get help and strength there; and the other after the Lord the Creator and His Son Jesus Christ." § It was witlxin his own heart * From his baptismal name Christopher. — Journal, p. 1, fol. | See the healthy queries of Cromwell : " Do we own one another more for the Grace of God, and for the Spiritual Ee- generation, and for the image of Christ in each other, or for our agreement with each other in this or that form of opinion ? Do we search first for the Kingdom of Christ within us before we search one without us ? Do we not more contend for Saints having rule in the World than over their own hearts ? " A Declara- tion of His Highness the Lord Protector, inviting the people of England and Wales to a day of Solemn Fast. — Mercurius Politicus, March 16 to 23, 1654. X Journal, fol. ed. 1694. § Ibid. pp. 8-9. CHAT. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 21 that these two tendencies contradicted one another, and strove to cast out one another. Let the Church of England he governed hy bishops, or by presbyters, or be left ungoverned; let public prayers be extempore or from a book ; let water baptism be by dipping, or sprinkling ; let the Bible be a Calvinistic, or Arminian book, or something between the two — this war would still be going on in the hidden battle- field of his own heart ; and no decision of such mere external questions could give victory to one side or the other there. He separated himself "from all priests and pro- fessors, carnal talk and talkers," and attended only to " Christ, who had the key, and who," says he, " opened the door of Life and Light unto me." As the Light appeared all appeared that is out of the Light — darkness, death, temptations, the unrighteous, the ungodly — all was manifest and seen in the Light." In Christ's Light he saw the evil of his own mere creaturely thirst, and of all the deeds and thoughts which flowed from it : in Christ's Light he found the satisfaction of that higher thirst after real fellowship with God: in Christ's Light he found power to subdue and keep under all the selfish and wilful tendencies of his being. The Grace of God must be sought for and felt in a mail's own heart if 22 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. he would be delivered from Lis sin and his fear by that Grace. All the Sects he saw looking to old writers, to learned languages, to doctrines, to an improved Church system, to the Bible, to favourite preachers, for the Light. But it was not ha any of them. The true Light was within man himself. They need not believe it on his testimony. The Light Himself would witness that He was there, if they would cease from their own works, wait, and let Him shine forth and manifest their darkness, and work in them. The first preachers of Quakerism, also, who travelled and laboured with George Fox at its commencement — Howgill,Nayler, Burroughs, Dews- bury, Audland, and others — who were, like him, illiterate men, have most of them left personal descriptions of their conversion. They might one and all be described in nearly the same words ; * for they one and all found rest for their heai'ts and * See — (I.) W. Sewell, History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People called Quakers : Conversion of Howgill, p. 54; of Burroughs, p. 55, &c. &c, London, fol., 1722. (II.) John Whitehead, Enmitie between the Two Seeds: written in gaol, London, 4to., 1655. (III.) John Perrot, Preface to his Mystery of Baptism : written in Rome, Prison of Madmen, London, 4to., 1664. (IV.) "William Dewsbury, A Discovery of the Great Enmity of the Serpent against the Seed of the Woman, contains his autobiography, under the title " The Eirst Birth," London, 4to., 1655, &c. CHAP. III.] TIIE IDEA OF QUAKEEISM. 23 minds in the firm faith that a Saviour xoithin them was their need, and that they had one. With this one central doctrine of the Light Within they went up and down England, doing battle with all the Sects which had arisen over the prostrate Church. iii. They spake of this Light Within as the only true Principle of Conviction ; in Solomon's words, as " the candle of the Lord searching all the inward parts,"* sliming into the most secret corners of the heart, and revealing every sin, however petty, wher- ever hidden. They spake of this Light Within as the only true Principle of Salvation. By single-hearted trust in this every soul might be delivered from its old bondage to the Devil, to itself, and to the world. They spoke of this Light Within as the only true Principle of Regeneration, as that very Seed of the New Birth whose growth enabled a man gradually to cast off the sins, errors, and diseases of the old nature, and to put on the truth and holy healthful- ness of that New and yet Original, because Eternal Nature, recovered for all men by the Lord Jesus Christ. They spoke of the Light Within as the only true Principle of Association, or ground of a Church. By * Proverbs xx. 27. 24 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK L submitting to this they would find Christ's Divine Light and Life in themselves yearning after, and seeking to join itself to that which is of Him in every other ; and forming and extending, out of the very necessity of its nature, the Society or Kingdom of God. , They spoke of this Light Within as the only true Principle of Vocation, or direction. By taking heed to this every Christian may see at once what he is to avoid, or what to do ; and may hear whenever he faithfully listens (as they were continually quot- ing), a voice saying, " This is the way, walk ye in it."* They spoke of this Light Within as the only true Principle of Illumination. By this their minds were enlightened to perceive truth from error, right from wrong ; to discern men's spirits and conditions ; to see the deceits in opposers, and the wants in those who needed teaching. They spoke of the Light Within as the only true Principle of Inspiration. By this they had breathed into them Truth to declare, and the courage, energy, and wisdom to declare it faithfully. iv. This unusual manner of speaking of the Light Within as the one efficient cause of the ivhole rege- * Isaiah xxx. 21. CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 25 nerate life of the soul, may, perchance, lead some reader to misapprehend the intention of the primi- tive Quakers when they did so. Our notion of Light as a mere enlightener, as the opposite of darkness, is sure to mislead us if we transfer it to the Spiritual Light here spoken of, if we use it as our means of understanding that Light. When the first Quakers spoke of the Light as sufficient to salvation, they did not baldly mean that it had the property of enlightening or manifesting, that it gave a true understanding of the position of matters ; they always apprehended it as it was spoken of by Saint John, as a Living Light. " In Him teas Life; and the Life was the Light of men."* "This Light," say George Keith and Benjamin Furly, " hath Life in it, and an universal virtue and power to reach unto the whole man, not only to cure the blindness of his understanding, but the perverseness of his will and the depravedness of his affections." Again : " We do not understand the Light, or Grace, or Gift of God and Jesus Christ, as separate from God and Cheist, for that is as impossible as to separate beams from the sun, for God and Christ are one with the Licht that comes from Them for ever."f * St. John i. 4. t Universal Free Grace of the Gospel Asserted; or, the Light 26 THE PECULIUM. [book L v. The " Principle," therefore, of the primitive Quaker Theology was a Person. That Principle was God Himself ; or, was that Holy SriRiT by Whom the Divine Unity makes known His presence in us, and through Whom the Father and the Son come to us and take up Their abode with us. William Penn adopted the expression of Plotinus, " the Di- vine Principle in man," as an ancient testimony to Quaker doctrine. Some modern controversialists have made merry with this expression, and ask if a Principle can make "groaning which cannot be uttered ? " if a Principle can " intercede for us ? " if we can be " baptized into the name of a Prin- ciple ? " Yes, we can. Where the Principle is a gracious, enlightening Being, a Divine Person, as He is to Whose presence William Penn and George Fox witnessed, we surely can. I will append some instances of this use from Quaker writings. " While I lay thus in prison " (at Worcester), says George Fox, "it came upon of the Glorious Gospel. 4to, pp. 136. London, 1671. See the Preface, p. vi. " Not, as is asserted, the Arminian, or Papist notion of universal grace. They both deny that the Universal Light which is given to all is the Light Evangelical, or light for the faith of the Gospel to rest in. Therefore, they do not hold it forth as the immediate object of the Christian faith. Secondly, they deny the way and manner of its operation to be by Imme- diate Revelation. Thirdly, they say this Light comes from Christ; but Christ himself is not in man in the true seed of Regeneration." CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 27 me to state our Principle to the King, not with particular relation to my own sufferings, but for his better information concerning our Principle and us as a people. It was thus, and thus directed : ' To the King. The Principle of the Quakers is the Spieit of Christ, Who died for us, and is risen for our justification; by which we know that we are His, and He dwelleth in us by His Spirit, and by the Spieit of Cheist we are led out of unrighteousness.' " * "The Light of Cheist," says James Nayler, " is the first Principle that shows a man his condition, and leads to Cheist the Sayioue, and without it the Gospel is hid from every creature living." ft vi. But when the truth was firmly believed by George Fox, by his converts, or by any others whom the Divine Spieit was leading along the same paths, that Cheist is giving a direct and per- sonal Light, that men can hear Him speaking to their hearts and consciences, there is a danger lest * Journal, 1674, p. 422. •)• Second Answer to Thomas Moore. Proposition I. 4to., 1665. % Their Testimony was to the Principle of God in Man, the precious pearl and leaven of the Kingdom, as the only blessed means appointed of God to quicken, convince and sanctify Man. So they opened to them what It was in Itself, and what It was given to them for." — William Penn's Preface to George Fox's Journal. 1694. 28 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. they should fancy themselves favourites of His ; should introduce this qualification of His Grace, that He speaks only in the hearts and consciences of a few chosen ones ; and should proceed to divide the Humankind into those to whom the Divine Word is speaking, and those to whom He is alto- gether silent. But George Fox was listening to Him with a pure and single heart. Every page of his early history, the revelations of his strenu- ous inward right, the oppositions of the Sects, the successes of his ministry, all show us that he was being led to the conviction that he most truly fol- lowed the Divine Light when he attested it to be the common fountain of Grace in every man, the witness of God in every man, — when he felt that it was not God's mark of favouritism and separa- tion upon him, but His universal gift to Mankind. " The Lord opened to me by His invisible power," says he, " how every man was enlightened by the Divine Light of Christ." " Wicked men," he says, "were enlightened by this Light — how else could they hate it ? " The Light is neither conditioned by time, place, religion, occupation, moral character, age, nor sex; it has no opposition except sin and self-willed darkness. The Old Testament shows that the history of mankind before Christ came in the CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 29 Flesh is a history of the strife of the Light with men ; with those who obeyed the Light, like Moses and David ; and those who resisted the Light, like Pharaoh. George Fox wrote two Epistles to the Jews of his own day, appealing to the Light of the Messiah within them. He wrote also to the Pope, to the Emperor, the Kings of France and Spain, to Oliver Cromwell, to Charles the Second, to all Bishops and Priests in Christendom, to mer- chants, to judges, to masters of ships and seamen, to all the several Sects ; in every letter he speaks to the Divine Witness in them ; he feels that there is a Pure Light, a Holy Will, within one and all, shining upon and striving with their hearts and consciences, and waiting to save them, if they will obey and follow Him. vii. Whatever other doctrines the Quakers may have accepted, whether from George Fox, from the loose, airy, notional teachers of their time, or from their own experiences, or whatever doctrines they may have deduced from these primary ones — this belief, first, in the Light of Christ within, and, secondly, in the Universality of His Light, sepa- rated and distinguished them by impassable marks from all other Sects. It would be better, perhaps, to see this in their own words than in mine. 30 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. " There be two main or principal things held forth by us, which are as it were the two hinges or fun- damental principles upon which all other things re- lating to doctrine or practice affirmed by us do hang and depend. The first is, that there is no saving knowledge of God or the things of His Kingdom attainable but by the Immediate Revelation of Jesus Christ, Who is the Image, Word, and Light of the Invisible God, in which alone He can be manifest unto the salvation of men. The second is, that this Image, Word, or Light, which is Jesus Christ the Son of the Father's love, doth shine forth in some measure universally, and enlightens every man that comes into the world, and thereby giveth him a day of visitation whereby it is possible for him to be saved." * viii. These were the two principal messages which the primitive Quakers felt themselves called out to announce to all mankind. They went forth with a full confidence that they needed no other weapons for the conquest of their own souls or of the world to the Kingdom of Christ. Every hour bore a witness in their own souls to the truth of these doctrines. Each blind, cold, idle, or wicked thought or volition * Benjamin Furly and George Keith. Universal Free Grace of the Gospel, 8,'c. Ut supra. CHAT. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 31 in which they had ever indulged, they could trace to a disbelief that the Light was striving with them, or to a disbelief that He was striving with others also. All the Bible, too, seemed to second their deductions ; and the lives of the saints showed that the belief in an ever-present, assisting, restraining Stieit was at the root of all their holy acts. Cheist was speaking to them at the very spring and centre of their being. The way in which St. Paul describes the beginning of his new life is, " It pleased God to reveal His Son in me." But a revelation is not a putting-in, an in- troduction of something new. It is a talcing away of all veils and hiding media from that which is already there. Cheist was in Saul, Saul was kicking against the Ktvrpa of the Light, before the Fathee revealed Him there.* ix. Their faith in the first truth, the Light Within, when they compared it with the dogmas and exer- cises through which they had endeavoured to get nearer to God, filled them with an awful and joyous sense of the Divine Presence. They had neither to rush to steeple-houses, to the popular preachers, to the Bible, nor to exercises, for their God. All the time * Acts ix. 5. KtvTpa, literally goads, or anything with a sharp end. The tragic poets used the expression for resistance against the Divine will. iEschylus, Prometheus, 323. 32 THE PECULIUM. [book L they were striving and straining to reach Him, He was near to them : He, the Divine Word, was dis- cerning all the thoughts and intents of their hearts ; all their being lay open and manifest in His sight. So soon as they believed in His Light, He not only showed them present duty, and filled them with pre- sent grace, but He threw rays backward on all the rugged and bloody passes of discipline by which He had been leading them : they saw He had been with them even in these hours in which they had felt most alone. Before George Fox " came to the Light," his biography contains passages which might be put into the " experiences " of a hyper-Calvinist, and would not seem out of place. There are all those alternations of bright and dark — of Christ's absence and Christ's presence — that April-day theory of Christian life, which seems to make the Presence of God dependent upon our consciousness of it ; and in which, indeed, is shadowed forth the true and awful thought that the blessing of His Presence does depend upon our consciousness of it. But after George Fox is " enlightened," these doubts seem never to find one moment's place in his heart. He believes that Christ is ahvays with him. When the Quakers felt it true that Christ their Teacher was with them, and not only teaching them, but also helping them td CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 33 carry out their lesson, it must have flashed upon them with a new strength that He had done every- thing, had found everything; and they felt they could cry, " Not unto us, 0 Lokd," with a fervour that no others could. x. Their faith in the second truth — the universality of the Light Within — filled them with hope for the world. Those sects and churches might despair which believed God had rejected, by a fixed decree, great hosts of men and women. But they, who believed that His own Son was then and ever knocking at the door of every heart and conscience in the universe, could not give up the worst sinner, the darkest heathen. There was hope for such as long as there was light, mercy, and power in Christ. It was the intensity of this faith to which they chiefly owed their wonderful success. xi. Such effects had the belief of these two doc- trines upon the first Quakers themselves. What witness did they bear to the world, the Sects, and the Church ? They bore to the world the clearest witness of God's redeeming grace and forgiveness, which was heard in England during the whole of the seven- teenth century : they declared that no man, woman, or child under heaven was left without Christ's 3 34 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK L sufficient Light and Grace. They bore a witness against all the efforts of worn and restless spirits to find rest in outward alterations of the State and Church, in reformations, godly disciplines, parlia- ments : the Saviour of men comes to them where their disease is — within. They bore also a more self- evident witness of condemnation against the world than any of the Sects were doing, since they attested the Light and Grace of the Saviouk in every one, and that no one was left unspoken to by Him. He would be able to say to each in the judgment, " I shone a Light in your streets, yea, a domestic Light in your very houses, and ye shut your eyes to Me, ye would none of my reproof." xii. They bore a witness against all those doctrines of the Sects, which hemmed in and conditioned the Grace of God, or which substituted the understand- ings and wills of men for It. Whilst these doctrines seemed to be the most self-turned and introspective of any ever held by Christian men, they bore a true witness against that unhealthy kind of self-turning and introspection from which we saw George Fox escaped the moment he believed in the abiding in- dwelling Light of Christ. They witnessed to the unchangeable and faithful nature of God, that the Lobd was not fickle and repenting. They hore also CHAP. Br.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 35 a clear witness against the loose antinomian dogma of outward imputation (into which the popular theology was in constant danger of falling), by- calling men away from it into a real righteous- ness, and to the desire of a new life, which Christ Himself, the Source of Life, would beget within their very wills (if they would submit to Him), by giving them of His own righteous Spirit and Nature. They re-proclaimed, so to speak, the very graciousness of the Father's Grace, as much to the Sects as to the World; for the Puritans so hid the Gospel with qualifications, that their preaching of it appeared sometimes a torment, and sometimes a riddle ; * and the Incarnation and Sacrifice of our Blessed Lord a problem, or an act of wrath. They bore also a witness against the Pelagian and Socinian dogmas, which, by setting up a light of nature and free-will, seemed to make every man his own saviour; for they answered to the witness of all renewed con- * Isaac Penington: Letters. — "Peter Chalfont, 19th 6 m. 1665. I received from thee a paper of Richard Baxter's, sent, I believe, in love. And in love am I pressed to return unto thee my sense thereof. It seems to me very useful and weighty, so far as it goes. But, indeed, there is a great defect in it, in not directing sinners to that Principle of Life and Power, wherein and whereby they may do that which he exhorteth them to do. For how can they come to a true sensibility or repentance, or join in covenant with God through Christ, until they know and receive some- what from God whereby it may be done?" 3—2 36 THE PECULIUM. [book L sciences, that every good act and thought in them proceeded from the inspiration of the Spirit of Christ. * xiii. Lastly, the Quaker assertion of these two doc- trines bore a witness against the forgetfulness and formalism of the Church. These doctrines are often expressed, always implied, in all the offices of her Liturgy. Indeed, the very name Catholic and Apos- tolic ; the pretence of being National ; the Sacrament of Baptism given to the children of all parents, bad or good ; the Confirmation Office, and much more, would be like mockeries, if the two leading doctrines of the early Quakers were untrue. * Eobert Barclay: Apology, Prop. iv. — "Man, as he is in this state, can know nothing aright; yea, his thoughts and concep- tions concerning God and things spiritual, until he be disjoined from this evil seed, and united to the Divine Light, are unprofit- able both to himself and others. Hence are rejected the Socinian and Pelagian errors, in exalting a natural light." Baskerville, 4to, p. 73. See, too, Isaac Penington: The Flesh and Blood of Christ both in the Mystery and the Outward, pp. 41, 42. London, 12mo, 1675. 37 CHAPTER IV. THE PRINCIPLE OF THE QUAKER CHUECII. i. How far Puritanism believed in the Light of Christ Within — Made it dependent upon Consciousness — Restricted it to the Elect. ii. Unrestricted by Quakerism — Objection of Puritans that it de- stroys Election and the Church, by the plea of Univer- sality. iii. Quakers affirm that it affords the only means for knowing the Church — Confirms Election. iv. Quaker Idea of the Church — The Society obeying the Divine Light within them. v. The Church a Baptized Body — A Communicating Body. vi. The Church a Spiritual Society — An Inspired Society — A Universal Society — A Society manifesting God's Aspect to the World. vii. Essential Catholicity of this Idea and these Truths — Their ready adoption by the Christian Conscience — Quakers re- proclaim them. viii. Witness borne by the Quaker re-proclamation against the Churchmen, Separatists, and Politicians of the Time — The Catholic Church not a merely National Body. Ls. Not a Political Body — Not a Hierarchical Body. i. Most of the religious sects coexisting with Quakerism at its first appearance, would have readily acknowledged its doctrine of the Inward Light of Christ, had it been introduced to them 38 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. under certain modifications. They would have liked it translated into the kind of theological lan- guage to which their ears were accustomed. They would have wished it restricted to those under the influence (as they would have said) of a saving faith. Owen, Howe, Goodwin, Bunyan, and the whole school of the Puritans, helieved that Christ was within them, resisting their most inward sins. Indeed, the almost invariable subject of the thou- sands of sermons which they have left us, is the working of Christ within the soul of the believer ; of the dark moments when He is hidden, the light moments when He is seen; and they are full of exhortations to believe that He, the faithful Lord, is really there, even though this or that black dis- pensation seems to hide Him. That " the preachers of the world take a text of the saints' conditions, and study what they can raise out of it," is a per- petually recurring topic of anger in the early Quaker tracts. Two parallel tables might be made out, in which the same facts, put into Quaker language in one table, into Puritan language in the other, would bear witness that the same Lord was the real Teacher of both, and that both were struggling with a common evil nature. The Quaker Theology, however (considering the two in their bearings upon CHAP. IV.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 39 men consciously Christian), had one great feature distinguishing it from the Puritan. We should never be led to suspect from any Quaker's diary that he fancied the presence of the Divine Word in his soul depended upon his thinking He was there. ii. We find this distinction confirmed when we come to the Quaker doctrine conceiving men not consciously Christian. For they tell every man that he has Christ the Light with liim, and that the Seed of Eternal Life is really lying at the very root of his being, under the Seed of Death. They cried out that the Just and Holy God had no favourites ; that He was not giving His Son to one, keeping Him from another : Christ was not only in the holy and Christlike, He was enlightening those who hated Him and were unlike Him. The popular controversialists asserted it against them. They said that such a doctrine made nothing of the Divine Sovereignty. They said that the whole Bible, from the acceptance of Abel to the casting out of Judas, was a history of Election. Is there no called fellow- ship, no Elect, no Peculium, no Body of Christ ? Does not this doctrine of the Light of Christ Within make the division of men into a World and Church impossible ? iii. The Quakers had an answer ready. No, they 40 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. would say ; the doctrine of the Light Within gives ns the surest method for separating the Church from the World. It is a great matter to have Christ's Light within us, to he possessors of His striving grace. But it is not the whole matter. He is in us to renew us ; He is in us as the Seed of a New Birth to grow up into the Tree of a New Life. He is in us to remould and restore our hearts and lives to that original likeness to Him from which they have fallen. Some hearts obey His efforts; in the Apostle's words they become " fellow-workers" with that God Who is working in them to will and to do.* He is in these to salvation; He treads under one by one all their sins. But others shut the eye of their souls to the Divine Light ; they resist His loving strife. The Light is in these to condemna- tion : they " love darkness rather than Light, because their deeds are evil."f The primitive Quakers would also say : ' Nor does our Principle destroy the doctrine of Election; it confirms it ; it settles it upon an immovable basis.' George Fox was constantly preaching that that which God elected was really good, that which He reprobated really wicked ; and that His righteous Reason and Will, and not a cold, reasonless de- * Philip, ii. 13. f St. John iii. 19. CHAP. IT.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 41 cree, was at the root of election and reproba- tion.* iv. The Quakers, then, would realize the Church as that body of men and women who consciously obeyed the Light. They would realize the World as that whole body of men and women who were consciously resisting the Light, who were choosing Darkness. Christ was in the obedient with a depth and fulness which the disobedient could never ap- proach unto, nor dream of ; which neither secular learning, nor Bible knowledge could give them. He had so come to them, they had so received Him, that He had taken up His abode in them, and dwelt in them, and they dwelt in Him ; His Spirit moved their spirits, and all their acts w r ere His. Hence they always spoke of the Church (that is, of Qua- kerism) as a divinely inspired body, and as an infal- lible body. v. The Apostles had spoken of the Church as a body bound together by the seal of Baptism. The Quakers said that the witness of the Apostles was true, for Christ had admitted them into His Church * " I opened to him (Justice Robinson) the parables, and how Election and Reprobation stood ; as that Reprobation stood in the first birth, and Election stood in the second birth." — Journal, p. 62, 1651. Also his reasoning with the Particular Baptists, pp. 173, 330-31, 1665; and many other places, ed. 1694. 42 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. by baptizing them with His Spirit and with fire. The Apostles had spoken of the Church as a Society of men and women communicating in the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus. The Quakers said that they eat and drank of the Spiritual Life of Jesus, in then - spirits. Our Lord had declared it to be the first duty of His Church to make disciples of all nations. The primitive Quakers went up and down England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Ger- many, the American Colonies, calling on men to obey Christ's Light within them, and to enter into the Body bound together by the Baptism of His Spirit. vi. These, then, were the leading doctrines involved in the primitive Quaker Idea of the Church : first, the Church is a Spiritual Body, the Kingdom of God is a Kingdom of Spirits : secondly, the Church is a Catholic Body ; it is a kingdom over spirit as such, implicitly a kingdom over all spirits ; a society built up not out of national existence, nor out of the Bible, nor out of doctrine, but out of the very nature of men themselves as spirits: thirdly, the Church is an Inspired Body, a kingdom whose laws and privileges touch the heart and will — a society of men and women moved to live a holy life, and to do mighty works, by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost : CHAP. IV.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 43 and lastly, the Church is the living manifestation of Him to the world. vii. Before I speak of the witness borne by these doctrines against the Church and the Sects during the Protectorate and the Restoration, I will make a few remarks which may throw light on their ready acceptance by the Christian conscience. In the first place, they are the very same doctrines which, ex- pressed in diverse forms, perhaps, have been held by almost all Christian men in all ages, and held with especial clearness and force by those otherwise un- Quakerly men, the Catholic Fathers. Again, it was the forgetfulness of these doctrines by the Church and the Sects, or the substitution of glosses and explanations for them, or the displacing of them from their central position, which gave cause for the re-proclamation of them by Quakerism, and afforded spiritual men and women show of excuse for entering the Quaker body. Furthermore, it was in the proclamation of these primary truths, and not in the peculiar, limitary, and Puritan deductions which the Quakers modelled out of these truths, or the narrow Society which they built upon them, that the real strength of Quakerism consisted. It was these which bore the witness to the universal consciences of men that Fox and Nayler, Burroughs 44 THE TECULIUM. [book L and Howgill, were preaching to them a Principle wluch they felt they needed and ought to possess, and which had often occurred to their own hearts during the wreck and tempests of the Church and State. It was by not acknowledging these truths as true, and by not asserting or proving that the Church, or Presbyterianism, or Independency, or the Fifth Monarchy, was the true and legitimate deduction from, or answer to, these truths, that Churchmen, Presbyterians, Independents, and the rest, fell before the attacks of the Quakers in every part of England. viii. These truths bore a witness against the notions of the Churchmen, the Puritans, and the Politicians of the time, that the Church was a mere national body, to be oppressed or helped by Kings or Parlia- ments, to be disfigured or reformed by abolition or restoration of the Catholic orders or the Presbyterian ministry. Presbyterians, Baptists, Independents, all the new Sects, and the Politicians, were striving to make a new Church of England. George Fox came into the midst of their confusions with this Catholic message : Christ has not formed His Kingdom on the nature of Englishmen, but of men : the re-forma- tion of His Kingdom, the second building up of His universal Temple, cannot begin in a Parliament House ; it must begin in the court of Conscience. CHAr. IT.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 45 ix. These truths bore a witness against the notion that the hierarchy, or ministers, are the organs of the Holy Ghost in the Church, against the real or implicit division of the Body of Christ into the Church and the Faithful.* The whole Body is the Church, the whole Body is the Faithful, the whole Body is the organ of the Holt Ghost ; every man in it is inspired by Him, by virtue of his personal human union to the Divine Word — by virtue of the Incarnation of the Word of God in all flesh — by virtue of his Baptism. The ministry is set apart to teach the ignorant and con- vert the heathen, to build up the Saints, to direct consciences, to declare God's absolution, to offer the Christian Sacrifice. But the whole Body has the Inspiring Spirit of Grace to labour for the purifica- tion and extension of the Church. Aptitude of learn- ing proceeds from the SriRiT as much as aptitude of * Saint Cyprian, whom certainly no one would accuse of under- valuing the Priestly Office or Episcopal Order, insists often on the Priestly character of every Christian. He declares he will do nothing without the Laity; that it has been his principle from the beginning: "A primordio Episcopatus mei statuerim nihil sine consilio vestro, et sine consensu plebis, mea privatim sententia gerere. Sed cum ad vos per Dei gratiam venero, tunc de iis qua2 vel gesta sunt vel gerenda, sicut honor mutuus poscit in commune tractabimus." — Editio D. A. B. Caillau, ep. v. p. 33. Parisiis, 1S"*2. Oxford Translation, ep. xiv. p. 37. 46 THE PECULIUM. [book L teaching. It is the same Grace in another con- dition.* To every baptized Corinthian, St. Paul says : " Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, who dwelleth hi you."! * Saint Cyprian exhorts all the laity to use that gift of teaching •which they have toward individuals. — Ed. Caillau, ep. xi. pp. 53-55. Ed. Oxf. ep. xvii. pp. 43, 44. f 1 Corinthians vi. 19. 47 CHAPTER V. THE REFLECTION OF THE QUAKER IDEA IN MODERN QUAKERISM. i. Loss of Principles by Decay and by Modification. ii. The Revival of a Sect in Religion not necessarily a Revival of the Principle of the Sect — Quakers and the Evangelical Revival. iii. Are the Catholic Principles of Quakers^ revived ? — Are the Quaker Enthusiasms? iv. Both doubted or contradicted by Modern Quakerism. v. Doubt and Contradiction agents of Decay. vi. Witness of Ancient and Modern Quakers. vii. Witness of Ancient Quakers against every Appearance of Evil — Against the Evil Principle. viii. Witness of Modern Quakers against certain real and supposed Evils — Its Traditionalism and Externality. ix. Accidental Likeness, Essential Dissimilarity of the Ancient and Modern Witness. x. Ancient Quakers witnessed to the Presence of the Divine Word in Men. xi. Modern Quakers witness to certain Duties — Philanthropists and "Lovers of Men." xii. The Ancient Quaker Witness does not necessarily involve Quakerism. xiii. Quakerism hinders and contradicts that Witness — Transition to the Second Book. i. The principles of which I have spoken as the Divine Root of Quakerism (an outward realization of which it was the aim of the Quaker theology to 48 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. express, and of the Quaker Church to spread) have been displaced, modified, explained away, contra- dicted by many generations of Quakers. Much was lost in the scholastic or formal epoch of the Society ; much more in the general religious de- clension of the eighteenth century. ii. The revival of a Sect, so far as it means the reproduction of that life which has decayed, and not the revival of religious feeling in the Sect, is a very rare event. When it does occur, it leaves the Sect quite another thing than it originally contemplated. In the eighteenth century, Quakerism passed, with the other Sects, and with the Church, through a period of religious darkness, and suffered from the epidemic of scepticism and empty laxity. With the other religious bodies, Quakerism underwent a revival. But this was a revival of its religion, not of its Quakerism. It reappeared as a mild Arminian- Evangelical system ; its members differing from the members of other such systems chiefly in having no rites, no paid ministers, in not taking oaths, in not entering the army, in not following the changes of fashion, and a few other external peculiarities. It is since the Evangelical Revival that the decay of Qua- kerism has more determinedly set in. A time of « general distrust of the grounds of all religion is not CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 49 necessarily a time of the decay of Sects. When men scarcely believe anything, they do not think it worth their while to disturb their daily wont of life; and they go easily and contentedly where their fathers took them. hi. When we hold up the Mirror of Modern Quakerism to the Idea of Ancient Quakerism (as I have spoken of that Idea in the prior chapters), two questions occur in relation to the two Catholic Principles. First, Do modern Quakers believe in the Saving Light of Christ in every man? Secondly, Do modern Quakers believe that the only Catholic Church must be a Universal Society of Spirits, bound together by the indwelling of the Common Spirit of Christ, into which men are ad- mitted by the Baptism of Christ, and which exerts itself in the reduction of all men to that Baptism ? Two questions also arise respecting those tico Quaker Enthusiasms which the primitive Friends confounded with, and substituted for, the Catholic Truths. First, Do modern Quakers believe that every man or woman who consciously submits to the Light of the Lord in their spirits, must, by the irresistible power of that Lord, be drawn into com- munion and fellowship with " the people of God, called Quakers"? Secondly, Do modern Quakers 4 50 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK L believe that the Society of Friends is the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and that every other religious body in the world is a sec- tion of the predicted Apostasy ? iv. If the word " modern " were left out of these four queries, and they had been put to any primi- tive Quaker, he Avould have answered them all in the affirmative. All modern Quakers, and all persons conversant with modern Quaker opinion, would answer them in the negative. Or, if they said ' Yes ' to them, they would affix some quali- fication winch would render them virtually nega- tive ; such as, e We believe in these as the Society believes ; ' that is, in some interpretation of the ancient words, more destructive to the two Catholic truths and the two Quaker opinions, than absolute denial of them would be. v. If I could answer e Yes ' to all or any of these questions, I should doubt both the clear state- ments of statisticians, and the self-deploring Jere- miads in which Quakers have lamented the decay of Quakerism. I should think a restoration possible, for a while longer. As I believe that all these questions must be answered in the negative, so I believe that the restoration of Quakerism is im- possible. For, since undoubting faith in these two CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 51 Catholic Principles and these two Quaker Per- suasions was the condition of Quaker vigour and success; so the disbelief, half-belief, or doubt of these, is the sure condition of Quaker decay; as I hope to make more manifest in the further develop- ment of this subject. vi. I have spoken, in the prior chapters, of the witness which was borne by primitive Quakerism against the existing Church, Sects and World. Of course, from the exclusive standpoint of the Quaker Church, these were only regarded as three different forms which the common spirit of the World chose to assume for worldly purposes. Though a Quaker of the seventeenth century and one of the nineteenth would not be able to agree in their extension and restriction of the term World, they would agree in this, that Quakers were called out from the World to bear a witness against it and for it. But question them as to what this witness is, and we shall have opposite answers. There is an abso- lute distinction of principle between the witness of ancient and modern Quakerism. vii. If we could call up a Quaker of the earlier period, and question him what the witness of his Society really was (and in the Quaker books we may call many up, and so question them), he would 4—2 52 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. answer (as they answer), ( We are witnesses to this : God has come to teach His People Himself; Christ has given to the Humankind His Light and Spirit, and is reproving them of righteousness, of judgment, and of sin.' This was the positive form of their wit- ness. Its negative and antagonist phase, therefore, was not against mere evils, but against the very source and spring of evils — against the dark prin- ciple of perpetual forgetfulness of the presence of God — against the unruly principle of perpetual re- sistance to His stirring Light and Word — against the very sinfulness of Sin. viii. Ask a modern Quaker what is the witness which has been committed to his Society, and he will answer (the hooks, letters, memoirs, advices of modern Friends supply the answer), 1 We are wit- nesses for the Spirituality of the Kingdom of Christ ; we are an example of the Christian Church in its simplicity ! ' Press him closely for a definition of Spirituality and of Simplicity, and we shall he an- swered by a set of negatives: 'We have no forms, we do not pay our ministers, we count no buildings sacred ;' and so on. If further pushed, and reminded that Spirituality cannot consist in these negatives, he will answer, perhaps, that they are the fences of Spirituality. CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 53 ix. The essential difference between early and later Quaker witness is less apparent at first glance, from its accidental likeness. The modern Quakers might say, ' Our fathers (whom you believe to have wit- nessed to something positive) had bald forms of wor- ship ; they scrupulously anathematized set prayers, the payment of ministers, the sanctifying of build- ings, and so on ; therefore, we are keeping in con- tinuity their witness.' But it is very plain from the rousing language of Fox, Burroughs, and the rest, that their hypothesis for rejecting forms stood upon quite an opposite ground to that of their disciples. ' God,' they would say, ' is the true Teacher of His People; He is the Spirit Who animates and creates true forms, where, when, or as, forms are wanted: how can we want set forms, when we have the Form-Creator and Form-Inspirer in the midst of us ; if they were not insulting, they would be unnecessary?' Again, they might say, ' Our Teacher gives His precious Wisdom without money and without price ; our mi- nisters are but the instruments and organs through which His Word passes ; how could we dare to pay them, or they to receive, money for what is not theirs, but the Holy Geost's?' Thus, the old Quakers began, not at the forms, but at the Uni- versal Presence of the Divine Teacher. 54 THE PECULIOI. [BOOK E Modem Quakers, on the contrary, begin at the forms. ' Forms,' they say, « are the mere organs of the Divine SriiUT. They are dead and empty in themselves. We may have what seem to he the noblest and most venerable forms, and yet not have His Divine Presence. We do not want dead and empty things ; we want tbe living, life -creating Spirit. All Sects but ourselves, more or less, sub- stitute forms for the SriRix; or, at best, seek the Spirit through forms — through the Bible, hymns, and prepared sermons. We put away all forms, therefore we cannot make this substitution.' Thus the modern witness is a witness against formality, or for spiri- tuality, not a witness to the Presence of a Divine Lord and Teacher. " Xo Forms " is but formal, after all ; and the poor Irishman, going in for a few minutes to kneel hi silence before the Altar whereupon he believes the Very Flesh is lying, Which was beaten in Pilate's Judgment-hall, and pierced upon Calvary, may be intensely more spiritual than all the Quakers in the barest (most spiritual) meeting-house that ever was built ; nay, he may be more firmly bound, in the unity of the Spirit, with George Fox and Isaac Penington, than the people who wear the same kind of clothes, and use " thee" and " thou " by imitation. x. Yet this is not the only testimony upon which CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OE QUAKERISM. 55 modern Quakers claim honour. They have borne the greatest witness for Philanthropy as a necessary element of the Christian character. Their witness against War, Slavery, Drunkenness, and other Evils, as enemies of mankind, has been (considering their fewness in number and absorbing commercial habits) the most extraordinary and persistent made by any body of Christians. They have had a bright name as philanthropists, ever since that fine name and new profession appeared in England. In the eyes of half our countrymen of the present day the first charac- teristic suggested by the name Quaker, is, Philan- thropist — a good-hearted, placid, rich man, whose profession is to do good ; just as two hundred years ago the invariable characteristic would have been Enthusiast — a wild, oddly clad man, whose profession was to travel about, opposing, contradicting, witness- ing, in the most extravagant methods. xi. As Philanthropoi, lovers of men, they are in a direct continuity and succession to George Fox and the first Quakers. The development or change is the same also. The unbending faith of Eox and his fel- lows, that the Spirit of Christ, their own Lord, the Beloved of their own souls, was in some sense in- habiting every man's conscience, gave them an awful sympathy with all states and conditions of men, a 56 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK L mighty hatred to all Man's enemies. It was because they saw that the Seed of Christ in men was crushed and insulted by War, Slavery, or Drunkenness, that these were witnessed against by them. For, what is War ? A man resisting the uniting Spirit of Christ in himself, the pleading image of Christ in another, and rushing to murder by the inspiration of the un- christly spirit of Wrath. What is Slavery ? Making a chattel, a thing, of one in whom the free Spirit and Light of Christ is speaking and shining. What is Drunkenness ? A man drowning the Seed of Christ in him under gross and beastly self-indulgence, re- sisting the will of the Spirit, submitting to the animal will. Thus the old Quaker philanthropy, as a wit- ness against these evils, beginning at the perpetual remembrance of the Presence of the Divine Light within, was a protest against the very root and prin- ciple of these evils, against the sin and atheism of them, against the forgetfulness of and unbelief in that Light. But the modern Quaker witness is made against the evils themselves. The Quakers have a kind of hereditary duty to perform, a set of works left them to continue, the calling of philanthropists to take up. It is good for mankind that it is so — hi the lack of better things. But how do they do it ? By Peace CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 57 Societies, Abolition Societies, Temperance Societies. George Fox and his fellows would have marched forth and preached to the faces and to the hearts of soldiers, of slaveowners, and drunkards. They would have said, ' Thus saith the Lord, This word do I send to your consciences by the mouth of My ser- vants, Thou shalt not hate thy brother; Thou shalt not make thy brother a tiling ; Thou shalt not bring thyself down to the place of a brute. Thou knowest the Light Who is in thee showeth thee this ; thou knowest there is That Which is calling upon thee to sacrifice thyself, to crucify that inward rebellious will of thine which would make thee a murderer, an oppressor, a drunkard.' xii. I believe this witness is true. But it is a message which no more involves Manchester Peace doctrine, or Teetotalism, than that prior witness of the Presence of the Spirit Who is above all forms and ceremonies, involves the rejection of the Sacraments and Orders of the Catholic Church. Yea, and as we saw before, the essence of this witness, the unselfish sacrifice of the will, may be accomplished by a soldier, on a battle-field, in a truer sense than by the eloquent speaker for the Peace Society, on a platform ; even by a paternal slaveholder (for such there are, difficult and rare to find, perhaps,) more truly than by a vio- 58 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. lent party abolitionist ; by a sober user of wine, tban by an intemperate and bigoted abstainer. Leaving out such possibilities, what a different witness it is to that of speakers and writers for No-war, Abolition, and Teetotalism; to those platform, bazaar, and fancy- fair methods, by which ladies and gentlemen are attempting to help forward the Kingdom of God. xiii. Not only does the primitive Quaker witness (the Truth which George Fox and his fellows per- ceived) not involve Quakerism (the Schism, the In- stitution, which they made to contain and manifest that witness) ; but, on the contrary, the Quaker-Ism hampers and contradicts that witness. I shall endea- vour to throw further light upon this, in the next book, where I propose to examine the factors and the elements of that Schism or Institution. 59 BOOK II. THE QUAKER SCHISM; OE, FORMAL QUAKERISM. CHAPTER L THE DIVINE ELEMENT, OR CONTRIBUTION, IN QUAKERISM. i. Introductory. ii. The three Factors: The Holt Spirit, the Human Founder, the Age — These Three give Elements to Quakerism. iii. The Divine Element subject of this Chapter — How the Head of a Universal Body gives His Spirit to a detached Schism ; to Quakerism — A Sect in success. iv. A Schism may decay, although it has a Divine Principle of Life — A Sect in decline. v. A Schism may decay because it has only one, two, or more, not all the Divine Elements of a Catholic Body. vi. History of Quakerism — Music divinely appointed — Effect of Quaker prohibition of Music. vii. A Schism may decay by its Principle of Life returning to its Catholic Centre. i. Does the original form or completed body of Quakerism throw any light on the causes of Quaker decay ? This is the question which I shall attempt to answer in the Second Book. 60 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. The -\vay to the answer lies, I think, through another question : — Who were the primary makers or causers of Quakerism? What were the leading and distinctive elements or contributions in the formal finished Sect, the completed Institution ? ii. I believe they were these three : — First, the Divine Sower gave them, as the Seed of His Wokd and SriuiT, that temporarily forgotten or depressed principle of which I have spoken in the First Book. Secondly, the early proclaimers of this principle, especially George Fox, raised up a Christian movement and institution upon it, of which their consciences, their opinions, their wisdom, their ignorance, their temperaments, their sufferings, were the builders. Thirdly, the spirit of the Age, acting upon George Fox and his fellows, and upon their work, stamped it with its own secular charac- teristics, marked it with the peculiarities of the seventeenth century. iii. The history of a Sect during its success, is the record of its proclamation of some Catholic principle which the Catholic Church is leaving unspoken, undeclared. For, as surely as, by the Incarnation, the Blessed Word and Son of the Father took upon Him the nature of every man, so surely is man's soul Catholic by its very nature, and thirsts CnAP. I.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. Gl after a Catholic food ; which food, by some method or another, God is sure to supply. This doctrine is no private judgment, but the clear and legitimate deduction from the conduct of our Lord Himself, when He was called upon, by the very Princes of the Church, to give verdict in a case of schism. " And John answered him, say- ing, Master, Ave saw one casting out devils in Thy Name, and he followeth not us : and we forbade him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall do a miracle in My Name, that can lightly speak evil of Me. For he that is not against us is on our part."* Our Lord does not here say, ' Since he does My will, since he witnesses to My rule over evil spirits, and to My work of freeing human spirits, since he really casts out devils, he is as much an apostle as any one of you ; perhaps more so, since, when I was on the Mount of Transfigu- ration, and you were prayed to cast out devils, you could not cast them out.' This is not what our Lord said; this is what the founders of Sects say. But He goes to the broad ground of self- sacrifice. They had just been quarrelling about dignity and degree ; He had set a child in the * St. Mark ix. 38-40. 62 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. midst of them. He goes on to show that to do things in His name, not in their oivn, is the secret of power, the spring and source of all Divine work. When they, the Church which He has called, and which He owns, think little of them- selves, they will find His strength in them. Mean- time God must, God will, have His work done. If the Universal Society which His Son began, which He guided, and to which He taught the inward sense of all things, does not advance His truth and work, some other Society will, and will do it with the sanction and Name of God. But this affords no excuse for Sect-making, for separating from the Church; since, even when our Lord was openly in the midst of them, a man was found who could cast out devils, while the Apostolic College could not Yet our Loed neither ordained him an Apostle, nor cast off the Twelve as apostates. So, too, this act of our Loud forbids the Church to anathematize or restrain any man who is speaking His truth or doing His will, though not in outward union -with herself. If the Church had always translated this principle into practice, how many Sects had been cut short in their beginning, how many had been unnecessary ! It is as unchurchly as it is weak and mischievous, to take the Papist ground when CHAP. I.J THE QUAKER SCHISM. 63 arguing with sectarians, to tell them that they are wholly wrong, and we wholly right. If the Church had not lost faith, had not sinned, there would be no Sects. One who was a very noble asserter of the authority of the Church, says : " He that can look upon the mischiefs either of civil war in the world, or schism in the Church, with the heart of a Christian, will not think strange that both should be schismatics to God, though only one part can be schismatics to the Church." * iv. The history of Sects in their decline, is the record of continual approximation from points of difference to points of likeness with the Catholic Church. At every step, some individualist (that is, some Foxite, Wesleyan, Ignatian, Lutheran, Cal- vinist) element is dropped ; some universal, human, spiritual element is taken up. All the while, these Sects feel themselves in the way of progress, and say they are so. And so they are, in so far as one Baptism as the process, one Body as the goal, are to be added to the common starting-point — one Lord. But in regard to themselves, as Sects, they are not in progress. Every step forward is a step * Herbert Thorndike, Just Weights and Measures, ch. ii. s. 6. [Works, p. 87, toI. v. Oxford ed. 1854.] A Treatise written during the most flourishing period of Quakerism's life. G4 THE PECULIUM. [COOK II. into self-destruction. No age hitherto has been so fall of the signs of this approximation as our own; the very outside of our places of worship preaches it to men in the street ; the growing discovery that the Holy Ghost did not forsake the world from the death of St. Augustine to the birth of Wycliffe, preaches it to men in the study. The disseverance of a Sect is a witness that God will judge the Church, that her Lord is a Righteous Ejus. The decline of Sects is a witness that He will vindicate her as the only Catholic witness to Himself ; that is, as the only power in the world which can speak to every time, in every place, to every man, to every business. v. There is also only one condition upon which even a true principle, a seed of God, can maintain perpetual life. It must live in union with all the other principles of the Nature and Kingdom of God ; it must not be severed from them ; it must not come into any contact of opposition with them. Now the history of Quakerism is a continual record of such oppositions, and of the fierce, self- destructive battles which have resulted from them. I might instance this by the slight, doubting, waver- ing manner in which the early Quakers viewed that principle which might be called the Gospel, I mean the awful fact of the Incarnation. But as I shall CHAF. I.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 65 hare to speak of tins afterwards, I will use a more ordinary illustration now. vi. Music is a science founded, just as much as theology is, on the principles of the Divine Nature and order. It is regulated by divinely arranged laws, of which Discord is the violation ; to the truth of which all musical and musically cultivated souls are witnesses. The need of music is sown deeply in the souls of men by God their Maker. When men are seeking, hearing, playing — above all, dis- covering or composing — true music, they are obey- ing a law which they were not meant to resist. The Quakers have put a prohibition of music upon their books. This prohibition stands upon no mean or meagre ground. Some of the early Quakers, the most Quakerly of them, pronounced all music un- lawful ; others pronounced good music inconvenient, for the sake of its associations with hunting, drink- ing, play-acting, love, war; and bad music is un- lawful for its own sake. They had a good reason to give for it ; they could trace it up, in their own way, to the very principle which they had received from Christ their Light. Here, then, are two> principles, both from the Divine Centre, in contest and opposition. If the Society of Friends were the Catholic Kingdom of God, both could find their 5 66 THE TECULIUM. [book n. truest centre and harmony tlierein ; Quaker music would be the grandest that was ever composed. But since both cannot exist together under Quaker conditions, Quakerism cannot be the Universal King- dom for men, for it must exclude musical men : it cannot be a kingdom for all places and times, for it cannot bless and sanctify the concert-room or the singing parti/. The same contest may be seen in the Drama and in the Arts. The prohibitions of the Quaker discipline (as I shall try to show when I come to that head), are the sentences of death which Quakerism records against itself — are witnesses that the Divine Principle is given it ivith restrictions, as to places, as to times, as to men, as to pursuits. vii. Lastly. A Sect may decay because its prin- ciple again finds a home in its true centre ; because its witness is taken from it by the Catholic Church returning to her duty. When the Truth and the Life are received again into the City which drove them forth, men will resort no more to those caves where they once hid. Before George Fox was born, the two principles which he made the basis of a phantasmal and expected Catholic Church, were the principles of the realhj existing Catholic Church. 67 CHAPTER II. THE FOXITE CONTRIBUTION. i. The Founders of Schisms — George Fox as Founder of Quakerism. ii. In what sense he was not the Founder — The other Founders. iii. The Movement began in Fox's Soul — Josiah Martin to Voltaire. iv. Quaker Objections — The Divine Word the Founder. v. Quakerism is Foxism — Fox built himself into it. vi. Fox's Proclamation of the Light Within drew out the unex- pressed Quakerism of the Age. vii. His private Experience the productive Cause of this Pro- clamation. viii. Tenets of Quakerism, the Deductions of George Fox. ix. Symbols of Quakerism — Geonje Fox's Methods of distinguish- ing the Church from the World. x. Proved inefficacy of his Methods — George Fox unfitted for the Reformer of a Universal Society. xi. Only an Omniscient Man fitted, the Incarnate Word — George Fox's Method the contrary to His. xii. Decay of Quakerism, as Foxism, inevitable from the most universal Evidence within our reach. i. I have said that the first element in the con- stitution of a Schism usually consists in some Divine principle perceived by its founders, some truth of God which men are needing and feeling after at that time, and which the merciful Father is sure 68 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. to reveal. The second element is that contributed by the Founder or Founders. And the Founder is not that man who first discerned that principle or truth upon which the formal building is raised, but he who effected the most toward raising and forming the building. It is so in the Physical Kingdom ; they who first discern the new truth are not accounted the discoverers, but they who substantiate, settle, and hand it over to mankind as an available possession for ever. All those great epochs marked by the characteristics of certain strong spirits, were pre- pared for the reception and arrival of those spirits, by men of clear discernment, perhaps of untiring labour, but held back, thwarted, misunderstood; testifying in an undertone, because " the time was not yet come." In the specific instance of Quakerism, this general law holds good. The master-spirit and chief builder of Quakerism was, undoubtedly, George Fox. But there had been Quakers before him. ii. The Society of Friends, from the very first, have shrunk back from calling George Fox their founder. Their usual designation of him is, "our honourable elder ; " and they speak of him only as one among many. In a sense, they are justified in doing so ; for James Nayler, William Dewsbury, Richard Farnsworth, Francis Howgill, Edward CHAP. II.] THE QUAKEK SCHISM. 69 Burroughs, and a few others, laboured quite as hard in the first onslaught of the Quaker theory upon the Church, World, and Sects ; and conduced nearly as much to the multitudinous conversions of the pra>formal period of Quakerism. iii. Yet, even confining ourselves to the mere origi- nation of the new movement, this truth faces us in a most plain, open, inescapeable manner, that it was a movement which began in the soul of George Fox. When we come to the second period, to the model- ling of the Quaker constitution and discipline, to the Society of Friends, to Quakerism as an Ism, the hand of George Fox is still more evident. His fellows in the period of success and conquest were all either dead; or in some hyper-Quaker Schism, as Perrot and Pennyman ; or, with himself, were milder, less expectant, more orderly men. Both liis own Journal and Sewell's History connect Quakerism with him, as intimately as Arianism can be connected with Arius, Lutheranism with Luther, Wesleyanism with Wesley, or any of the Gnostic Sects with the per- sonal names they are distinguished by. "He not only," says Josiah Martin to Voltaire, "converted thousands to his sentiments and opinions, but was also the author of the scheme or plan of discipline by which the Quakers regulate their Society, and 70 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. Avhicli he himself saw established in England, Scot- land, Ireland, Holland, and America : a plan, though simple in its nature, yet very extensive in its service, yea, so extensive as to be capable of taking in even the whole world ; and if strictly followed by all, according to the spirit and intent of its author, would, to use thy own words, 1 bring down upon earth the so-much boasted golden age.' "* iv. The early Quakers avoided thus nicknaming their Society and opinions, not only because George Fox himself woidd have hated it above everything, but also because it could never have represented to themselves or the world, in the least degree, what they believed that Society and those opinions really involved. Indeed, the name Foxism would have presented the very opposite. For it was the faith of Fox and his fellows that their Society was the one only Holy and Elect Church, called out of the long Apostasy of Ages ; holding no opinions, following no man ; but grounded upon, and bound together by, the Divine Principle of the Life and Light of Christ dwelling and working in every member. No one, * Letter from one of the People called Quakers to F. de Voltaire [London, 8vo., 1742, p. 41.] He, William Penn says, was "the Instrumental Author: He that in this age was sent to begin this Work and People." — Preface to George Fox's Journal. [Pol. Lond. 1694.] CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 71 I think, could read George Fox's Journal, or any of his tracts, without concluding, that if he suspected anything he held to be an opinion, he would have thrown it away at once, as far from him as pos- sible. v. Nevertheless, we, in the placid calm and quiet- ness of historical distance, losing sight of small dis- tinctions, perceive that Quakerism is, essentially, Foxism. It may be, I think it is, the growth of some living Truth, which groivs quite independently of him : it may be, I think it is, the germination from a Divine Seed. But still, if I may say so, Fox is the gardener. It is he who fixes it to this or that wall ; he who moves the trellis for it, first here, then there ; it is he who allows it to develop freely toward the south or east, but clips every branch or spray that aims westward ; it is he who makes such fanciful frames and espalier rails for the young and tender tendrils to enfold and cover. Albeit, during all his trainings, clippings, waterings of that which he believed to be God's Tree of Life, it must be remembered that he did all in the belief that he was receiving perceptible and immediate suggestions and commands from the Lord. Each twig which was clipped, or suffered to grow ; each nail which was driven in ; was clipped, suffered, driven in, as he 72 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK H. believed, in obedience to the direct command of the Light of Cheist. I shall now give some examples to show that Quakerism really is Foxism, — that Fox built up him- self, his temperament, his experiences, his fancies, his knowledge, his ignorance, into that outward body of doctrine, constitution, and discipline, by which the successive fact Quakerism continues in the world. vi. First, it is most probable that this body would never have existed as a separate formal institution, had it not been for George Fox. The great mass of Seekers in all parts of England, who were, so to speak, the raw material which was afterwards built up into Quakerism,* were aggregated and built up by * Wm. Sewell, History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People called Quakers, [fol. Lond. 1722, p. 6.] And even the worse sect of the Ranters were purified, in many places, into Quakers. See also William Penn's Preface to Fox's Journal. Further, John Crook's Epistle to all that Profess the Light of Jesus Ciikist within to be their Guide. " For you know many of us, before we received the truth as it is in Jesus, felt some stirrings of life, and therefore separated in our judgments and opinions from the generality of our neighbours and country- men where we dwelt ; because of an inward cry from a deep want in our souls, and a hungering after the constant enjoyment of that which we with many others possessed, but could not find in any- thing under the sun." [4to., London, 1678.] John Crook was a Jus- tice of the Peace, in Bedfordshire. His first tract, written 1659, was against Tithes. In this Epistle, 1678, he takes already, though Qua- kerism was not yet thirty years old, a traditional ground, and talks of decline and loss. Even in the beginning of 1647 George Fox says, " I met with some Friendly people." [Journal, p. 6, fol. ed. 1694.] CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 73 George Fox. It was through his mission, that their own dim apprehensions and semi-discoveries were clenched and perfected, gained a shape and name. Through his mission — I will not say they learnt that they were inwardly related by their constitution as human beings to the Divine "Word — but they learnt how to give it a doctrinal utterance, — they learnt how to use that awful central truth as God's weapon for the reformation of themselves and of the Church, and the reduction of the World into the Kingdom of His Sox. By Fox's mission they were given a centre, were drawn together ; by it a great veil was taken away, and they perceived that they had all along- been seeking in a Common Spirit a common end ; that they were not mere individuals, but parts and members of a common body. Hence his mis- sion was the magnetic and formative principle of Quakerism. vii. And what was the producing cause of this mission ? George Fox's own personal experience.* He came to the Light of the Divine Word, in him- self ; he found his evil deeds shown him and re- proved. He obeyed the Light of the Divine Word * ''The Lord in that day opened these things unto me in secret; they have since been published by His Eternal SrmiT, as on the house-top." — Journal, 1647, [p. 11, fol. ed. 1694.] 74 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK EL in himself ; lie fomad his evil deeds, liis very will to evil, mortified and arrested. He connected this process with his nature, as a member of an Elect Redeemed Humankind, for which the Heavenly Father cared, for which Christ died : not as an individual picked by authoritative and reasonless favour from a Reprobated Humankind, for which God did not care, for which Christ had not died. In other words, he felt that the illumination, re- proof, and help of the Light belonged to him as a man* Therefore he felt free to go up and down the world, proclaiming God's Grace within man to every human creature. viii. And what are the catechetical doctrines and tenets of Quakerism ? Tlie inferences and deduc- tions of George Fox from the Principle. So soon as he realized the voice of Christ in the conscience, the indwelling of the SriRlT in the Saints, the unity of the Church through that indwelling, the spiri- tuality of the Redeemed Society, he began to connect these truths with all the distracting evils which he saw, heard, suffered from, in the Church and World. * "I cried unto the Lord saying, Why should I he thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils ? And the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all condi- tions ; how else should I speak to all conditions ? And in this I saw the infinite love of God." — Journal, 1647, p. 13. CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 75 Every peculiarity of the Quaker constitution, its tenets, its habits, the symbols by which it endeavoured to distinguish its members from the World, had been insisted upon by some person or another, in some Christian Schism or another, long before George Fox. The non-payment of the ministry for eccle- siastical offices had been witnessed to by Jesuits ; the wearing of a peculiar dress in order to distinguish the Holy Body from the World, had been witnessed to by all orders of monks and nuns ; the silent wait- ing, by many Mystics. Some of their tenets were the floating notions of the ultra Puritans ; as, for instance, the forbidding of the use of mourning habits and gravestones by the Holy Body. The confused delu- sion of a Society of sinless men, 0 'i Kadapol, had visited the Novatians, and a perpetual succession of schis- matics. But all these, and many more, passed through the alembic of Fox's own mind, before they were built up into their place in the Quaker consti- tution. To those which he derived from the religious World around him, to those which he drew from that " righteous Christer," his father, and from the shep- herd his lere-father, he gave a new intensity and use, by interpreting them in his central idea, the Divine Light. Those which had been witnessed to by elder Sects, he did not derive from Ecclesiastical History ; 76 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. for -when lie began his mission lie was unacquainted with it ; and when he got some smatterings of it in later life, he used it, as he used the beginning of Ecclesiastical History in the New Testament, not for the discovery of the truth, hut for the confirmation of what he believed to be the truth. If he had known anything of the history of Schisms, this know- ledge would have given another direction to the Quaker movement. For whatever he had, he built into this system. Having ignorance of Ecclesiastical History (which is the real record of God's judgment upon the Church and Sects), he built that ignorance into the Quaker constitution. ix. What are those outward symbols and badges by which for two hundred years Quakers have been distinguished from the general mass of men ? They are George Fox's forms ; they are his methods of marking the children of the Light from the children of the Apostasy. It was because George Fox saw that men and women under the Apostasy were say- ing " Good morning " and " Good evening " to persons to whom they really wished wretched days and wretched nights ; because George Fox heard men and women telling folk whom they hated the sight of, how glad they were to see them, that he de- clared the children of Light were " forbidden to CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 77 use the World's hypocritical salutations."* At this day a Quaker does not say " Good bye " to me (God abide with you), because two hundred years ago a holy man came across many people who said these true-hearted words without the true heart. And yet if I part with a Quaker he will say " Fare- well" to me, which means the same thing. But what constraining moral power is there in this Quaker form of wishing good which is lacking in other forms of wishing good? Is it less possible for a man to wish me ill when he says " Fare- well" than to wish me a bad night when he says " Good night ? " Two hundred years have proved that the substitution of "Thou" and "Thee" for "You" has been as vain and inutile. That " Thou" may be the very vehicle of the worldly flattery it was intended to be a charm against, was made evi- dent so early as SewelFs dedication of his History to George the First. f If he would not take off his hat to the King, the whole spirit of hat-worship is in his preface. If any Quaker of the first age * Concerning Good Morrow and Good Even ; the World's Hypo- critical Salutations. [4to., Loudon, 1657, p. 14.] f " Great and Mighty Prince!" — so it begins. Compare the beginnings of George Fox's Epistles to Charles II. of England, and to Johannes III. of Poland. " King Charles .' O King ! Friend, who art the chief ruler of these dominions," &c. 78 THE TECULIUM. [BOOK EL had had to address George the First he would most probably have ordered him to repent of his whoredoms and adulteries, to put aside his harlots, and reconcile himself to his own son. x. Can such distinctions be the marks by which we are to tell the Church from the World ? No : the preservation of such distinctions is a sign that George Fox built up himself, his notions, his pro- visions, into the Quaker constitution. Such dis- tinctions are signs that he was not enabled to watch the universal working of the Word of God in the History of the World, with the same in- tensity, faithfulness, clearness, and good use, with which he watched His particular ivorldng in his own soul. They are signs that he was setting about a work which no mere man can do — that of becoming a root and branch reformer of the Church. For the belief that reform is needed, in- volves the confession that the worldly principle has entered into the Church ; and if so, reformation must be a casting out of the worldly principle, a redivision of the Church and the World, a re- making of the Church. This is what George Fox believed Quakerism was doing. The completed Quaker Body was to be the New Jerusalem, the real and ultimate Peculium. But no man can do CHAr. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 79 this work of thorough purgation and edification unless he can see into every conscience, into all places, at all times. In other words, only One Man can do it — the Lord from Heaven, Who wrought the reformation in George Fox's heart, Who cast the world out of it, and built it up in His own image. si. Did George Fox cany on his own work as a reformer, on His Method ? I think not. For that blessed and Divine Reformer Who sees into all consciences, and knows every condition, when He found thieves and mercenaries in His Father's House, did not go and build another house, with bolts which thieves might burst, with bars through which they would find easy way; but He turned the thieves out of that House. So I believe that it is by the Church which He Himself began, and which He will cleanse of its apostasies, and not by any of the substitutes for Her — with all their apt, but violable, provisions against hypocrisy, super- stition, heresy, false doctrine — that He will leaven the World. For all such provisions, fit and wise as they seem for a certain time, for a special country, for a peculiar class of men, bear on them the stamp of the provider. They are Augustinian, Benedictine, Franciscan, Lutheran, Ignatian, Foxite, 80 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. Wesley an. They hear no mark of an Eternal and Catholic fitness. How, indeed, can an Eternal mark between the Church and the World be set by any except One to Whom the Past and the Future are equally and for ever Present ? How can a Uriiversal mark be set by any except One to Whom every conscience in the Universe is always lying open for judgment ? xii. The nearest approach we can make to an in- sight so Eternal, so Catholic, is by History. Yet, what a weak, insufficient, fallible insight that must be ! Each generation tells the preceding one that it misunderstood the scope and meaning of half its records. Nearly every fresh writer, of any power, overturns some historical conclusion which ages have accepted ; and those characters of men which we believed set for ever, are reversed in the most unexpected way. But how frightfully hopeless it must be to attempt to fix, de novo, the laws and manners of a Universal Society, without perfect knowledge of all the History which we can know ! This one thing History does teach us, — that the par- ticular cannot be a law to the Universal, the species to the Genus, the part to the Whole, the member to the Body, Fox to Mankind. And in so far as the Quaker constitution is Foxite, or Barclayite, CHAr. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 81 or characteristically stamped by any fallible man or men, it lias an inescapeable element of decay in its very being; it must die. It is only a question of time, and of corrective conditions, how long the principle of decay will be in working out its final decease. G 82 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. CHAPTER III. THE SECULAR CONTRIBUTION. i. Introductory — Partial or Secular Character of all Schisms — Self-destructive Exaggeration of the point they separate upon. ii. Schisms as against the Age, and as created by the Age — Quakerism, anti-Puritan and hyper-Puritan. iii. Quakerism the Sect of the Seventeenth Century. The " godly, thorough Reformation " — All Sects failed to realize it. iv. Quakerism became the Sect of the Time, by protesting against the Puritan Theology as unable to realize the " godly, thorough Reformation." v. Quakerism became the Sect of the Age by asserting its own Theology as the method. vi. And by adopting the Secular (that is, the Puritan) theory of Life, Worship, &c, as in itself, the Reformation. vii. Secularity of Schisms a Seed of sure Decay — Quakerism as a Product of the Seventeenth Seculum. viii. The Scriptural meaning of an Age — Opposition of the Age, with all its Products, to the Eternal Order, or Church. ix. Evil Elements of the Seventeenth Century built up into Quakerism. x. One Seculum cannot legislate for all — Eternity the Law for all Ages, and not one Age for all. i. In this chapter I intend to notice the element contributed to the original constitution of Quakerism by the Age or Seculum in which it arose. CHAI*. mi] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 83 It is the invariable nature of Schisms to bear upon them the characteristics of a Time. It is manifested both in what they exaggerate and hi what they lack. For, supposing an enduring or non-secular Body to be compounded, say, of twenty necessary conditions, every one of which requires to be duly manifested, and bringing forth life, a Schismatic body ensues, where one, or two, or many, of these conditions are left unmanifested, are fruitless; so that the really enduring body appears dead. This one, or two, or many, will be the central and governing conditions of the schismatic body, will hold an exaggerated importance in it; while the nineteen, or remaining conditions will hold unduly subordinate places in it ; their life will become cramped, their use die out. A Schism succeeds by opposing the recognized evils of the Seculum, by pom ting out the unrecognized, and by satisfying its felt and fancied needs. ii. So a Schism arising in any particular age, and having great success in that age, would be at once more in conflict with the Seculum, and yet more in harmony with it than any co -existing body. Thus, Quakerism seems more strenuously opposed than any other Schism of that most schismatic of all ages, to the very spirit of the seventeenth century., its own age ; and yet to be expressing that spirit as 6—2 84 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. no other among its Schisms could do. Every one will acknowledge \ that the prominent characteristic of England in the middle of the seventeenth century was Puritanism. Yet Quakerism was, in the first principles of its Theology and Anthropology, the most essentially unpuritan of all bodies. But in its cultus, form, and modes, it was more Puritan than Puritanism itself. iii. Quakerism was not only an expression of the temper of the Seventeenth Seculum, it was the Sect of the times. The real aim of that Seculum was, as its profound satirist has represented it in his Hudibras, "a godly, thorough Reformation." Even Archbishop Laud, whom all the Herods and Pilates of the time agreed in denouncing as the most for- midable enemy of the Age's movement, was actually martyred for attempting to carry out what he believed to be a " godly, thorough Reformation." But with such a Reformation the Seculum was not satisfied. It did not answer to that informal, confused, phan- tasmal Reformation in the hot brains of the reli- gionists of the day. Presbyterianism tried to satisfy it, but failed. The Independents and Anabaptists tried, but failed. The Seekers, Ranters, and other Sects, made little and local experiments, but failed. Each new Sect said to the newest except itself, CHAP. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 85 ' You are not going far enough.'' While that in its turn answered, 'You are going too far.''* But the moment Quakerism appeared as a de- finite institution and set of credenda (for it did come to the great mass as a system of credenda), and as the Church into which men must enter, it succeeded. Leslie says that George Fox had at one time one hundred thousand disciples, so rapidly his move- ment spread. The Seekers found that it was what they were seeking. The great Puritan Sects lost all their most consistently Puritan members ; for they perceived that the honest and logical working out of the Puritan theories was exhibited in Qua- kerism. They were already there in heart ; they merely went forward and took that advanced ground of which they had all along had glimpses and sur- mises. Quakerism spoke out what the Seculum * Thus Richard Baxter, from his Presbyterian point of view, says, " To the Separatists and Anabaptists in England : You do but prepare too many for a further progress; Seekers, Ranters, Familists, and too many professed Infidels, do spring up from among you, as if this were your journey's end and the perfection of your revolt. You may see that you cannot hold your followers when you have them. Your work is blasted ; you labour in vain. You do but prepare men for flat heresy and apostasy. I have heard yet from the several parts of the land, but of very few that have drunk in this venom of the Ranters or Quakers, but such as have first been of your opinions, and gone out at that door." — Second Preface to The Quaker's Catechism [4to, London, 16G5]. 86 THE PECULIUM. [book II. was half fancying — was indefinitely expecting. It gathered up, completed, and proclaimed forth, in a wonderful manner, all the serious thoughts, the fears, the suspicions, and the ill-digested theories, which had long heen visiting the men of that time. iv. First, Quakerism hecame the Sect of the Age by making a protest against the Puritan Theology and Churches as unable to carry on the " godh r , thorough Reformation," that illusion of the Seculum. They opposed Puritanism so far as it seemed to be hindering that Reformation. It seemed to them to be hindering it, chiefly, by its hard, dogmatic, ex- clusive view of God's temper toward men, and by its still clinging to a belief in the possibility of a National or Parliamentary Church. To such theo- ries, as I have said in an earlier place, Quakerism opposed the Doctrines of the Universal Inward Light and Grace, and the Doctrine of the Spiritual Church. So far, it set itself in contradiction to Puritanism. But in the matters of the ministry, worship, and discipline, it condemned Puritanism by surpassing it. ' You are right,' the Quaker would have said to the Puritan, e in all that you have urged against that daughter of Babylon, the late Church of the Prelates ; but you do not go far enough. You do not perceive the issue of the CHAT. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 87 principles you yourselves have started. It is be- cause you do not believe in the Light, because you resist His lessons, that you stop half-way in the work of the Loed. Your assertion of the need of a Divine call to the ministry, you invalidate by still receiving Oxford and Cambridge students. Your assertion of the unity and spirituality of the Church, you invalidate by talking of a Church of England — by meeting in stone steeple-houses and calling them churches ; and so through every point of witness given you to uphold. You will not re- turn to the Master His talent with interest.'* * George Fox says, in liis Epistle to Gathered Churches into Outward Forms, " Ye have run on without a King, without Chkist the Light of the World, which hath enlightened every one that is come into the world. But now is truth risen, now are your fruits withering." — Journal, p. 161 [fol. ed. 1694.] William Dewshury, in his Discover;/ of the Great Enmity of the Serpent ayainst the Seed of the Woman [4to., London, 1655], is very bitter on the glee and self-confidence of the Puritans on their " Reformation." " England, who, according to her own lusts, hath heaped teachers to herself, that hath spoken smooth things to her, calling her the beautiful Church and Spouse of Christ." Also, A Return to the Priests about Beverly for their Advisement, [4to., London, 1653.] "The English Church held up by you the English teachers who gave forth this book, who are made by the will of man ; those who are come to The Church of God, by you called Quakers, deny such." This book, or " advisement," by the Presbyterian and other teachers, is thus named: " A Faithful Discovery of a Treacherous Design of Mystical Antichrist, display- ing Christ's Banners, but attempting to lay waste Scriptures, Churches, Christ, Faith, Hope, fyc, and to establish Paganism in 88 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. v. Secondly, Quakerism became the Sect of the Age, by asserting its own Theology and Church as the only efficient Method of the "godly, thorough Reformation," that dream of the Age. The Quakers discerned the inmost spirit and purpose of that Seculum. It, the world then passing away and the glory of it, was a peculiarly "religious world." The Puritans were the men of the time. They had cast down the Church as unholy, they had driven her Priests to garrets and prisons, and they had set up, as they fancied, a real Kingdom of Christ upon her ruins. But the world felt that Puritanism had not brought in the righteousness, unity, and joy in the Holt Ghost which it was blindly groping after ; and religious men saw that the fine new Army and Parliament Churches were not manifesting forth the life of Jesus. A spirit of dissent against Presbyterian and Independent Puritanism arose from end to end of England. Sects sprung up like mushrooms in a night; all differing from each other in idea and method, but all agreeing in end, for one and all set before them as the real riXog of the Age, the enthusiastic delusion of a " godly, thorough Refor- England." [4to, London, 1653, pp. 60.] This tract is very moderate, and admits that many of the evils witnessed against really exist. The Quaker's Return is very violent. CHAr. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 89 mation. Some expected it through General Assem- blies, some through a New Discipline, some by imprisonments and persecutions, some by the sudden appearance of Christ to Judgment. Quakerism arose amid all these. It agreed with them in aiming at the same riXog ; but it differed with by making this glorious assertion : ' Christ has come, He is knocking now at every conscience in Christendom, asking to be let in. The Lord has come Himself to teach His people.' They differed in scorning and rejecting all the methods laboured for and dreamt of by the other Sects. The coming Discipline, the Parliamentary Statutes, Imprisonments, the Appear- ance of Christ in the Flesh, they thought all needless methods. He had come in the Spirit and Will, in the centre of man's being, in the only part of the creation where the working out of a really ' godly, thorough Reformation' was possible."* * See, inter alia, the experience of the different Quaker Apostles, as sketched in Se well's History ; John Whitehead's Autobiography, entitled, The Enmitie between the Two Seeds [London, 4to, 1655]; William Dewsbury's Autobiography, affixed, under the title "The First Birth," to his Discovery of the Enmity [4to, 1655]; John Perrot's, in the Epistle to the Reader, before his Mystery of Baptism and the Lord's Supper [London, 4to, 1662]; Francis Howgill, in the Glory of the True Church Discovered, as it was in its Purity in the Primitive Time [8vo, 1660, pp. 160]: chapter iv. pp. 20-31, he proves that Quakerism is the only way out of the Apostasy into the Reformation. 90 the peculium. [book ir. vi. Thirdly, Quakerism became the Sect of the Age by putting forward the loose, unchurchly, Secular theories concerning worship, the ministry, prohibi- tions, and outward distinctions between the Church and the world, as in themselves the " godly, thorough Reformation." They exaggerated Puritanism. For not only the world, but Puritans themselves, felt that Puritanism had not brought in that glorious Spiritual Kingdom, to the easy advent of wliich the orders and rites of the Catholic Church had seemed to them the only hindrance. They pushed their theology through various Church forms, one after the other: from Presbyterianism into Independency, and from In- dependency to Anabaptism. But they gained no greater purity? no wider success. An immense body la}* predisposed to accept any institution which should offer a surer path to the Puritan teXoc. Quakerism was peculiarly fitted to make such a promise. It met both those classes of Puritans who felt sure that there was a wrong element somewhere or other in their own Ism : it met that class who believed that the disorder lav hi its theolosrv, bv callino; them off from the exercises and sermons "made out of the saints' conditions and heathen authors," to the Divine Word in the heart : it met that class who believed that Puritanism had not reached its teAoc because it stood CHAP. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 91 still, by exaggerating, or, rather, by developing to the utmost, all those Secular theories of Puritanism which arose from its own confusion of itself with the Church, and of all unpuritan men and sects witli the World. The Quaker prohibitions of music, of mourning- habits and gravestones, and almost every other item of the Book of Discipline, arose from the Puritan spirit of the Seventeenth Seculum contributing to Quakerism ; they had all been contended for by some prior Schism of the Time.* vii. This Secularity of Schisms is a cause of their inevitable decay. The only constitution which cannot decay must be an Eternal one — that is, it must be as fitted for to-day as it was for yesterday ; for to-mor- row as either ; — for the nineteenth century as for the seventeenth ; for the twentieth as for either. Now the cause of a Sect breaking off from the Universal Body, must be either from self-will, or from some supposed or real inefficiency in the Universal Body * That Quakerism was not only a development, but the fulfilment, of Puritanism, is implied in such passages as the following from William Coddington's letter to Richard Bellingham, Governor of Massachusetts: — " Consider that forty-five years past thou didst own such a suffering people that now thou dost persecute. They were against bishops, and ceremonies, and conformable priests. They were the Seed of God, that did serve Him in spirit: then called Puritans, now called Quakers." — W. C.'s Demonstration of True Love unto the Rulers of the Colony of Massachusetts, pp. 19, 20 [4to, 1674]. 92 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. at the time of such breaking off. But let us accept the most charitable hypothesis ; let us say that it breaks off to seek a righteousness which it is not finding in the Universal Body. It seeks, itself, to become a universal body, and to build a final and enduring home for righteousness. All sects have this vision of hope ; they would be lunacies or follies if they had not. But a constitution built by men of a special Age or Seculum, must be built with the tools which that Seculum supplies. Laws given forth, theories evolved, bases laid, customs prescribed, in certain periods, must be spoken, evolved, laid down, in such words and modes as are current among the men of those periods. The founders cannot leap over two centuries, and take the instruments, the language, and the methods of an unbom time, to build their institution, lay down their laws, prescribe their customs. If the fathers of Quakerism had done so, the Quaker constitution and customs would have cer- tainly suited what is called the " spirit of the nine- teenth century," though it would not so certainly have suited the spirit of the twentieth century. But then it would not have suited the seventeenth century, the time for which it was really wanted. They might have cast it clown among their own contemporaries ; but none would have seen in it any interpretation of CIIAr. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 93 their Age's questions — none would have run into it as the long-expected resting-place for their worn and homeless spirits : none would have seen any fitness or desirableness in it. The founders would have had a glorious prophetic vision ; they would not have done anything for the help and benefit of men. viii. A further light is thrown on the decay of a specific religious society, marked with the charac- teristics of a specific age, when we think of the Scrip- tural purport of the term Age. The Bible speaks of the Age or Seculum — of the spirit of the Age, as evil, or, at least, as not good. It is the " World that passeth away." It is the "present evil World." It is the whole circle of business, amusement, knowledge, government, religion, considered as uninformed by the Divine Presence. It is the aggregate of human influences considered as only human. It is the World as left to itself. It is that self-willed spirit of false and hasty judgment which condemns and sneers at all the Past, because it was unlike itself; and which, notwithstanding, sets up itself as the law and rule for all times to come. It is the spirit which resists the Ecclesia, or Kingdom of God, or Eternal Constitu- tion, arising out of no Age or Seculum, — bound by no condition of past, present, or future, but ready for all Ages — the Secula Seculorum. Out of this distinction 94 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. rises the everlasting strife between the pure eccle- siastical and pure secular : corruptions in the Church, the necessity and rise of sects, spring from confound- ing them. ix. The Age, or Secidum, as distinct from the Eccle- sla with which it coexists, contains in itself elements either evil or not good. If a schism be organized into a formal constitution by a contribution from the Holy SriBiT, from the personal founder, and from the Age or Seculum, the secular element must be chosen out of these evil or not good characteristics. It is not likely that men believing themselves directed by the Holt Spieit, and seeking to do a Holy Will, would select the evil. They would choose the not good; that is, the public opinion, the illusions and errors, the excited mental epidemics and enthusiasms of the Age ; they would build up these into their system. And these are the very elements winch the build- ers of Quakerism chose out of the Seventeenth Secidum ; or, rather, which the spirit of the Seventeenth Seculum forced upon them. These elements are visible in Quakerism at this day ; like old rusted armour which living men can neither wear, nor know how to use ; which, if they could wear it, and did use it, would not be the least defence against existing enemies, but rather a help to the CHAP. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 95 wearer's own destruction. And the worst of it is, instead of being, like such old armour, a thing for antiquarians to admire and talk over, Quakers are expected, by Quakerism, to wear and use this strange gear of the days of their fathers. x. One century can no more legislate for Eter- nity — can no more set up its temporal secular idiosyncrasies for a law to all centuries — than one individual can do so for the race. A universal religion and church must be eternal as to times, as well as catholic as to places and persons. It must not only not be Roman, Greek, English, Ge- nevan ; it must not only not be Montanist, Phocian, Wesleyan, Foxite, Laudian ; it must neither be of the Patristic, Mediaeval, or Reforming Ages. It must be fitted to what is enduring in men, to that which is the same in all ages : that is, to the human spirit pressed down by sin, thirsting for deliverance from it. For Religion and the Church exist to take hold of the eternal part of man — of that wluch knows no change, — the redeemed Seed, the communication of the Immutable God in him. 06 THE PECULIUM. |_BOOE III. BOOK III. THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. CHAPTER I. i. Preservation of Quakerism by Discipline. ii. A Discipline not expected by the first Quakers. iii. Christ Jesus the Discipliner of Christians. iv. Testimony of Quaker Documents. v. Schisms at the Establishment of a Discipline. vi. The Establishment of a Quaker Discipline a Cession of Quaker assumptions. vii. A Glance at the Preservative Influence of the Discipline. viii. This Influence inherent, not merely associative. i. Is the discipline of Quakerism connected in any casual manner with Quaker decay ? Before saying yes or no to this question, I must assert my con- viction that the Discipline of Quakerism has been connected in a casual manner with the life of Quakerism. But I must say, at the same time, that this connection between Discipline and Life is traceable only in the way of preservation, and not CHAP. I.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 97 in the way of growth ; as a conservative element, and not as an aggressive and assimilative one. Yet the only true and enduring preservation is preserva- tion by means of growth, that is, hy a real informing principle of life. Growth is a function or faculty of real preservation. Preservation by Discipline alone is but a temporary arrest of decay. ii. I think there can be little doubt that the idea of a Discipline in their Society at all, the conviction of their need of a Discipline, took the first Quakers by surprise. For if, as I have already hinted in this Essay, the idea, the conviction at the bottom of the Quaker constitution was the essentially schisma- tical one, that it was to be the Peculium of God, the holy and utterly sinless Seed, the body of per- fected ones, the true Catholic Church, those 0 'i KaOapol which Novatians, Donatists, and every suc- cessive Sect had hoped themselves to be ; then it was evident that the very suggestion of a Discipline for the Quaker body, was a kind of unconscious con- fession that they too, like their predecessors in the pathway of Schism, were journeying to a delusion — that they could not be the Peculium, for unrigh- teousness and disorder had found a way into their society. iii. If George Fox and his fellows, in the first 7 1)3 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. flush of their success, when calling upon all men to " come out of the Apostasy," and from " man- made Sects " to the Church of the Living God, had been asked how they should arrange, supposing sin was to appear in the holy Church (i. e. in Quakerism), or supposing Cln'istians (i. e. Quakers) required to marry, to educate children, to bury friends — they would have put aside the questioner as one " out of the Light," and the question as a " speech of dark- ness." ' The Light Himself, Christ within us, is our Discipliner,' they would have said. ' We have no need of canons, rules, written laws. He will show His Church what to do, and what to avoid, every moment.' This, certainly, was their belief; it took, however, a distorted form, and later gave rise to the hyper-Quaker Schism which called forth Barclay's Anarchy of the Banters, and Penn's Liberty Spiritual. And what are all Canons, and rules of Discipline, but a cage against whose bars the spirit wounds her breast, and breaks her wings, except she has the sense of a Divine and loving Discipliner, Who is also a Giver of true liberty ? Thus that great Father of the Church, S. Clement of Alex- andria, gives to his whole book of advices and rules upon eating, drinking, marriages, children, laughter, evil- speaking, gems, ointments, perfumes, CHAP. I.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 99 and so on, tlie name of Tlie Discipliner (Ylai^a- -yoj-yoc). And that Discipliner is Jesus Cheist our LoeDj " Light of Light." * iv. Here I will quote what Quakerism itself de- clares of its Discipline, and declares, too, in its official character. " It cannot be said that any System of Discipline formed a part of the original compact of the Society. There was not, indeed, to human appearance, anything systematic in its formation ; it was an association of persons who were earnestly seeking, yea panting after, the saving knowledge of Divine Truth." f v. Thus, not only by deduction from Quaker principle, but also by the official confession of the Society, we see that the Quaker Discipline was an uncontemplated thing. Tlie violent objection with which the Discipline was assailed by some of the more primitive Quakers, and the fact that Barclay and Penn were the defenders of it, show this still * So, too, S.Augustine: — " Disciplina a discendo dicta est: Dis- ciplina? Domus est Ecclesia Christi. Quid ergo hie discitur, vel quare discitur? Qui sunt qui discunt, et a Quo discunt? Dis- citur bene vivere. Propter hoc discitur bene vivere, ut per- veniatur ad semper vivere. Discunt Christiani, docet Christus." — De Disciplina Christiana : Omn. Opera S. August. [Ed. Caillau, torn, xxvii. p. 109.] f Introduction to the Rules of Discipline, p. 16. [London, 4to., 1834-49.] 7—2 100 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. more plainly.* " It proved a great trial of spirits. The self-willed and lawless opposed it with vehe- mence, and it must be admitted that not a few of a very different class were drawn aside by specious arguments to oppose what was represented as an encroachment upon individual spiritual liberty-"t But the times of decay had already set in when William Penn became an authority among Quakers. J For he (like the Friends of our own age) looked upon Quakerism more as an example of what the Church should be, than as the actual and only Pecu- lium of God. The establishment of a Discipline was, in itself (apart from the wisdom or folly of its laws, time after time), an unconscious proj)hecy of decay. For the aggressive growth of Quakerism continued * "This spirit cries, "We must not judge conscience, we must not judge matters of faith, and we must not judge spirits, nor religions." George Fox, singularly enough, appeals to the Bible to refute Perrot, Pennyman, and the rest: — "All you that deny prescriptions without distinction, may as well deny all the Scriptures, which are given forth hy the power and Spirit of God. For do not they prescribe how men should walk both towards God and man, both in the Old Testament and in the New ? "—Journal, 1678. f Tract Association of the Society of Friends. Tract 124, p. 23. London, 1855. J Doubtless, the extraordinary show of Polish, French, Lu- theran, Patristic, and Apologetic learning exhibited by George Fox at this date (as in his letter to King John III. of Poland) was lent him by Penn, Keith, or Barclay, all of whom travelled with him on the Continent. Journal, 1678. CHAP. I.] TIIE DISCIPLINE OE QUAKERISM. 101 only so long as Quakerism proclaimed itself the restored Church of God ; but its Discipline regards it as a private religious family. vi. The establishment of a Discipline, also (by showing that sin appeared in the Quaker body), became a silent confession that the presence of sin in the existing Church and Sects did not (as pure Quakerism certainly had believed and preached), necessarily, unchurch these bodies. As long as it was assumed by the Quakers that they were the Peculium, the True Church, every one who heard of the assumption was concerned also to know its truth. It was a great matter, not merely whether men were Christians or not, but also whether they joined "the Seed of God, called Quakers," or not. The ignorant already in that Seed, would preach and labour the harder, cleave all the more closely to it, for the monstrous assumption. The ignorant without the Society, would be the more sternly arrested to hearken to the Quaker preachers, as they are now to listen to the Mormonites. Thus the assumption both gave vigour to the inward life of the Society, and also furthered its outward growth. But when Quakers gave up this assump- tion, the whole relation of things was changed. It was the cutting of Samson's locks. The religion at 102 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. which all sects and opinions trembled, became the most harmless and powerless of all. If Quakerism be but a denomination — a part of the Church — and if other sects be other parts, then every man is free to choose the part which pleases or suits him the most. The Quaker may prefer some other body ; or he may prefer the body in which his habits were formed, to which his associations are bound. But still he can give up Quakerism without being an apostate. The gap yawning at one time between Quakerism and other isms is filled up, Quakerism has ceased to be, has ceased to pretend to be, obligatory on the conscience. vii. Yes, a young man or young woman trained up under the Quaker Discipline may, indeed, without sin, give up Quakerism. But here comes in the real preservative power of that Discipline. The character of his, of her, life has been formed by it. By it he and she have learned to look at the world, and home, and faith, and duty, and Christ. By it they have learned some interpretation of the mystery and diffi- culty of living. By it they have learned to avoid the tilings they are avoiding, and to permit the things they are permitting. It has been, and is, the Canon of their life, that by which they have ruled the right or wrong of everything. They are, in greater or less measure, the creatures of it, and it is difficult CHAP. I.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 103 for them, and not merely undesirable, to escape their creator's grasp. viii. And this preservative power must be put down to the Discipline itself, as something over and above that ordinary power of association, which, as it carries the sons and daughters of Churchmen to the Parish Church, the children of Independents and Anabaptists to the Chapel, or the children of Methodists to the Preaching-house, would take the children of Quakers to Meeting. The Discipline has given to Quakers, the weakest of all Sects in power of external conviction and growth, a source of internal strength which every other Sect, which the Church herself, might covet. Every member the Church keeps, she keeps in spite of her lack of a Discipline ; or, rather, in spite of the abeyance of her Discipline. And now that, in the mercy of her King, she is reawakening to a fresh sense of her tremendous mission, and is looking into her armoury, and counting whether she shall be able with her thousands of thousands to meet those who come against her with their tens of thousands, the first need she perceives is her want of a Discipline. For this she expresses, in her great annual mourning on Ash Wednesday, her fervent longing and hope.* * Commination Office. 104 THE PECULIUM. [book hi. CHAPTER II. i. Idea of a Peculium necessary to a Discipline. ii. The Whole Work of a Discipline — The Branches of a Dis- cipline. hi. To keep the World and the Church asunder. It. What is the World ? — With Early Quakerism ? — With Modern ? v. The Two Worlds of Holy Scripture— The Human World— The Carnal. vL Schisms confound these Two Worlds. vii. The Human World is Redeemed. viii. The Carnal World is Reprobated — Distinctions of Saint Augustine. i. I have said tnat in the establishment of a Discipline, the Quaker Church implicitly ceded its assumption of being the Peculium. Albeit, without the idea of a Peculium — that is, of a holy, invisible, and eternal Society, as distinct from the unholy, visible, and passing-away Society of the World — a Church Discipline would not only lose sight of its end, but also want strength and will to move toward any high end at all. For the end of Discipline is perfection ; TraiBayojyla aims at making every one whom it disciplines a TfAaoe : and at nothing less. The end of Discipline is the realiza- CHAP. II.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 105 tion in the actual and visible Church, or in any part of it, of the absolute purity and goodness of the ideal " Church of the Firstborn " in Heaven — the Society of the Holy Trinity, of the Angels, of the Patri- archs, Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, and the whole company of the Blessed Dead, who, though dead, yet live. And this purity and goodness of the Ideal Church is unrealized, is made impossible, in the actual Church, or in any part of it, by the discovery of worldly elements in it. Thus, while the positive work of a Church Discipline is the edification of the Church members in a really churchly or renewed life, its negative work is the keeping out of all worldly elements. ii. Or, to speak broadly, the whole work of a Dis- cipline is— to preserve alive the eternal distinctions between the Church and the World ; the reprobated body and the elect body ; the body inspired by the indwelling SriRiT and the body left to itself. This is done : First, by preventing worldly persons and worldly elements from entering into the Redeemed body ; as such Discipline is prohibitional, and con- sists in the prohibition of, or restriction from, certain wicked and worldly acts or things, that men may not unchurch themselves from that fellowship with God which is true Church fellowship, and so lay open to 106 THE TECULIUM. [BOOK III. excommunication by the Church, or body that repre- sents the Church. Secondly, by casting forth such elements wheresover they have entered ; as such, Discipline is penitential, and calls for that change and forsaking of mind, that compunction and confession, by which men are reunited to, or realize their union with, God and all the Holy Society in Heaven and on earth ; and on which they are received again into the visible communion of the body which represents to them the Church on earth, the body being here — Quakerism. Thirdly, by taking charge of all those matters necessary to the Redeemed Body as a collection of human beings; such as birth, death, holy matrimony, education, the poverty, of members ; or matters necessary to the Redeemed Body as con- sisting of Spirits in the flesh, Spirits reached through the senses ; as ministry, meetings, buildings for wor- ship : as such, Discipline is institutional. iii. Such are the general branches into which a Discipline must be divided, if its purpose be to keep asunder the Church (or body supposing itself to be the Church) and the World. What elements, what persons, will this Discipline prohibit ? Worldly elements, worldly persons. Who are the subjects of its penitential canons ? Worldly persons, or at least those who have become, for the time, or in the act CHAP. II.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 107 to be repented of, unchurchly (or, in Quaker phrase, unfriendly). Thus, the whole character and tone of the Dis- cipline of any religious society calling itself the Church, depends immensely upon its interpretation of the term World, upon what the members abjure when they forsake the World. iv. Ancient Quakers, I think, would have said that they meant, by the World, all persons who were resisting the entry of Christ's Light into their darkness ; all who were loving their own darkness above His Light; all elements which were contrary to His Nature and Will; implicitly, all unquakerhj elements. Modern Quakers would say, I think, that they understand, by the World, what the Holy Scripture understands by it. v. The Bible speaks of two Worlds. Our Lord says, in the Gospel of S. John,* that there is a World which God the Father so loved that He gave His only begotten Son for it ; which the Son so loves that He is always seeking to draw it nearer and nearer to Himself, by His Spirit and Light, — to transmute it into His own Body, the Church. The Church — therefore, or whatsoever society may think itself the Church — must surely be bound to love this * S. John iii. 16. 108 THE PECLTLIUM. [BOOK III. World, which her Father loves, which her Husband the Lord Jesus loves. S. John says there is a World which God calls upon us not to love. All that is in it is contrary to Himself, to His Divine Righteousness, to His Fatherly Nature, to the Spirit and Light of His Son ; it has no care for, no unity with, anything but itself ; it is already under the condemnation of God. That World which the Church is to love, and this World which the Church is not to love, cannot be one and the same World ; they must be two contradictory Worlds. vi. Is there not a danger, then, that a new Schism — which separates itself from the existing Church, for the very reason that its members may be more strictly distinguished from the World than they have ever yet been — may make some confusion between these two Worlds, and take the one for the other? Is it not possible that they may separate themselves from that World which the Husband of the Church yearns over, which has in it a measure of His Light and of His Spirit ? Is it not possible they may unite themselves, in some way, still more closely, with that very World from which the Church is called to be separate, against whose selfish divisions and self- witnessings she is set up to bear eternal witness for God? CHAP. II.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 109 I believe that it is not only possible, or even likely — I believe it is absolutely certain — that this will occur. The history of every Schism, from Cerinth.ua to John Wesley's Societies, seems to me to prove it. Deluding themselves that they are the Church, or at least the truest representatives of the Church, they account all persons and opinions contrary to them as the not- Church — in other words, as the World: thus they come to love things which God is hating, and to condemn things which He is justifying. And what arc these two Worlds of which the Holy Scriptures speak? Their difference may be set, I think, by two simple adjectives : one is Human, the other is Carnal. vii. The Human World, that is, the whole Race of Adam's posterity, and all they do and are by God's original fiat, wisdom, and ordering, as the Artist of Mankind, cannot be dead or lost in His sight. For He sees Mankind — not as He made them, nor as they wickedly have unmade and do unmake themselves — but as the Body to which His Son has united Himself, their everlasting Head. In Him we live: as in Adam we all died, even so in Chiust we are all made alive. God looks upon Humanity, and upon all human functions, in His Son. Whether we eat, or drink, or dress, or walk, or laugh, or sing, or 110 TIIE rECULIUM. [BOOK III. think, or dance, or labour, we can do all these to the glory of God. These are things which every Christian man in some measure acknowledges, be- cause Christ teaches him as a man, what He does not teach him as the member of a Sect. But these are things which his Sect in some measure or other denies. For no Sect at all is founded on the nature of Man, which involves (I speak with awe), in the Incarnation, the Nature of God : no Sect at all ever separated from the Catholic Church in order to bear witness to this (at the time of separation) forgotten truth, "was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man."* The Creeds are the vindication of Mankind's liberty from man- made, from sect-fancied Disciplines. The Disciplines of Sects have proved a tyranny over the consciences of men, or crushed down their divinely given facul- ties, their human intuitions, because the Sects have held a crude, slippery, or doubting notion of the Incarnation. Though the Quaker Discipline here and there acknowledges, perhaps, with the early Quakers, the fact that Christ has baptized every member of our race with a measure of His con- victing, saving, and condemning Light, — it never says, it never seems able to say, with S. Augustine, * Nicene Creed. CHAT. II.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 1 1 1 in the Confessions, " Thou hast inspired me through the Humanity of Thy Son." * viii. The Carnal World is hateful in the eyes of God, because it is the corruption, the vitiation, of what He has made. It is the whole round of rebellious spirits living as if they were not spirits ; the whole mass of evil elements, influences, pursuits, from which every ray of Christ's Light, every effluence of His Life, is utterly banished. It is lust, that is, the turning of the whole desire upon Self; the putting of every Self in the place of God ; the setting-up of a loose self-will for His Law; of a selfish understanding for His Infinite Reason and Wisdom ; and the estimation of Self as the real pivot and centre of the universe. This World, our Lord says, loves its own, and hates those whom He has chosen out of it.f " It is said to_ love itself," says S . Augustine, comment- ing on these words, "because it loves the wicked- ness by which it is wicked ; and]' again, it is said to to hate itself, because it loves the thing that hurts it. It hates, therefore, in itself Nature, it loves Vitia- tion; it hates what it is made by the goodness of * " Inspirasti raihi per Ilumanitatem Filii Tui." — Lib. i. c. 1 : Omnia Opera S. Augustini. [Ed. Caillau, torn, xxv.] f S. John xv. 19. 112 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. God, it loves what in it is made hy loose free-will." * And again, lie says, " It is the Vitiation in it we are forbidden to delight in, and are bidden to delight in the Nature ; whereas, in its own self it delights in the Vitiation, and hates the Nature : so we can both delight in and hate it rightly, while it delights in and hates its own self perversely." f * " Diligere se dicitur, quoniam iniquitatem qua iniquus est diligit : et rursus odisse se dicitur, quoniam quod ei nocet, hoc diligit. Odit ergo in se Naturam, diligit Vitium : odit quod factus est per Dei bonitatem, diligit quod in eo factum est per liberam voluntatem." — Tractatus lxxxvii. In Joan. Ecang. § iv. Omnia Opera S. Augustini. [Ed. Caillau, torn. xvi. p. 222.] f " Vitium quippe in illo diligere probibemur, jubemurque diligere Naturam, cum ipse in se diligat Vitium, oderitque Naturam : ut nos eum et diligamus et oderimus recte, cum se ipse diligat oderitque perverse." — Ibid. \ 113 CHAPTER III. i. Question stated — To which World belong the Prohibitions of the Quaker Discipline ? ii. The Things prohibited. iii. Doers of these Things Members of the World. iv. The Things not inconvenient, but Sinful. v. Are they real!// sinful, Carnal ? vi. They are Unquaherbj. vii. Evidences that they are really Human. viii. Heathen Origin of the Theatre, Names of Months and Days, no reason against the use of them. is. The Discipline of Quakerism fights against God by its Prohibitions — The Divine Discipliner. x. The Discipline, as penitential, requires Quakers to repent of Bight Acts. i. To which of these Worlds belong those "things of the World " which the Discipline of Quakerism endeavours to keep out of Quakerism by its pro- hibitions? Are they the material and spiritual handiwork of God, parts of the creation which He blesses for the sake of His Son ? Or, are they the handiworks of our depraved free-wills, as separated from God ? ii. The things prohibited will declare. The Disci- pline says, that a Quaker must not see Hamlet or 8 114 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. Macbeth performed ; the people of the World go to plays. The Discipline says, that a Quaker must not dance ; it is a diversion of the people of the World. ic As becometh men professing godliness" says the Printed Epistle of 1848, (how differently the Quakers of two centuries ago would have designated them- selves !) " we are led out of a conformity to the varying fashions of the day, and restrained from the pursuits of Music and Dancing, from theatrical entertainments, and from vain sports, and from other frivolous and hurtful amusements of the World." Is the Church then, or is the Peculium in the Churches, a not dancing, not theatre -going, not music-hearing body ? The Discipline says, that a Quaker must not kneel down to pray among persons of another Sect, nor among Churchmen. The Discipline says, that a Quaker must not marry out of the Quaker body. The Discipline says, that a Quaker must not wear black clothes as a sign of grief. The Discipline says, that a Quaker must not mark the grave of his wife, parents, child, or friend, with a gravestone. The Discipline says, that a Quaker must not call the first day of the week, Sunday ; or the first month of the year, January. iii. Does not the prohibition of common prayer with other Christians, imply (as indeed the first CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 115 Quakers preached and believed), that the members of the Sects and the Church are not Christians, but are in fact members of the World, from which, as the elect Church, the pillar and ground of the Truth, they, the Friends of Jesus, were called to separate them- selves ? * Does not the prohibition of marriage with non-Quakers imply the same ? The wearing of black clothes, also, in sign of grief ; the putting up of memorials over our dear ones dead ; the ordinary naming of the days and months, are all implied, and sometimes asserted, by the Discipline of Quakerism, to be signs and notes of the World, of that passing- away body which is under the frown and condem- nation of God. iv. It might perhaps be contended, that the Discipline regards these marks or notes as unfit, or inconvenient, rather than as sinful. The Discipline itself does not, I think, allow any such interpretation ; even if it did, the strong declarations of the primi- tive Quakers would convince us that the Spirit of * Compare, in this very matter of prohibitions, George Fox's language about non-Quaker Christians: "You may see a book written by the very Papists, and another by Richard Baxter, the Presbyterian, against bare breasts and bare backs. They, that were but in an outward profession, did declare against such things ; therefore they who are in the possession of truth and true Chris- tianity should be ashamed of such things." — Journal, 1685. A Warning against Pride and Excess in Apparel. 116 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. Quakerism does not allow it. Thus, in regard to the prohibition of Music, the Printed Epistle of 1846 says, "Our attention has been turned to the increased exposure of our young Friends to the temptations of Music, which we believe to be, both in its acquisition and in its practice, unfavourable to the health of the soul." V. The question follows, Are these things prohibited really sinful ? In the first place, very few, if any, modern Quakers believe that they are. In 1764, the Society was " hurt by hearing that [Quaker] book- sellers have lent or sold novels, romances, plays, or other pernicious books:" it entreated its members " to avoid a practice so inconsistent with the purity of the Christian religion." Albeit, even if they are sinful, even though they are so prohibited, many Quakers indulge in them without any visitation from the Quaker Discipline. An educated Quaker, now-a-days, would be ashamed to have no opinion about Thackeray, Kingsley, or Dickens ; about In Memoriam, or TJie Idylls of the King. vi. But, granting that the things prohibited by the Quaker Discipline are prohibited as sinful, one cannot help seeing that they are prohibited as much, if not more, as unquakerly. Nor is this merely because of the old Quaker confounding of sin with non- Quakerism. The rules of most modern date assume CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OE QUAKERISM. 117 Quakerism to be the kcivwv of right and wrong. They are full of appeals to the older Quakerism and Quakers. " Our ancient witness," the " testimony of the elders," " our religious principles," " the views which it is our duty and our privilege to hold ;" these, and such expressions, appear in every section of the Rules of Discipline. The members of the Quaker Society are not forbidden by the Discipline to illu- minate their windows in times of public rejoicing, because the Divine Discipliner of the Church re- strains them inwardly by His Spirit from such an act ; but they are forbidden that " they may main- tain inviolably" (as the Discipline says in 1759, and reiterates in 1801, and again in 1833) "their ancient and Christian testimony in these respects." * Quakers are not prohibited by the Discipline from " the observance of days set apart without a Divine direction" (that is, not through Quakers) because the Divine Discipliner convinces every such observer of the decrees of David, Constantine, S. Louis, or Elizabeth, of sin ; but they are prohibited because it is "opposed" (as the Discipline says in 1833) "to those views of the spirituality of worship which it is our duty and privilege to hold." f * Rules of Discipline, p. 172, § 2. [4to. London, 1834-1849.] f Ibid. p. 173, § 4. 118 THE PECULIOI. [BOOK III. vii. Some Friends, then, at least, indulge in some things prohibited by the Quaker Discipline, and so, implicitly, are excommunicated by the Quaker Society. But they do not feel any sting on their conscience ; they hear no whisper, no syllable of reproof, from the Disciplining Wokd. They are not even really shut out from Quaker communion. The truth is, their humanity condemns their Quakerism. These things prohibited by the Quaker Discipline are not only not carnal, not elements of the World as separated from God, not of lust and self-will ; they are human. Music, romances, the drama, dancing, outward signs of mourning, memo- rials to the beloved dead ; these all arise out of Man's original constitution, out of what S. Augustine calls our nature as made by God — natura opificium Dei ; and not out of our nature as corrupted by free-will — vitium libera} voluntatis. Wherever Man is, these things are. Men and women singularly obedient to the illumination of Christ — men and women renewed in the whole spirit of their minds — have found oc- cupation (not that alone), have found even vocation, in the pursuits and things prohibited by Quakerism, — first as worldly, then as unquakerly. The first Friends often said that Moses, and David, and Jeremiah, and S. Paul, were Quakers. The three CHAr. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 119 first were poets ; David was a musician : S. Paul quotes Menander. S. Clement of Alexandria and S. Justin Martyr quote heathen poets and play- writers; therefore they must have been readers of them. And yet, of all the early Fathers, none exhibited in a more clear and vital method, or manifested in holier life, the principle of Fox, Hubberthorne, Parnell, Burroughs, and Howgill. A mighty host of redeemed artists, poets, romancists, musicians, play-writers, builders of monuments, bear witness for God and His order against the Discipline of Quakerism, which marks with the note of the World things which He, by the Incarnation of His Son, has marked with the seal of redemption, the sign of the Cross. viii. I add, as a type of the other prohibitions of the Discipline, the ground of its prohibition of the Theatre. Of course some Quakers condemn it on the loose and general principle that worldly people support the Theatre, and therefore churchly, that is, quakerhj people ought not to support it. Others condemn it for its accidents ; for the bad people who may attend it, or the bad morals which may be spoken in it. But others (and this is also the ground of the Quaker prohibition against calling the first day Monday, and the first month January) contend that 120 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. as it was not founded by Christian men in Christian times, but by Heathen men in Heathen times, as it was not a product of the Christian mind, therefore it cannot be used by Christians. On the other hand, the Catholic Church says (as indeed if she be Catholic, that is, universally human, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, she cannot avoid saying), ' The Theatre was a product of Heathen minds in Heathen ages. Heathens were men, made in the likeness of God, inspired in some measure, as S. Justin Martyr says, by Christ the Wokd, of Whom the whole human race are par- takers.* Therefore I accept it, christen it, use it.' Shakespeare and Wycherley are not included in one condemnation ; a different measure is meted to Congreve and Lope de Vega. For the same reasons, also, we do not deny our Baptism, when we call the first day Monday, or the first month January. ix. The Discipline of Quakerism fights against God by its prohibitions. The whole of life is, as Bishop Butler has said, a Discipline. The Discipline * He contends that all who live according to the Divine Wokd (such as Socrates and Heraclitus amongst the Greeks, and Abraham, Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, among the Bar- barians), are in some sort Christians : while all who defy and disobey the Word are unchristian. — Apology, cap. lxi. This is that grand and Catholic chapter which Daille says he cannot understand. CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 121 of the Church ought to be a shadow and image of the Discipline of Her Divine Head, the Disciplining \Vokd. All these things prohibited by the Quaker Discipline are parts of His Discipline. Until the Grace of God breaks in upon the conscience, by the Revelation of Jesus Christ, men are blind to their Divine Discipliner, even when they are receiving and profiting by His lessons and rules. But is He the less their Discipliner, are these the less His lessons and rules, because the noises of sin and lust deafen us, or any one, to His glorious voice, blind us, or any one, to His presence ? No : He, by his Discipline, made iEschylus a play-writer, and Palestrina a musician, and Michael Angelo a painter, and Malebranche a priest ; He, by His Discipline, quod semper, quod ubiquc, quod ab omnibus est, makes His human creatures express their grief for their lost ones by changed habits, and reverence their lost ones by memorials of stone, and wood, and brass; He, by His Discipline, leads Quakers to pray with non- Quakers for common ends, in the One SriniT — leads Quakers to unite with non-Quakers in the holy mystery of Marriage. The Quaker Discipline pro- hibits these and other provisions of His Discipline ; it does, therefore, fight against God. x. Of ivhat acts does the Quaker Discipline, as 122 THE TECULIUM. [BOOK III. Penitential, require the man or woman who is "under dealing" to repent? Of acts against the Discipline of the Eternal Word ? of unchurchly acts — acts against that fellowship with God which is true Church fellowship ? I think not. Of acts against the Quaker Discipline? of unquakerly acts ? I think so. Thus, the Discipline of Quakerism prohibits the marriage of Quakers with non-Quakers. When such a marriage has taken place, the Discipline requires it to he repented of, in accordance with the delusion of the first Quakers, that Quakerism was to he the Society of redeemed men and women, and non- Quakerism the Society of reprobate men and women. But Marriage, when it fulfils its Idea, is a Sacrament of the union between Christ and His Church. It is an outward and visible type of His self-sacrificing love for her, of her devotion and passion for Him. It is the seal of that love of two persons for one another, which neither of them ever has had, or ever can have, for any one else at all. There is the Divine root and reason for their wedding ; it is a part of the Order of God that these two should be one. Such a marriage cannot have its ground in the depraved and worldly self-will which fights against the Order of God, and puts itself under the sharp knife of His Discipline. Do not these penitential provisions of CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 123 the Quaker Discipline fight, therefore, against God's Fatherly Order and Discipline, when they call upon that Quaker or Quakeress to assume, in reality or pretence, the position of a penitent, who has at the same time the answer of his or her nature and con- science that there is nothing really to repent of, that the marriage is really Holy Matrimony, is blessed by the Priestly Benediction of Jesus ? 124 THE PECULIUM. [book EEL CHAPTER IV. i. The Quakers carry to the extreme the Puritan Hatred of Tradition — Puritanism too Traditional, ii. Quaker attempt to cut away Tradition at the Root. iii. Quakerism Traditionalized; especially by the Discipline. iv. Vindicatiou of the Catholic Church in Quaker Discipline, when defending itself, v. The Living Word the Rule of earlier Quaker Discipline ; the " Written Words " of later Quaker Discipline. vi. Traditionalism and Death — Reverence for the Past and Life Traditionalism of the Sects. vii. Early Quakerism insulted the Past. viii. Modern Quakerism idolizes the Past — Mere preservative Aim of the Discipline. ix. Relaxation of the Discipline useless. x. Tightening of the Discipline useless. i. Quakerisji, as the last term of Puritanism, ex- hibited in the extreme the Puritan hatred of Tra- dition. The Quakers made this complaint against the Puritans proper — that they had never hated Tradition enough. Even when they were fighting against the apostate and behind-looking spirits of " Popery and Prelacy," they seemed still to be looking behind. What was their weapon in that warfare? The Bible. The Quakers would address them in CHAI\ IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 125 sonic such strong and dangerous language as this : * Your faith stands in a Cueist who lived at Jerusalem sixteen hundred and fifty years ago, rather than in a Christ now living, now throwing His Light into your dark hearts and consciences. Why are you so anxious to obey the words of the Holy Spirit spoken to David, Paul, and John ? Obey the words rather which the same Spirit is even now speaking to your own very selves ? ' ii. When they reached this point, the Quakers undoubtedly fancied that they had enunciated some- thing which cut away Tradition at the very root. But the Puritans, the wisest of whom were obtuse and one-notioned men, instead of recognizing this dcvelopment^of their own theories, turned round and accused the Quakers of dishonouring the Scrip- tures. Nothing could be more untrue. Few studied the Scriptures so deeply and reverently. The}- did not dishonour them, they only honoured the Spirit more. Again and again they asked, ' If the Holy Scriptures did not bear witness to a Spirit above themselves?' They professed to stand in the same power, authority, and Spirit, as the writers who gave forth the Scriptures. The ministers of God, they said, call the Scriptures — writings, treatises, and declarations ; and call the Eternal Son of God — 126 THE PECULIOI. [book HE The Word. " Do not you rob Christ of His title, and of His honour, and give it unto the Letter, and show yourselves out of the doctrine of the ministers of God?"* Two hundred years, however, have passed by, since these words were written. And these, who were witnesses against Tradition, are the most traditional of all existing Sects. iii. In the traditionalizing of Quakerism, the Quaker Discipline has been a mighty, if not the mightiest, agent. I have already shown that the very establishment of a Discipline was, and was perceived to be by some of the Quakers, a tradi- tionalizing movement. But, at first, though it cor- rected and restrained certain individual developments of the Quaker faith in a living and present Inspire! - , it did not depress the Quaker faith that He was the direct source of authority and order in the Church, that is, in the Quaker Society. " Our monthly and quarterly meetings," says the Booh of Discipline, in 1703, " being set up by the Power and in the * George Fox. Answer to the Exeter General Warrant for apprehending all Friends, 1656. Also, Richard Farnsworth's Confession and Profession of Faith in God, by His People, who are in scorn called Quakers : Showing that the People of God are no Vagabonds, nor idle, dissolute Persons, nor Jesuits. [4to., London, 1658.] " The Holy Scriptures are the Words of God," is reiterated throughout this pamphlet of fourteen pages. CHAP. IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OE QUAKERISM. 127 Wisdom of God, Which is the authority of all those meetings, all Friends are tenderly desired and advised carefully to keep to and in that authority."* Again, " It is our judgment and testimony that the rise and practice, setting up and establishment of men's and women's meetings, in the Church of Chiust in this generation, is according to the mind and counsel of God, and done in the ordering and leading of His Eternal Spirit." f iv. In passages such as these, the Catholic Chmch is again justified and vindicated by the mouth of the proudest and most extreme Schism. She was not, then, denying the authority of the Holy Scriptures — she was not setting; herself against the witness and O CD direction of the Spirit in individual believers, when she asserted her faith that Christ by His Spirit was with her, giving her authority to bind and loose, to shut and open, even unto the end of the world. * Rules of Discipline, p. 112, § 3. [4to., London, 1834-1849.] t Ibid. p. Ill, § 1. George Fox asserts the possession of an Apostolic, or Patriarchal, power in this matter : " The Lord opened to me what I must do, and how the men's and women's monthly and quarterly meetings should be ordered and established in this and other nations." — Journal, 16G6. Again, "Some who made a profession of the same truth with us, being gone from the simplicity of the Gospel into a fleshly liberty, and labouring to draw others after them, did oppose the Order and Discipline, which God by His power had set up and established in His Cliurch." —Journal, 1678. I 128 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. The Rules of Discipline are the Canons, the Yearly- Meeting is the Oecumenical Council, of the Quaker Church. v. In the two extracts just given, the Living Word and SriiUT is asserted as the authority of the Quaker Discipline, the Lawgiver of the Quaker Church. No reference whatsoever is made to the Holy Scriptures, the written Words of God. The ground taken by the Quakers against the three Puritan Sects (Pres- byterianism, Independency, and Anabaptism), and the preservation of their original witness against every shape of Tradition, made this abstinence both natural and necessary. But, a century and a half later, the Divine authority of the Quaker Disci- pline was expressed in a very modified and temperate way : " We have been much impressed," says the Printed Epistle of 1833, "with the value and im- portance of our Christian Discipline: we believe that our forefathers in the Truth were graciously favoured with Divine aid in its establishment, and that it is in accordance with the simple principles of Church government developed in the New Testa- ment.'''' * Thus Quakerism, too, is found looking bach. As a whole, the Rules of the Discipline are aggressively * Eules of Discipline, p. 120, § 24. CHAP. IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 129 traditional. The date, indeed, of its earliest Rule is no earlier than 1670; while there are very few earlier than 1700. The real rule-givers have been the men of the Middle Age, and the men of the Latter Age of Quakerism. For, by 1670, the tra- ditional temper had set in with great strength, and it has continued ever since. As I have said before, not " to obey our Immediate and Divine Discipliner," but " to maintain inviolably our ancient and Chris- tian testimony" is the motive in all the Rules. Thus, Quaker Discipline is Traditional in regard to itself, as well as in regard to the New Testament. The Divine Word has spoken no new law in the Quaker Discipline, ever since the Discipline began. This has struck, with great concern, the rationalistic minds of a body of Quaker schismatics in America, who have put forth a declaration of their present leading as " Progressive Friends." vi. The disease of Traditionalism must not be con- founded with the healthy state of Reverence for the Past. We truly reverence the Past when we re- member that is one with our own time, in Eternity ; that we have no more done with the Past, no more lost the Past, than the apple to which this morning's sun has given its ripening streaks of crimson and gold has done with the root, and trunk, and branches 9 130 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. upon which it grows, and has heen growing, with a hundred other apples. Traditionalism connects the Past with a vain regret, and vainer imitation; but Reverence connects it with its own present and organic life. This is the difference between the partial Sects of different ages and the Holy Catholic Church. The Sects look back at the primitive age, and say, in confused disagreement, ' The Church of Christ ivas Presbyterian, or was Independent, or was Anabaptist, or icas Quakerly, or was (something like?) Wesleyan Methodist, or was some other ist. We must restore, imitate, that primitive ist, and then we shall have the primitive Church again.' But the Church says, ' The primitive Church teas Episcopa- lian ? ' No ; she says far more than that — ' I have,'' she says, 'the Apostolical Succession. The Lord said to the first rulers of the Church — Bishops over both the teachers and the taught — ' Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.' ' I,' she says, * bear witness that He has never left me. whatever my corruptions, whatever my weakness, whatever my mistakes, I have never had to look back for true Sacraments, for a true Ministry, for the Eternal Word of Life and Grace : I have always looked within.''* * I have mentioned "Wesleyan Methodism in this section more as a Schism set up on Wesley's death, than as a Movement con- CHAI\ IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 131 vii. Early Quakerism insulted the Past. In their ignorance of Church history and biography, George Fox and his fellows handed over to the Devil the whole of Christ's Kingdom between the death of the Apostles and the Reformation, and nearly as much from the Reformation to the preaching of Fox. " I was trained up," says James Parnell, the Quaker pro- tomartyr, " in the customary way of the worship of the World, which is held in the IdoVs Temple, every first day of the week."* " It is not enough," says Isaac Penington the younger, " to rent from Popery, and to sit down under the power and government of the same spirit in another form ; or to rent from Episcopacy, and the same spirit sit down in Presby- ductcd by him during his life. It is but just to give his own words. A Mr. Hall had written to him and his brother, urging them to " renounce the Church of England." This is part of his answer: — "We believe it would not be right for us to administer either Baptism or the Lord's Supper, unless we had a commission so to do from those Bishops whom we apprehend to be in a suc- cession from the Apostles. And yet we allow these Bishops are the successors of those who were dependent on the Bishop of Rome. We believe there is, and always was, in every Christian Church (whether dependent on the Bishop of Rome or not) an outward Priesthood ordained by Jesus Christ, and an outward Sacrifice offered therein." — lieu. John Wesley's Journal, No. vi. Decem- ber 27, 1745. * The Fruits of a Fast appointed ly the Churches gathered against Christ and His Kingdom (i. e. Quakerism), p. 1. [4to., London, 1GG5.] On page 6, he says that the Independents are his greatest persecutors. 9—2 132 THE PECULIUM. [book III. tery ; or to rent from Presbytery, and the same spirit sit down in a form of Independency or Anabaptism; or to rent from these, and the same spirit sit down in a way of Seeking and Waiting, and reading of words of Scripture, and gathering things from thence without the life."* viii. Modern Quakerism overpraises and idolizes the Past, — its own Past. And the aim of this Tra- ditionalism, as it appears in the Quaker Discipline, is merely negative — to preserve occupied ground, not to conquer new. Thus, in 1808, the Discipline apologizes for the traditional usages in speech and dress : " We know by experience that they are often the means of defence against temptations to mingle in the company of such as are unsuitable examples for our youth to observe and to follow." f The Rules of Discipline are substituted, not for the Bible, but for the Divine Light and Spirit. Ought not (on the old Quaker principle) the Indwelling Spirit to preserve us from temptations and unsuit- able examples? Ought not unworldly speech and dress (so called) to be adopted from an inward dis- affection to the World, and not be thrust upon us * The Axe laid to (he Boot of the Tree, pp. 20, 21. [4to., London, 1659.] f Bules of Discipline, p. 198, § 22. CHAP. IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 133 from without? Can it be anything more than a hurtful imitation of unworldliness ? ix. But these parts of the Discipline have been given up by many Friends ; the giving up has been authoritatively pronounced a venial, not a mortal, unquakerliness, by the Society. Clarkson, in the be- ginning of the century, perceived that if the Disci- pline of Quakerism " were undermined, the whole building would fall."* " The relaxation of a disci- pline," says Dr. Schaff, in his History of the Apos- tolic Church, " is always a suspicious symptom." The Discipline, as I said in the commencement of this Book, is the girdle which has held Quakerism to- gether : the universal provisions under the head of '•' Oversight" peer everywhere, see every one, watch everything.^ The " Oversight" of the Quaker Dis- cipline has been a firm, but, on the whole, kindly, * Portraiture of Quakerism, book ii. c. i. § 1. f Rules of Discipline, p. 184, &c. (§ 7.) Young men coming to London without profession or employment. (§ 8.) Seafaring Quakers. (§ 9.) Duty of oversight over each other. P.E., 1827. (§ 10.) Disputes to be settled early. (§ 12.) Lists of members to be read over once every year. (§ 19.) Quakers in straitened circumstances to be sought out; to be assisted to educate their children in a "suitable and guarded way:" for "they may be exposed to mix with others not of our religious persuasion." Members, too (§ 7), are to be preferred as apprentices, servants, assistants : " A preference which seems to form an essential part of the care which we owe to our religious body." 134 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. ecclesiastical Argus, and lias had the power of an ecclesiastical Briareus. To relax such an Oversight would not only he picking out ninety-nine of its hundred eyes, hut also lopping or unnerving as many of its hundred arras. How could this increase its discernment? How add to its strength? x. But, if relaxing the hold of the traditional singularities of the Quaker Discipline upon Quakers, will not save the Quaker Society, neither will tight- ening them save it. The very conjecture of a relaxa- tion proves that they are thought too tight — that any additional stringency would he accounted an over- straining — would lead, most likely, to an immediate schism.* * A pamphlet, entitled An Address to the Society of Friends, on their excommunicating such of their Members as Marry those, of other religious Professions [London, 1808], points out the decline of the Society in Scotland and Wales, " in consequence of the increase of Church power and inquisitorial authority." 135 BOOK IV. QUAKER CONDUCT. CHAPTER I. THE PRINCIPLE OP EAELY QUAKER CONDUCT. i. Question of this Book stated — The Motive Principle of early Quaker Conduct. ii. Motives of Conduct, many. iii. Resolution of many into one — The Inspiring Will of God. iv. This Inspiration the Ideal Motive of early Quaker Conduct : Doctrinally, Practically. v. This Principle not Quakerly, as such — The Catholic Principle. vi. This Principle a Source of Strength to Quakerism, as such. vii. Quakerism appeals to the Church for the Confirmation of this Principle. viii. Relation of this Principle to the Decay of Quakerism/as such. i. I propose in this Book to inquire, Whether Qua- ker Conduct throws any light on the causes of Quaker Decay ? in other words, have Quakers degenerated ? Is the ordinary life of Quakers and Quakeresses in the nineteenth century quickened by the same prin- ciple as the ordinary life of Quakers and Quakeresses in the seventeenth century? Does this principle 136 THE PECULIDM. [BOOK IV. produce the same acts? Is it present in the same intensity ? Does it offer the same signs and evidences of its presence and power ? I shall have to compare, then, past and present Quaker principle, past and present Quaker acts, past and present Quaker in- tensity, past and present Quaker signs. ii. But if I speak merely of the motive principle of the acts of any man or society of men — if I speak of the ground from which they began to do and to en- dure — I shall travel far wrong. Only those saints upon whose spirits God has wrought His perfect work, and whom He is just about to take to Himself, can declare from their hearts that all motives except the one ultimate and fontal motive are dead in them. All men do and endure from mixed motives. But every true and holy act or endurance proceeds, con- sciously or unconsciously, from the Inspiring Will of God. Our good works are not ours, nor from us, but from Him working in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. Christian perfection ; the growth into Christ's spiritual stature ; the full and utter ifo-creation after the image of the Heavenly Man ; the being perfect, as our Lord says, even as our Father in Heaven is perfect ; — what but God dwelling and acting in us can bring us to this state — a state in which the Will of God is the one only motive and CHAP. I.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 137 principle of conduct, the ground from which every act and endurance consciously proceeds ? iii. All the motives which are broken, particular, isolated, in other men and women, are reattached, and centralized, and intensified by returning to their place as parts, in the Saint. The love of wife, or husband, or children ; the painting of a picture, the giving of alms, the writing of a book, the singing in a choir, the visiting of the sick, the cup of cold water in Christ's name, the very sweeping of a doorway, are felt by the Saint to proceed from the very indwelling of the Will of God, that Centre from which nothing except sin is really separated. All the graces, relationships, powers, functions, and tempers, which were " natural," become spiritual — not by alteration, least of all by disorderly morti- fication, but — by carrying them up to their first Spring and Source ; that is, to the Bosom of Him in Whom we live and move and have our being.* * " One can spin, another can make shoes, and some have great aptness for all sorts of outward arts, so that they can earn a great deal, while others are altogether without this quickness. These are all gifts proceeding from the Spirit of God. If I were not a Priest, but were living as a layman, I should take it as a great favour that I knew how to make shoes, and should try to make them better than any one else." Again, " Some have sweet voices: let them sing in the churches, for this also comes from the Spirit of God." " There is no work so small, nor art so mean, 138 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. iv. This principle, then, was the ideal principle of early Quaker conduct. The true and holy men among them were led by, listened and waited for, the moving of their wills, to this action, or from that action, by the Holy Ghost. The more sec- tarian Quakers, whether led by it or not, appealed to the truth and fitness and necessity of such an inspiration, as the only efficient motive of Christian conduct, of the acts and sufferings of Christ's elect. In doctrine and in practice, the Quaker Society set this forth — that to act in Christ's manner, the Spirit of Christ Himself must inwardly move and press us to all our deeds. v. But when this principle of conduct is undressed, so to speak, from its Quaker, Foxite, and Seven- teenth-secular garments, and shown in its original, undisguised, and naked shape, we shall see that it had been the Catholic doctrine of the conduct of baptized people for sixteen hundred and fifty years before Fox was born. Fox, indeed, and his fol- lowers, qualified it with uncatholic and fanatical limitations, as I shall hereafter show. But the Universal Church had believed, each man clothing but it all comes from God, and is a special gift of His." — Tauler's Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity : on 1 Corinth, xii. 16. Life and Sermons, pp. 354, 355. [4to., London, 1857.] CHAP. I.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 139 the truth in his own fashion, from Saint James to William Laud (who attempted to dedicate Music, Art, Learning, and even Sports, to God and His Church), that every good and perfect gift, whether among charites or charismata, whether a state of holy feeling or a faculty of doing, whether called natural or spiritual, came down from the Father of Lights.* And, putting aside George Fox and the early Quakers, to what body of men shall I turn to find this truth asserted as the only true principle and motive of Christian conduct? I will say at once to whom I should not turn : I should not turn to modern Quakers. Undoubtedly I should turn to S. Clement of Alexandria, to S. Augustine, to Tauler, to Fenelon, to Malebranche, to William Law ; and these (to whom I might add many more) were Catholic Priests. They bore that name which George Fox and his fellows accounted the very type of apostasy and of fall from the immediate inspira- tion of God. They were constantly engaged in all those acts which George Fox and his fellows took for signs of the absence of God the Inspirer ; they were, what the Quakers believed to be, thaumaturgists, players with types and images ; head-bowers and knee-benders ; wranglers about clothes, about stone- * S. James, i. 17; S. John, iii. 27. 140 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. and-mortar buildings, about water-sprinklings ; mere dealers in the unreligious husks and shells of religion. vi. If, then, the most churchly of Churchmen, men who valued the idea of a Priesthood, and their name Priest, were the clearest asserters of the Quaker principle of conduct, how are we to explain the disconnection of George Fox and his fellows from the Church : surely it should have seemed their fittest home ? I can but explain it by causes I have already dwelt upon, and by the heretical ele- ments which they mingled with this primary truth. These I reserve for the remaining chapters of this book. But I will state two or three plain reasons why the first Quakers, holding a principle so Ca- tholic, yet felt no attraction toward the Universal Church. The sin of the Church was one cause. She forgot in Whom she believed. As the Apostles, whom the Loed made her princes in all lands, could not at the foot of the Mount of Transfiguration cast out the devil from the epileptic boy, so she could not cast out the devils of the seventeenth century, because, like them, she forgot the power with which her Loed endued her so long as she thought nothing of herself ; like them, she dwelt upon her privi- leges, her throne of future power, indulging the thoughts which murder true power ; like them, she CHAP. I.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 141 was jealous when she saw other's casting out devils in the Name of Jesus. Secondly, it must be re- membered that Puritanism and not Churchliness, a many-sided Sectarianism and not Catholicity, was the very temper of the Seculum in which Quakerism arose. The Church was under a parliamentary ban. Thirdly, George Fox and his fellows (with the exception of Elwood, Barclay, and a few others) were profoundly ignorant of the history of the Church and the Sects in prior ages. The conduct of the Quakers, so far as it was under the in- spiration of Christ's Spirit, was a cause of growth to Quakerism, as such, because it was a principle England then needed and must have ; a privilege witnessed to in the Liturgy of the crushed and hidden Church, but not witnessed to in the formulas of the dominant Sects. It pleased God to make it known and heard through the preaching of the Quakers. vii. In the year 1700, forty years after the re- appearance of the Liturgy and Holy Orders, the excellent Ann Docwra, most orthodox as a Friend, thus writes : — " Revelation, or Inspiration,* proceeds from one Fountain, and is really Divine, although some of the learned have used their endeavours to * Two quite different things. 142 THE TECULIUM. [EOOK IV. debase Inspiration. But let us see what the Church of England says in this case in her Common Prayers. First, in the collect for the Communion, they pray, ' that God would cleanse their hearts by the Inspiration of His Holt Spirit.' I really believe that the hearts of all men cannot be cleansed by any other means but the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God. And, further, in the collect for the First Sunday after Easter, they pray for ' the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that ive may think those things that be good, and by Go