CORRESPONDENCE
THE INSPIRATION OF GEORGE FOX [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sut,—Your article of June 13th, on Fox's " Short Journal," is of deep interest, and I venture to attempt an answer to its queries, with gratitude for your interest in the subject.
The absence of reference to the profligacy of the Restoration from George Fox's Journal is analogous to the even more surprising absence of allusion to the Civil War. Fox was wan- dering about the Midlands and was once in London from 1643 to 1647 when the First Civil War was upsetting quiet lives everywhere. He may at times have crossed the track of an army ; but from the Journal you would never learn that it was not a time of profound peace. The Second Civil War only comes in at the point where Fox was offered a command in the campaign which ended at Worcester. The Journal is deficient in " background " all through. It aims at telling just its own story. This hardly touched the war or the court. The early Quakers, with the exception of Penn and Penington and one or two others, were not of the governing class. Pro- bably the absence of newspapers—a fact of enormous social importance—caused one class to know little of what another class was doing. We can now construct a history of the war and can realize the Court of Charles II. better than the West- morland " statesmen " and even the wandering preachers could in an age of little travel and no journalism.
There is, however, one Quaker book which is clearly con- scious of a profligate background, the vigorous manual of Quaker conduct by William Penn, entitled No Cross, no Crown (see especially Chap. xvii.). The first edition was written in the Tower in 1668. Its style is of a soul aflame, and by 1857 it had gone through twenty-four editions in English.
To ask what Fox meant by " knowing Cod experimentally," by " seeing God's face " and by the " Inward Light " is indeed to ask about the central faith and practice of Friends. To answer it would be to try to tell the open secret of all the
mystics, which is beyond the scope of those words we have coined for outward uses. We shall reach it best by human: analogies, which are always the safest approach to God. Suppose a humble soul has an uplifting interview with one of his idols or ideals ; suppose he did " once see Shelley plain,n his expansion and delight are an image of that of one who knows God is with him in the dark. But there is a better parallel—" the music sent up to God by the lover and the bard." Tennyson knew it in his inspired trances with their, sense of freedom and expansion, Wordsworth at Tintem or, watching the bed of daffodils, or writing in the Great Ode about the meanest flower that blows. But most vividly God comes to us in all love, and supremely in the love of man and woman. There God shows His face to common folk. The mystic sees it often ; not, of course, in the form of a vision of the flesh, but in an inward Light, a silent voice, as when Fox heard the words which set his soul at rest : " There is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy necessity." He may have remembered this when cross-questioned by the magis- trates at Derby in the passages you quote.
The scientific treatment of this faculty has been done with care by the Society for Psychical Research in the chapter on Ecstasy in Myers's Human Personality, and in kindred publica- tions. Ecstasy and Vision find a place in the activities of the. Subliminal Self. Fox's " spirit of discerning " meant tele- pathy. " I discerned him that spoke to me." It was a common gift with Fox, and the seventeenth and eighteenth century Quaker journals are rarely quite without it. It is the most characteristic faculty of the Subliminal Self. Pre. monition, as your article suggests, was often involved.
I feel a little shy of saying that Fox or anyone else was in touch with the Universal and the Absolute. We are all of us a long way from the Absolute. I incline to follow Plotinus (and others) in thinking that the Absolute is inaccessible till He or It becomes not Absolute and possesses qualities and characteristics.
You allude to Sir Thomas Browne's words, " ingression into the Divine Shadow." He uses ecstasis in the same list. He and Fox would have understood one another, as Fox and Cromwell did.
I do not think this " discernment " or telepathic gift is very closely connected with a " concern." (We do not say " con- cernment.") This is just a sense of duty to do some special thing, or to induce others to do it, an inward urge. I am. afraid it is often nowadays used rather too lightly. The word' ought to be saved for serious use.—I am, Sir, &c.,
P.S.—Since writing the above, I notice that the Bishop of Pretoria, in your issue of June 6th, says that to George Fox the Bible was the Word of God. (Italics his.) He cannot have read many pages of early Quaker literature, for the denial of the title Word of God to the Scriptures comes in as a recurrent refrain throughout. George Fox's first imprisonment was for calling this denial out in the Church at Nottingham. His exact phrasing is expressed briefly in his Journal, Cambridge Ed. i. 106 :—" He out with his Bible and said rr was the Word of God ; and I told him it was the words of God, but not God the word. . . . I told them what the Scriptures said of themselves that they were the words of God, but that Christ was the Word." There is much else answerable in the Bishop's letter, but not in a postscript.
[We are most grateful to Professor Graham for his very interesting and illuminating response to our queries.-- En. Spectator.]
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