BOOKS.
GEORGE FOX, THE QUAKER.*
THE publication of Mr. Thomas Hodgkin's excellent little biography of George Fox, in the " Leaders of Religion " series, should administer the coup de grace to any lingering currency of the Macaulayan legend as to the founder of the Society of Friends. Its brevity, and its author's deserved repute as a historian in another field, will secure its being read widely ; and wherever it is read there must arise, if previously non-existent, a recognition of the absurdity of the Judgment which would place George Fox, intellectually and morally, on the level of Ludowick Muggleton and Joanna Sonthcott, and would attribute to the astonishing ingenuity, coupled with an equally astonishing self-suppression, of some of his early followers everything that is intelligent or intelligible in the writings ordinarily assigned to him. For our part, we are unable to understand how any one possessed of ordinary discernment and fairness of mind could adopt Macaulay's theory on this subject after the most cursory study of George Fox's Journal on the one hand, and of the history of the body which has always venerated him as its founder on the other. Macaulay's suggestion is that the Journal was so revised and edited "by men of more sense and knowledge " than Fox, that, " absurd as it is, it gives no notion of his genuine style." Whatever may have been done by revisers and editors, Fox's Journal presents a truly im- pressive portrait of a man of humble origin who, throughout a. long life of constant toil and stress and frequent suffer- ing, bore himself not only with an unflinching courage • George Fox. By Thomas Hodgkin, 1:0.0.L. London: Ale:ham and Co.
and devotion to the sacred mission he believed himself to hold, but with an amount of address and resource which claim the respect and not the sneers of the liberal- minded reader. It contains, no doubt, not a little that is absurd and not a little that is repellent ; but it would be surprising to learn that any candid student of the Journal could now come to any other conclusion than that on the balance, the moral virtues, the spiritual earnestness and elevation of Fox's character, and his mental vigour, im- measurably outweighed those faults of narrowness and harshness to opponents, liability to obvious fallacies in reasoning, and indifference to culture, which were either universal in the age in which he lived, or largely explicable in his case by his want of early education. Equally obvious is it that a body of Christians who were, as the Quakers were, very distinctly in advance of Christendom generally in their moral interpretation of religious duty, are altogether unlikely to have owed their origin either to a man who was plainly nothing more than a half-witted fanatic, or to such a one dressed-up and tricked-out as a pioneer of progress by a con- spiracy of cultivated men whom his fervour and confidence in his own spiritual insight had carried away.
Mr. Hodgkin's book will probably be read by many who cannot, or do not, find time to make themselves acquainted with Fox's Journal. It seems to us to be inspired, as the writer claims, by that regard for truth which has ever been one of the leading characteristics of the Society of Friends, of which he is a member, and to be no more sympathetic towards its subject than is required for a just treatment of his character and work. No attempt is made to disguise the highly provocative character of Fox's early missionary operations. It is no wonder that his bitter attacks on the Puritan clergy who had been installed in the benefices of this country—attacks often delivered in church— for various errors of doctrine and for being '• hirelings" in receiving tithes, resulted frequently in " rude " behaviour towards him on the part of the congregations addressed, and every now and then in actual violence offered to him and his companions by individuals. The wonder would have been if he had been generally permitted to bear his testimony in such a fashion without molestation or without subsequent prose- cution. Daring the years in which he was thus striving, as he believed ender divine impulse, to draw off souls from guides who were leading them astray, Fox made but little attempt to mitigate the irritation naturally excited by the delivery of such a message as that with which he thought himself entrusted; and certainly when he found his mission resisted, as it was sure to be, and the law strained, as it often was, to get convictions against him and his companions and converts, he indulged in denunciations of the most uncom- promising character. A point which Mr. Hodgkin brings into full view is that Fox's testimony during all his early missionary tours, which began in 1648, was specially directed, not against Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism, but against the teaching of the Presbyterians and Independents, who had the upper hand until the Restoration, especially " the Calvinistio teaching of the predestined and eternal misery of a large portion of the human race, and the super- stitious reverence for every letter" of the Scriptures. To both these aspects of Puritan teaching the great Quaker doctrine of the Inward Light was in plain hostility. That light, Fox taught, came freely to all, and if not rejected placed the recipient in a condition of illumination equal in kind, and perhaps often in degree also, to that enjoyed by the saints of old to whom came the inspiration to which we owe the sacred writings. The Anglican and the Roman Catholic, no doubt, from Fox's point of view, overlaid the purity of Christian doctrine with all kinds of traditional and superstitious observances which distracted the soul from that immediate communion with the divine which Christ's work on earth had made possible,—so much so that " all that was distinctively characteristic of medimval Christianity was con- demned" by the Quakers "as belonging to the dark night of apostasy." But yet their manifold errors were more by way of addition to the Truth than of direct enmity to it. Calvinism and the doctrine of the Free Inward Light were in deadly conflict, and so, as Mr. Hodgkin well observes, speaking of the quarter of a century after 1660, in which Episcopalian parsons and squires were the chief agents in the persecution of Fox and his friends, "it can hardly be said that even then they were the chief objects of his religious polemics. Still, the Calvinistic teaching was that against which he bore his most persistent protest, and when his young disciple Barclay gave literary and logical form to the new sect's teaching, his Apology was a veiled attack upon the Westminster Confession, the great manifesto of seventeenth century Calvinism."
Perhaps Fox recognised, even if half unconsciously, that the fierceness of the Anglican persecution of Quakerism was in part due to a misunderstanding of the Quaker refusal to take oaths. The Cavalier gentry, of Cumber- land, Westmoreland, and North Lancashire in particular, appear to have really suspected the innocent Friends, who could have no possible reason for desiring the return of the Puritan r4girae, of being Cromwellians in disguise, and thought that their estates would not be safe until these obstinate plotters were suppressed. Mr. Hodgkin gives a very interesting sketch of the long and blundering judicial campaign waged against Fox at Lancaster in 1664-65, when, with his early convert and future wife, Margaret Fell, of Swarthmoor Hall, he was subjected to a scandalous revival of the antiquated terrors of Prwmunire in connection with their refusal to take the oath of supremacy, although they were perfectly willing to make an emphatic declaration of loyalty to Charles II. Throughout that passage in his career, and during his subsequent imprisonment at Scarborough, Fox displayed both a loftiness of temper and a keenness of intelli- gence and ready wit in dealing with the blunders of his enemies and the officials of the Court, which should go far to satisfy any one of the real nobility of his spirit and sanity of his mind. But among equally conclusive proofs of his mental power and spiritual elevation, to which, in their proper place, attention is suitably drawn by Mr. Hodgkin, are the impres- sion he produced on Cromwell, the emphatic tributes paid to him by such men as William Penn and Thomas Ellwood, the friend of Milton and the editor of Fox's Journal, and the comprehensiveness and efficiency of the system of Church organisation which he established for the Quakers,—a task that, in view of their leading tenet, to which reference has already been made, must have been one of peculiar difficulty and delicacy. There, and in the spirit and temper of the Society of Friends, and the consistency and continuity of their services to mankind, lie the best proofs of the character and gifts of their founder.
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