PLAIN" QUAKERISM
THEQuakers are holding a meeting this week at Man- chester to consider among other things the future of their Society; and when the speeches made are published in full we shall read them with exceeding interest. We know of few things more remarkable, either in religious or social his- tory, than the almost total disappearance of Quakers just at the moment when they ought to have become a great denomina- tion. With the single exception of non-resistance, which they hold rather as a doctrine of perfection than as one forbidding them to benefit by Courts, police, or even defensive armies, their distinctive ideas would seem to be singularly adapted to the tendencies of the modern world. Their belief in the authority of the Inner Light is little more than the formulisa- tion, and so to speak consecration, of the individual conscience, in which the best men of all denominations, and a great many faddists besides, now profess earnestly to believe ; and which is protected by a whole host of statutes. We hardly nowadays like to punish even the Peculiar People when they plead that they let their children die for want of surgical aid, be- cause they rely on their conscientious views of misunderstood counsel by St. James, who may have known that the doctors of his period were of very little use. The Quaker dislike of priests and sacraments is shared by the immense body of worthy persons who now affirm that religion is most excellent, bat that dogmas, which one would have thought essential to any creed, are but hampering fetters. The notion of punish- ing them for such a view is so foreign to the modern world that it hardly understands how it could have been sincerely held, and is inclined to regard any " test " as dictated by a latent spirit of tyranny or a view so narrow as to suggest positive inferiority of intellect. The wide philanthropy or Samaritanism, which was the general rule of conduct for Quakers, is now the ideal rule of all the Christian bodies, and indeed with many is the sole rule of life, while their refusal of reverence to earthly dignities is nothing but the great dogma of equality carried with resolution and in a spirit of self- sacrifice into practice. Lastly, we take it that the Quaker idea of cultivating "the stillness and the quietness," which has so great an effect upon their children's education, is identical in effect with that practice of "retreat" for which thousands of minds in our fussy generation have so deep, and we may add so ineffectual, a longing. Even their peculiarities of dress and language have long since ceased to excite ridicule, and are hardly more distinctive than those of earnest Socialists, or of the newest successful Protestant denomination. Perfect toleration, however, which has bene- fited so many creeds, has almost killed the Quakers, and in the hour of the triumph of their most prominent ideas, their Society is dying, or nearly dying, of want of votaries. They have leavened the community, and they are being absorbed into it. One would have thought that thousands of families would have joined their communion as a kind of intellectual "retreat," safe from the pressure of a battling world, but it is not so ; and if they have not for a few years actually decreased, they are never without the apprehension that, in this country at least, they may disappear, swallowed up in the multitude of those who agree with, and yet do not b!long to, their communion.
We can suggest nothing which would help them greatly, except, perhaps, the removal of the greatest stumbling-block which they present te,modern thinkers—their doctrine of non-resistance — which, even if it were taught by the Apostles as a counsel of perfection to be obeyed within a converted community, would in our semi-pagan world hand over mankind to the dominion of the bad. If you may not resist the burglar, he will have all the spoons, and no civilisation will be possible except that of a community of Yogis proud of nakedness, and in- different to, or exulting in, the endurance of physical pain. It might be possible so to modify the doctrine, that it con- demned aggressiveness rather than defensive resistance, and thus bring it fully into accord with the view which almost all sincere Christians would, in theory, uphold ; but the Friends will make no such change, and will, we presume, adhere to their tenets as Fox and Penn delivered them, until they pass from beneath the material eyes of the community which has so greatly benefited by their exertions. We have no means of affecting their decision, and indeed no wish to do it, but we should like very much to know whether, after the ex- perience of a generation, their wisest men think that the abandonment of the " plain " methods of address and clothing has, on the whole, been beneficial to their society. We have a doubt about it which we cannot get rid of, though we are hardly able logically to defend it.
The great, and in some respects unanswerable, objection to any distinctive dress or mode of speech or habit of life for any Christian denomination or class is that it tends to become by degrees a hypocritical formula. It is most useful during the period of what we may call inspiration, while the new body is earnest in its separate views, and desires to make its separateness visible to its own members and to the world from which it has voluntarily cut itself off. Everything which -then distinguishes it, helps to deepen its enthusiasm, and also to wake up in the onlooker a perception that here is a body of new teachers held together by a new faith. If the distinctive signs are admired, as we presume those of the early eremites were admired, they help to convert ; and if they are despised, they help to develop that pride of potential martyrdom, without which it is probable that no sect ever develops its fullest energy or makes the most rapid way. You cannot convert unless you believe, and there is no proof of the sincerity of belief like readiness to encounter death or suffering or ridicule for your faith. When, however, the inspiration has subsided, and life has become ordinary, and the distinction of dress or speech or habitude of life has become the mark only of a caste, it is sure to degenerate into a formality, not trusted by those who continue it, and apt to become a mere cloak, either for hypocrisy or for a secret indifference. The sect is then better without it, and if it has the nerve to lay it aside, as in England the
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