THE REVIVAL OF QUAKERISM. T HE Edinburgh Review has an interesting
paper on the revival of Quakerism, in which it is shown that a very small body, which during the first half of the present century was apparently dwindling rather rapidly, has during the last thirty years decidedly raffled, and especially during the last decade has increased the number of its active, as contrasted with its nominal members, by at least 20 per cent. This is a remarkable fact, because as a rule it is true not only that nothing succeeds like success, but also that nothing fails like failure ; and though the Society of Friends cannot be said to have failed, inasmuch as it never even displayed any ambition to absorb the other Christian Churches into itself, yet the very absence of any such ambition, the very reluctance which the Friends have always shown to grasp at the kind of influence which is gauged by the number and distinguished position of a Church's members, would alone be sufficient in an age of sensationalism and emotion to divert from the Society of Friends the interest of a very large proportion of its younger members. As a matter of fact, however, this ebbing away of sympathy with the Society of Friends has not gained but lost ground lately. The 5,041 active members of the Society in 1881 had increased to 6,110 active members in 1890,—a result which the Edinburgh Review attributes partly to the relaxation of what may be called the superstitions of the Quakers as to dress and language, and to the less rigid enforcement of their rules against marrying outside their own Society. These relaxations of formal restrictions,—which, far from being of the essence of the Quaker religion, may almost be said to be foreign to its true genius, and to partake of that very externalism and con- ventionality against which the existence of the Society of Friends was intended as a protest,—can only be regarded as dissipating artificial antipathies between those who might otherwise have been attracted to the Society and the Quakers themselves, and not as stimulating the genuine-life of the Society; and no doubt the Edinburgh Review is perfectly right in attributing the gradual improvement in the numbers of the Society mainly to the ardent sympathy of the Quakers with all the chief humanitarian movements of the day,—to their hatred of slavery, their hatred of cruelty, their hatred of injustice, and most of all their hatred of anything like dead forms or slavish orthodoxy and literalism. The central conviction of the Friends, the belief in that inner light which alone can give, even to revelation itself, anything like its true significance, has been doubtless the great mainstay of the little Church in an age when dogmas have been con- demned, authority has been defied, and traditions have been made light of. It is true that the Society of Friends have not been alone in discovering that there can be no such thing as revelation without an inner light to give meaning and life to the facts and thoughts and words of divine teaching. It is not more useless to display pictures to the blind, than to repeat
divine truths to those who have no echo of those truths in their own hearts; and this has not been left to the Friends to tell us. But they have insisted on it so powerfully, and have made it so completely the one centre of their religious teaching, that it has very naturally held its ground better in the minds of those who have been brought up in the Society of Friends, than it has in minds trained in other religious societies ; and at a time when everything else has been questioned, this central belief in an inner light which " lighteneth every man who cometh into the world," has no doubt protected many a thinker against a lapse into total scepticism. Without this insistance on the central truth of the inner light, Quakerism would have had no intellectual or moral stamina at all. It is a teaching not peculiar to the Society of Friends, but it is one on which that Society has laid so unique a stress, that it has not unnaturally disinclined those who see its full signifi- cance, to leave that Society for any other Church at a time when theological dogmas are so often discredited, when eccle- siastical authorities are so much disparaged, and when historic criticism has succeeded in making so much doubtful that had formerly been regarded as certain, and in establishing so little as certain which had once been regarded as doubtful.
Nevertheless, the Edinburgh Reviewer seems to us to go too far when he lends something like a sanction to the doc- trine of the Quakers that the chief duty of the Christian soul should be to watch and wait for the glimmering of this inner light, and compares it to the astronomer's use of photography for the discovery of stars hitherto unknown. "We do not dream," he says, "of contending that this method of silently waiting on God for inspiration is repugnant to Christianity or to a thoughtful religious culture. The devout soul in that process may be likened to a sensitised plate set in proper position under a starlit sky, which, after due exposure, is found marked by some stars invisible to the naked eye, and beyond the furthest sweep of the unaided telescope." Surely that is hardly so, for the "sensitised plate" not only takes the impression of the star itself, but records it for those who have no sensitised plate of their own on which to record it ; and this is just what the devout soul cannot succeed in doing. Rather are such perceptions of spiritual truths- " Like stars in the deep of the sky, Which arise on the glass of the sage, But are lost when the watcher is gone."
It is surely not that living sensitiveness of the devout soul,— which the Quakers fully recognise,—so much as the deep impress which multitudes of devout souls have left on the history and institutions and liturgies of the past, — which the Quakers underrate,—that corresponds to the photographic process used by the astronomer to betray the existence of otherwise invisible stars. They rely far too much on the immediate perception of the indi- vidual watcher, and far too little on those stellar maps in which former watchers have recorded the results of their conjoint and co-operative work,—for, as the Edin- burgh Reviewer justly says, the number of individuals "adapted from idiosyncrasy and training" to take part with any success in this discovery of spiritual truths is neces- sarily very small, and the only result of trying to make all sorts of men believe, that they are fit for anything more original than heartily to accept the teaching of others, is that they are encouraged to make no end of clumsy attempts to originate something of their own. Such attempts only minister to a morbid vanity in the nature thus unfortunately stimulated into attitudes for which it is not adapted, and these engender in the world at large a contemptuous scorn for the grotesque and often ludicrous effort to coin prophetic phrases, and painfully imitate the rapt bearing of prophetic inspiration. Surely even Quakers should perceive that "the inner light," essential as it is even to genuine discipleship, does not in most men go beyond helping them to discover those by whose teaching they can best profit, amongst those whose teaching is any way available. The mistake of the Quakers is that their methods have stimulated much that would naturally be spiritual passiveness into a pretence of activity which is itself false to "the inner light," and intrinsically artificial. In the great majority of men, "the inner light" indicates the best companion or teacher, but does no more, and im- poses a "wise passiveness" in the hands of that com- panion or teacher, instead of prompting to a crude and spasmodic attempt to affect attitudes of mind which are
wholly unsuited to the stage of the individual's inward life. But, unfortunately, the inner light is not always attended to when it rebukes the attempt to be original with an even more emphatic sincerity than that with which it stirs the torpid to greater activity; and so it comes to pass that the doctrine of universal individual illumination, co-operating with a very natural vanity, leads to the crudest freaks of spiritual life, which remind one rather of the pranks of the donkey who tried to imitate the playfulness of a lapdog, than of the plastic delicacy and tenderness of the divine spirit.
Yet surely, even in the present day of distrust of dogma, of negative criticism, and restlessness under authority, the Society of Friends might recognise the truth that the doctrine of individual illumination, needful as it is, is totally in- sufficient to guide any one to the true significance of revela- tion, unless it avails itself eagerly and gladly of all the various very different traces of itself which divine revelation has left ihi the world. No such revelation could possibly limit itself to the interior action of the spirit or conscience on the souls of men, as Quakerism almost assumes. If great men leave their mark unmistakably on history, on the civil life, on institutions, on literature, on the regeneration of nations, we cannot suppose that the infinite spirit could unveil itself to men without effecting the most impressive revolution in all these various departments of human life. It is all very well to trust to the inner light, but you must trust to it not only to detect truth in the region of the con- science and the spirit, but to detect it in the regions of art, of policy, of institutions, of tradition. Why should the inner light be limited to interpreting the direct voice of duty and the immediate instincts of devotion ? Surely it should be alive also to the effects indirectly produced on human society by the highest act of God, to the marvellous modifi- cation it effected in the patriotic life of the singular people through whom the revelation was made, to the special mode in which the first Church organised itself, to the actual embodiment of the first devotion in external worship, to the remarkable history of sacramental rites, to the order of dogmatic development, to the character of the earliest tra- ditions. These, too, are the indirect reflections of the divine revelation, and if the doctrine of individual illumination be (as it is) true, it should find the means of interpreting all these indirect traces of the divine energy, at least as adequately as it interprets the direct commands of conscience and the direct instincts of devotion. When an infinite mind unveils itself to man, it is idle to expect that the whole of its influence can be conveyed through the conscious life of the spirit. Man is a composite creature who can be frilly educated only by a variety of different in- fluences exerted on him through the senses, through the imagi- nation, through laws, through art, through science, through all the different spheres of human energy. And in all of these the true inner light should be able to trace the conspicuous influence of the divine mind as reflected in past ages of belief and tradition. The "inner light "should be the master- key which opens a great number of different locks, and it is because the Society of Friends has regarded it as the key to the true meaning of conscience and worship almost ex- clusively, that its noble central doctrine has exerted so little general influence as it has actually exerted on the history of faith.
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