The Idea of God—V
The Quaker Idea of God BY H. G. WOOD.
[Professor H. G. Wood is the Director of Studies at Woodbrooke Settlement, Birmingham. Next week Professor Lloyd Morgan will write on "An Evolutionist's View."—En. Spectator.] AGENERATION ago, in a book entitled The Silence of God, Sir Robert Anderson asserted and sought to solve the strange mystery that "ever since the days of the Apostles, the silence of Heaven has been unbroken." Primitive Quakerism might be defined as the simple denial of the existence of this mystery. Men may have been unheeding, but God has not been silent. George Fox claimed to have received a word from the Lord as sure as any of the Apostles ever did. And if he was forced to recognize that not all the Lord's people were called to be prophets and apostles in the full sense a those terms, yet he remained convinced that some measure of light was granted to every man—an unction from the Holy One, enabling each man to discern for himself the things of the Spirit.
The experiences in which Fox heard God's voice were marked by spontaneity, by seeming independence of previous inquiry and reflection. Tom Paine betrays the influence of his Quaker upbringing most clearly when he distinguishes "two distinct classes of what are called thoughts : those that we produce in ourselves by re- flection and the act of thinking and those that bolt into the mind of their own accord." He continues : "I have always made it a rule to treat those voluntary visitors with civility, taking care to examine, as well as I was able, if they were worth entertaining : and it is from them that I have acquired almost all the knowledge I have." Both the welcome and the caution are charat- teristically Quaker.
The early Friends valued such "voluntary visitors" above all book-learning, as the source of true illumination.. But spontaneity did not of itself suffice to establish the divine origin of such revelations or openings. They might be tested by waiting. Did the impression remain or recur, and thus show itself as something more than a casual or wayward thought ? This test of persistence might be supplemented by an appeal to reason in the broad sense of that term. Thoughts of a divine origin will form part of a consistent and progressive moral and intellectual order. When Fox was asked whether the Spirit which led him to refuse to bear arms might not on another occasion prompt him to take up arms against the Government, he replied in effect that the guidance of the Spirit could not be vacillating or self- contradictory.
Such an appeal to reason presupposes acquaintance with some clear tradition as to the line of moral progress. To the early Friends the Scriptures seemed to be essen- tially the record of spiritual guidance in the past, which both justified the expectation of such guidance in the present and provided a standard (a secondary standard, Robert Barclay called it) by which to judge the validity of present-day inspirations. The Quakers were not in bondage to the letter of the Scriptures as the Puritans were apt to be, but they were to be guided by the general drift and tenour of the Scriptures.
If this Scriptural standard be somewhat vague, there is still the court of appeal constituted by the Church or the company of one's fellow-believers—a court -which com- bines, or should combine, the corporate memory of tradi- tion with a living present experience. It was part of the essential greatness of George Fox that he realized the social reference of the principle of the inward light in • every man. He saw that it did not mean that each man had a sufficient light in himself to guide him in isolation, but that each man should have something to contribute to the common stock and should have a capacity to derive insight from association. In examining the voluntary visitors which suddenly invaded his mind, the true Friend submitted his concern to other children of the light for caution or encouragement. And where Friends took counsel with a due sense of personal responsibility and of respect for their fellows, experience and insight were enriched and corporate decisions proved often wiser than individual judgment. Miss Follett, in her books, The New State and Creative Experience, has worked out in detail and independently the social and political impli- cations of the Quaker principle.
A yet more delicate and final test of guidance was found by the spiritually more mature Friends in their awareness of Christ's presence with them. One such Friend writes from prison in 1662 to cheer his brethren : "And what shall I say to you that love the Lord ? Be where ye will, He is company." Those who were privi- leged thus to share the Divine Companionship could readily test the suggestions that flowed into their minds. Thoughts which cast a shadow on this interior friendship or conflicted with it could not be right; while an enhanced sense of Christ's inward comfort would justify the entertainment of a heavenly visitant.
The essential character of Quakerism depends on the tension between this seemingly immediate and first-hand apprehension of God and His Will in moments of insight, and the standards of reference whereby the loyal follower of the inward light is to be saved from sheer fanaticism.
The exaltation of such standards at the expense of the experience may issue in the formal conservatism of a peculiar people, clinging fast to the traditions of abeloved society, when the judgments of one's fellows are erected into something like a final court of appeal. Again, it may issue in forms of Evangelical Quakerism which are hard to distinguish from crude Fundamentalism, when the letter of the Scriptures is regarded as a supreme authority. On the other hand, if attention be concentrated on the experience and the standards of reference are depreciated or ignored, Quakerism tends either to revert to extreme forms of religious individualism which appeal to the crank and the rebel but which Fox by his genius trans- cended, or else to be identified with the non-dogmatic, non-committal outlook of the Seventeenth Century•Seekers, and to become simply a hospitable, tolerant attitude towards all sorts and conditions of faiths and philosophies. But whether the standards of reference be over-emphasized or neglected, the balance is lost which Fox himself struck and maintained.
Theologically, the central principle of Quakerism gives rise to ambiguities, since the universal inward saving light in which Friends believe is capable of many inter- pretations. A universal light, it is easr to assume, must be uniform, constant, and continuous: Many of Fox's later followers have been inclined to identify the inward light With the innate ideas of the Cambridge Platonists or with the revelation of God through Nature to all men, so dear to the Deists, or with the essential goodness, God- like and God-given, of ordinary human nature, so beloved of Rousseau and the Romanticists. But the original Quaker experience was bound up with days of visitation, with the comings of the Lord which men must .prize but may not command. Mr. Bernard Shaw's idea of God laying hold of Blanco Posnet for a particular job, unex- pectedly, has affinities with the Quaker conception. The Light of God shines in every man, and its continuity is the continuity of growth rather than of something uniform and constant. For faithful and obedient indi- viduals and generations it shines more and more unto the perfect day. But the times and seasons of visitation are in God's hands :
"We cannot kindle when we will The fire which in the heart resides ; The spirit bloweth and is still, In mystery our soul abides."
Perhaps the most serious intellectual crux for the modern Quaker lies in the relation of .moments of vision to more prosaic human- experience. Fox distinguished too sharply between thoughts that come unbidden and thoughts that we control and order, just as Bergson opposed too rigidly intuition and intellect. In Dr. Tennant's phrase, Fox confused I the psychical sense of immediacy with actual psychological immediacy, and assumed the absence of media because he was no longer aware of them. He consequently exaggerated the inde- pendence and originality of his openings and under- estimated his spiritual debts. But God is in the ordered thought as well as in the apparent bolt from the blue. Here the modern Quaker has to face theoretical and practical problems of which Fox was unaware. Yet the essential faith in God as primarily the author of all moral and intellectual progress remains unchanged. " There is no religion without revelation, just as there is no science without revelation. And man's one hope is to humble himself to walk with God.
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