Gleanings from the Works of George FoxRichardson, Dorothy M. (Dorothy Miller)
Philosophy
Gleanings from the Works of George Fox
Richardson, Dorothy M. (Dorothy Miller)
Fox, George, 1624-1691; Society of Friends -- Doctrines
His fellows and predecessors, the German mystics of the fourteenth and
seventeenth centuries, brought, it is true, the same message, the same
account of the pathway to reality as did Fox, but they brought it in a
restricted form. They were largely dominated by tradition, they
remained, most of them, within the official church, and those who did
not met secretly and laboured behind closed doors. It was in George Fox
that religious particularism, the outcome of the civilization whose
cradle was the little isolated homesteads upon the Scandinavian fiords,
reached its full flower. With him there re-appears in the form of an
experiment in everyday life, in the heart of the modern state, the truth
that dawned in Palestine sixteen hundred years before, the truth that
was side-tracked but never quite lost amidst the policies, expediencies
and jealousies of the official church, that has been clearing and
elaborating itself with increasing steadiness ever since the seventeenth
century, the truth that only in individuality carried to its full term
can we find the basis of unity. Unity amongst Fox and his followers is
the fruit and fulfilment of separateness. In order truly to love his
neighbour, a man must first love himself. He must achieve singleness of
soul, must discover that within him which is of God; that which "speaks"
with him only in the solitude of his inner being.
The unit, with Fox, is never, except incidentally, the group; never,
except incidentally, the family; but the single human soul faced with
its individual consciousness, the germ of truth, goodness, beauty,
light, love, God, it bears within itself, the seed of God present in all
human kind.
He stands for liberty, for trust and toleration in a day of unchallenged
religious and civil antagonisms and authoritarianisms. He stands for
love, for the essential harmony of the creation in a day when warfare
was the unquestioned and "divinely-appointed" method of settling
international differences, and litigation and debate the accepted
steersmen of private relationships.
III.
This particularist genius and his fellows represent the keenest moment
in one of those periods in its religious experience when humanity
becomes aware of the wider life to which it belongs, when working on,
God-led and God-inspired, part blind, part seeing, making in dark and
desert places the uttermost venture of faith, suddenly, on an instant,
it finds God.
A subsequent enormously enhanced fruitfulness, the amazing development
of "thought" and "science," our long sojourn amidst the great desert of
"facts," the final well-nigh despairing state of spiritual aridity that
synchronised with the neo-Darwinian mechanistic definitions of life, is
now once more in our day giving place to a home-coming, a new phase of
spiritual realization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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