The Message and Mission of QuakerismBraithwaite, William C. (William Charles)
Religion
The Message and Mission of Quakerism
Braithwaite, William C. (William Charles)
Society of Friends
I have now sought to show that Quakerism at its best is always the
product of vital forces, and is always producing vital relations. I
say “at its best”; that is the necessary qualification.
This brings me to my last point. What is needed besides the life of
the Spirit, the life of Jesus Christ in the Church? Surely what we
need is an earnest dedication on the part of those who are seeking to
know Jesus Christ. God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must
worship in spirit and truth.
In the early days of Quakerism men were athirst for the gospel of a
living Christ. In the present day, side by side with much indifference
and indolence there is a wide-spread craving for reality in religion
and life.
Tremendous social problems confront men to-day, new hopes of higher
life are coming to the mass of workers, new convictions and new duties
are dawning on the world, and fresh questions are being raised in the
domains of history, psychology and philosophy. We are probably living
in the midst of as great a period of transition as that which formed
the bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern Europe, and those alone
will find the fuller truth and lead men into it who will bear the
travail and follow the trail of the Seekers of the Light. We want men
who will get on the top of the situation, men in the spirit of George
Fox. When he was overwhelmed by the confusion of the year of anarchy
that preceded the Restoration of 1660, he lay in great exercise of
spirit at Reading for ten weeks and he writes:
“And so when I had travailed with the witness of God which they had
quenched and gotten through with it and over all that hypocrisy ... I
came to have ease and the Light shined over all.”[3]
[Footnote 3: _Cambridge Journal_, i, 343.]
It is the duty of the Church to discountenance all the manifold
insincerities which disfigure our current Christianity, and to give
free scope to honest-hearted love of truth. Sincerity is a plant that
thrives under freedom and light, but withers under authority. The
Church must use methods of illumination and education and fellowship
as its means for cherishing true-hearted allegiance to the Lord. It
will find these methods more fruitful than methods of authority.
Methods of authority may secure an artificial conformity, but it will
always be at some expense of sincerity.
Jesus resolutely turned His back on the quickly won Kingdom of God, to
be made up of those who gave Him external obedience; He set Himself to
the slow achievement of an inward Kingdom, which should gather men
into willing discipleship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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