William Penn Lecture
1941
The Vital Cell
Delivered at
Arch Street Meeting House
Philadelphia
by
Rufus M. Jones
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
Haverford College
FOREWORD
I shall assume that those to whom I am speaking
today are young, at least as young as I am. The age which
the calendar reveals for each one of us is not very
important, nor is the size of our bald spot; nor the grayness of our
hair. The really important thing is the quality of freshness
and elasticity in our spirits. There is no use talking to
minds that have congealed and set, and whose windows are
not open for new light to dawn, and expectant of it.
This Lectureship is sponsored by young Friends. This is
their hour and I am their spokesman. There is no use
saying anything about the local Meeting as a vital cell unless
the youth are to be in it and are to feel their share
of responsibility for its life and its development. Much that
I am saying today will call for courage and faith and
adventure and newness of vision, which characteristically belong
to youth.
Published 1941 by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
Republished electronically © 2004 by Quaker Heron Press
http://pamphlets.quaker.org
email: [email protected]
THE VITAL CELL
There is a tendency, which of course is quite
natural, to appraise Quakerism by its public occasions, by its
World Conferences, its Five Years Meetings, its Yearly
Meetings, or by its impressive work of service for World causes.
Here are objective facts and definite records which the
wayfaring man and the news reporter can read. The fresh
experiments in Peace making, carried on in the midst of the
destruction and hate of wartimes, and in areas of conflict in
peacetime, have quite naturally attracted wide and
sympathetic attention. It has been plain to see that there is a
more excellent way of life which can be and has been practiced
in the midst of agony and violence. That is worth taking
note of and it has been widely signalized.
A few great personalities have given a very
impressive character to the entire Quaker Movement. George Fox
is now recognized as one of the major spiritual prophets of
the period since the Reformation. Coleridge and
Emerson, Charles Lamb and Carlyle, George Bancroft and
William James, are a few of the distinguished men of Letters,
outside the Society of Friends, who have seen his full stature
and have raised him, to a commanding position.
William Penn, as the founder of one of
America's greatest Commonwealths, the exponent of a Holy
Experiment with the ideals of Democracy, and a writer of
commanding style, became the Quaker par
excellence in the mind of the French, in the eighteenth century, and he has always
held a place of rank by the side of George Fox. John Woolman
is the outstanding saint in Quaker History, and he has
come to be thought of as the Saint Francis of the Quakers.
In courage of conviction, in wisdom and persistence of
method of attacking a gigantic evil, and in his quiet but
extraordinary reliance on Divine guidance, he is in a class alone by
himself. To add to his just fame he had a unique style of
writing which has made his Journal the classic to which
Charles Lamb and Charles William Eliot and Sir Frederick
Pollock and many others have given generous recognition.
Elizabeth Fry, though not quite, I think, the equal of these three
in quality or importance, has, by her remarkable service
to humanity, taken her place in the list of the greatest
Quaker figures of History, where also John Greenleaf Whittier
and John Bright belong.
The Quaker contribution to education has
received marked attention and has added to the high appraisal
which the public has awarded to the Quaker movement. There
are ten Quaker Colleges in America, some of them of first
rank in the estimation of educators. Johns Hopkins
University, Cornell University and Bryn Mawr College, each owes
its foundation to a Quaker, and Brown University recognizes
a large debt to the famous Quaker Moses Brown and his
family. In the field of primary and secondary education the
Quakers have been not less creative and have shown equal
leadership, which in some of our States has permanently affected
the prevailing school system of the State, if not of the
country. But when all is said and done, and the accounts are all
in, not many Quakers have been great, not many have
been distinguished, and our contribution to the moral
and spiritual wealth of the world does not bulk very large.
We have not produced statesmen who have plotted the
course of History. We have made but feeble contribution to
the theological thinking of the world. We have contributed
little to the perennial stream of truth through the years and
for the ages to come. Our deepest significance as a people,
and our major importance as a religious movement, lie in a
sphere which eludes public appraisal and can hardly be
taught and tabulated. In fact this central mission of ours _
this heart and pulse of Quakerism _ has not always been
brought to consciousness even to Friends themselves, and is
always in need of fresh interpretation at the home base where if
at all the scoring is done.
What is it we were born to do; for what mission
came we into the world as the bearers and exponents? As I
see our mission, across the years behind us and in front of
us, it is to demonstrate and exhibit a type of religion
which reveals the life of God in the lives of men. The Gospel
we proclaim and incarnate claims that God is forever
humanly revealing Himself, loving, yearning, suffering,
sacrificing, redeeming, working now, as of old in Galilee and
Judea. The Real Presence of God here with us is the heart of
our faith. The discovery that all life, in our meetings, at
our meals and in our day's work and business, can be and
should be a sacrament is one of our most distinguishing
features. We stand for a religion of first-hand conviction, a
religion rooted and grounded in experience, a religion
whose authority is as little endangered by science and
higher criticism as is the authority of the multiplication table,
or the truth that the three angles of a triangle are equal to
two right angles.
The one danger here is the danger of losing the significance of man's spirit as a reality of the eternal
order. Our Quaker Movement has caught up and continued in
the world the faith that God created man in His own image
and after His own likeness. There can be no question that we
as persons have biological traits and that the mark of the
animal is on us, as the hairs on our arms indicate, and in us,
as many of our instincts suggest. But something else,
and something higher, is just as unmistakable in our
structure. The divine likeness does not lie in external conformity.
It consists in spirituality of being, in a moral and
spiritual integrity of soul. He has made us for immortal life and
has set eternity in us. "The spirit of man," as a great text of
the Bible says, "is a candle, a flame, of the Lord."
We do carry in us, deep at the center, something
that is not of the biological order, something that makes man
a being of infinite worth. This religion of life and of
suffering love, this religion which makes man a being of infinite
worth, would be bound, if it is genuine, to flower out into
human service, and to share the burden of human suffering, and
to be concerned about the culture of the mind and the soul
of children and youth, and to take up the task of
the peacemaker, as has been the case with the Quakers, but
its central inner significance as a religious movement can
come to light and does come to light at its best and highest in
the practice of mutual and reciprocal correspondence of
man with God. If the evidence of the truth and reality of
this intimate relation between God and man should fade
out, and if man should come to be considered by us, as well
as by the world, only as a top-notch biological specimen,
then the whole Quaker structure would, I am convinced,
topple down like a house of cards. Its strength and its genius as
a religious movement lie deeply centered in this inner
junction of the soul with God, tested and verified not merely in
the lives of a few rare saints, but rather in the experience of
the rank and file of us in our three hundred years of history.
The laboratory of our faith, then, is not in our
occasional great public gatherings, or in events which attract
the photographers and reporters, but in our local
Meetings scattered across the country, from South China in
Maine, our easternmost post, to Long Beach in California, one
of the farthest west of our Meetings. It is in these vital
cells that our life really centers, as life always does; it is
here that the life-stream of our faith is fed, or fails to find its
true supplies. These little islands of ours, surrounded by a
secular world of drive and grind, are the real experiment stations
of the spiritual life where it is being settled whether we are
to be the purveyors of light and life and love and truth,
or whether we are to end in sterility, like Abana and
Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, which end in desert sand.
The primary function of these local meetings, these
vital cells of our Quaker movement, is spiritual refreshment
and the sustaining of souls in the meeting for worship.
This spiritual refreshment, I shall assume, is the central
feature of a local Quaker community. I know that at the
highest moment of worship self is entirely out of conscious
focus, and there is no thought of refreshing or equipping
or fortifying the soul. The worshipper is so entirely in love
with God that he is not calculating about returns. He
forgets himself, loses himself, in his outpouring and upreach
of love and adoration. But that forgetting and that losing
of self is precisely the way to health and refreshment
and restoration. There is no way to find yourself until you
discover how utterly to lose yourself.
A genuine Friends Meeting must be something
more than a number of individual atoms occupying the space
in a meeting house. So long as the "atoms" hold on to
their precious individualism and remain detached, the
worship will not rise to any great height. Worship at its best
and truest is corporate. The walls of insulation fall away.
The pluralism vanishes. The many members are fused into
one body. Each helps all and all help each. Robert Barclay
has beautifully described this fusing of life into a corporate
unity. "As many candles lighted," he says, "and put in one
place, do greatly augment the light, and make it more to
shine forth, so when many are gathered together into the
same life, there is more of the glory of God, and His power
appears, to the refreshment of each individual, for he partakes
not only of the light and life raised, in himself, but in all
the rest." Barclay adds his own testimony: "I myself am a
true witness; for when I came into the silent assemblies of
God's people, I felt a secret power among them which touched
my heart, and as I gave way unto it, I found the evil in
me weakening, and the good raised up." Isaac Penington
said something very similar out of his experience: "They
[the members of a meeting] are like a great heap of burning
coals, warming one another, as a great strength, freshness
and vigor of life flows into all." Whittier has given the best
account I know of this depth-life in a meeting group. It is
the description of a meeting in "Pennsylvania Pilgrim."
"Without spoken words, low breathings stole
Of a diviner life from soul to soul,
Baptizing in one tender thought the whole."
This great sacramental experience is not confined
to seventeenth century meetings. It is not something over
and done with. I have been in meetings like those which
Barclay and Whittier celebrate. I have seen tears roll down faces
in the gathered silence, and I have felt the sacramental
power fuse the group into the communion of a united whole.
But this does not happen unless at least some of the
members go to meeting prepared for this supreme business of
the soul, and unless there is in the meeting a widespread
attitude of expectancy. Worship is mutual and reciprocal
corres-pondence, and it calls for a double search _ a reaching
up from below and a divine movement of grace downward
from Above.
Hardly less important and significant for the
spiritual life of a meeting is its constructive and creative
ministry. There are perhaps some seasoned Friends who find
their souls sufficiently fed in the silence, who do not need, or
at least think they do not need, the ministry of spoken
words. But most persons who compose a congregation are
carrying burdens, often too heavy to be borne, and there are
always some who are "oppressed by the heavy and weary weight
of all this unintelligible world": and who need a
lift. They look for inspiration and guidance. They want to have
the significance of life and the grounds of immortality
brought to light.
All great ministry is ministry of interpretation of
life. We are at the present moment weak in this ministry
of interpretation, and weak in the lifting power of messages
of illumination and inspiration. There is a place _ an
important place _ for brief testimony, for the few words of
experience, or of Scripture reference, or of quotation from the
ripe experience of others, but there ought to be much
oftener than usually happens that other type of ministry
which opens windows for the soul, and which raises the
whole level of life for the entire congregation. Such a message
ought to be followed by a deepened silence, and if more words
are said after the silence, they should, if possible, fit and
carry on the message that has spread over the meeting.
Preaching if it is true preaching ought not to interrupt the worship;
it ought to continue the spirit of worship.
But how is it in the range of possibility in most of
our meetings to expect such ministry of interpretation
and illumination? Well, one of the main difficulties is that it
has not been expected, and very little has been done to
encourage and foster this type of ministry, and to nurture and
develop it in persons who revealed a potential gift. It is just as
true today as it was when it was "opened" to George Fox, in
1647, that Oxford and Cambridge cannot "make a minister
of Christ." But what is not so often "opened" to the
Friends who have the responsibility for the life of our meetings
is that no one, however divinely gifted with the
spiritual afflatus, is likely to be miraculously equipped for the
creative interpretation of life in our generation.
Life in our times has been profoundly secularized by
a thousand drives and influences. But one of the most
subtle and insidious of all these influences has been the
scientific implication that man is merely a complicated
biological specimen, the later offspring of flat nosed baboons, and
in the last analysis the curiously shaped product of the
earth's crust _ of the earth earthy. It can hardly be expected
that one can lift life up in all its spiritual significance and
make an effective demonstration of the life of God operating in
the life of man, or to give convincing evidence that Christ is
a life-giving Spirit to modern groups without a certain
amount of intellectual background. There has been a
widespread loss of faith in immortality, which naturally goes with
the acceptance of a biological estimate of man, and
Friends greatly need to have the eternal aspect of life brought
to light with power and authority. But that cannot be done
by merely quoting texts of Scripture. It comes back once
more to the call for a deepened interpretation of life by
persons who have faced the issues, who understand the problems
of our time and can speak to the age in demonstration
and power.
A great many persons who have gone to Haverford College in my period have gone into the ministry in
other churches. Some of the students have become
effective Quaker interpreters of life, but many more should have
been and, I am convinced, would have been if they had
received the right encouragement from their home meetings.
The point I am now making is so vital that it may be taken,
I think, as crucial for our continued existence as a
people. This is a new age of "seekers," the world has turned to
us with extraordinary expectation. Why is it so few join
us? Why is it that some of our oldest meetings are slowly
dying before our eyes? The answer is clear and plain.
"Seekers" are often disillusioned when they visit our meetings.
They look up too often and are not fed. In many cases they do
not find the answer; they do not have their condition spoken
to. They go away sadly, and they wonder. I should not say it,
if it were not so, and of course I am not thinking primarily
of these two yearly meetings in Philadelphia, and I am
well aware that there are notable meetings, fully alive and
pretty well filling the need of the times.
Our main question is, How is this situation to be
met? How are weak meetings to become strong? There is no
easy answer. It calls for the most searching cooperative and
long continued effort of prophet-statesmen in the whole
Society. Many yearly meetings have tried to solve it by
introducing the pastoral system. That has not solved it, and
probably will not solve it, though it has brought fresh life and a
more effective ministry into many meetings in the areas where
it prevails. And something can be learned by an impartial
study of this experiment. It was a bold but radical attempt to
arrest the decline which was ominously in evidence in the
seventies and eighties of the last century, and to bring life into
places where there was deadness. It was open to two dangers.
It did not wisely enough comprehend the spiritual genius
of the Quaker method of worship and the essential
conditions of it. And in the second place it was an easy step for
the meeting to become directed and regimented and
brought into line with the order of service common to most
evangelical Churches. With it came the tendency to call the meeting
a "church," to lose the distinctive aspects of the Society
of Friends as a free, democratic, spiritual movement, and
to treat it as one more sectarian Church, alongside the
great list of Protestant denominational and creedal Churches.
That did not always happen, but it has been a
well-marked tendency. What is the alternative, or, better still, the
alternatives? Of course, one alternative is to go on slowly dying out.
That is certain to happen if nothing is done to check the
decline which over a term of years is unmistakable. I believe
that much could be accomplished by carefully
planned intervisitation. There are highly gifted persons in a
few meetings, who ought to circulate much more than is
now the case. Their absence occasionally from their own
meeting would throw the sense of responsibility on other
members of it, which would have a wholesome effect, and they
would bring fresh life and inspiration where they visited. It
is impossible for me to overestimate the importance of the
visits of Friends in the ministry to our meeting in the days of
my youth. It made all things new and wonderful to the little
boy who could predict almost infallibly what our own
members would do and say. But a new voice, a new vision, a
new personality, made all the difference and woke him up to
the rich meaning of his Quaker inheritance.
For the most part those visitors came on their
own initiative with an inward sense of urge. It was a part of
the psychological climate of the Society of Friends in those
days that sooner or later, and usually sooner, every
prominent Friend would be "moved" to go out on one of these
far-flung visits, and the whole Society was fed and nurtured by
such messengers. The times have changed, and the
psychological climate has altered. It is fairly easy to explain the
change, but it is not necessary to do so. The fact of the altered
climate is obvious. I see no reason why it is not just as much
a divine leading and just as spiritual a procedure to have
the concern for a visit originate with the meeting as with
the individual. If the concerned Friends of a meeting,
which would usually include the Overseers and Elders, were
awake to the needs of their meeting, they could invite some
Friend to visit them for a weekend, or perhaps for a longer time,
so that there might be an opportunity for family visits as
of old. Friends' Fellowship Council is fully alive to
the significance and importance of this work of
intervisitation, and it could be of much assistance in making
arrangements for it.
But first of all it is essential that there shall be in
each meeting an alert group of Friends who feel a
profound concern for the spiritual life of the meeting. The local
meeting of ministers and elders should be enlarged to include
the overseers and other, weighty Friends, and they should
be the Pastoral Committee of the Meeting, concerned
for shepherding the flock, visiting families, encouraging
Friends who minister, opening the way for Friendly visits, and
for special meetings and in every possible way nurturing
the youth and deepening the spiritual life of the meeting.
They must endeavor to get out of old, deeply plowed ruts,
static ways, and have everything done with freshness and
vitality. We must get over being afraid of newness, and be ready
to venture and to experiment, with what St. Paul called
a constant "renewing of the mind."
In larger meetings a secretary to the meeting will be
a source of strength and efficiency, and, if my proposal, to
be made later, for local service work should come to fruition,
a secretary would be almost essential for the fuller life of
the meeting, and especially for the leadership among the
youth of the meeting. We are concerned in this lecture with
making the local meeting a vital Quaker cell, and that means
that we cannot be satisfied, as a Friend once put it, to "do
our little work in our little way." We must use all the
spiritual wisdom and gifts of life God has imparted to us to
make that cell of life vital and creative.
George Fox gave as his test of a meeting the call
to make it a power house, what today we should call a
filling station. His word to Friends of his day was: "Hold all
your meetings in the power of God." Few tests would make
us more humble than that. Is the meeting a
laboratory demonstration that God and man meet in mutual
and reciprocal correspondence? The time has come for us to
focus on what is primary in importance, and to be
open-minded and conciliatory on all matters of secondary
importance. Through all the Quaker generations, from George Fox to
the present time, the central feature of the Quaker
movement has been the reality of the life of God in the lives of
Quaker men and women. Even in that dull period of strict
discipline, of the regulation of garb and speech, and legislation on
the height of gravestones, there was a succession of saints
who had a divine anointing, who had the Name written on
their foreheads and who "knew God experimentally."
If these meetings of ours, these vital cells, are to
be power-stations, they must feel a much greater sense
of responsibility than they now do for the welfare of
the community in which they live. There can be no question,
I think, that our humanitarian work through the
Service Committee has profoundly affected the attitude of the
world, and particularly of the other churches, toward us, but
what is much more important is the fact that it has
heightened our own spiritual power, increased our corporate unity,
and made us much more conscious of our divine mission in
the world. These local cells would in like manner be vitalized,
if they took up in a corresponding manner and degree
the work of ministering to the needs, or some aspect of the
needs, of their local communities. Not long ago a social
worker knocked at the door of a home in his community, A
woman opened the door a few inches and said: "You needn't
come in here, me and my husband, we don't take no interest
in nothin'." You can see her starved life, her poor, thin,
single-track existence.
But the sad fact is that there are persons like her
within easy reach of almost every meeting house. There are
boys and girls to be shepherded. There are sorrows and
hungers to be relieved, as real, if not as poignant, as those
Elizabeth Fry found in Newgate. We have too easily assumed that
a local Quaker Meeting lives unto itself, is responsible
only for its own worship and ministry, can then shake
hands and go home to a good dinner. That is not enough. It is
an eternal principle of life itself that it can be saved only
through self-giving. Life takes on the glow of consecration only
when it "loses" itself for the sake of others. These little
Quaker islands of ours, which dot the length and breadth of
our country, would stir with new life if they suddenly
found themselves awake to the tasks of life which lie ready to
hand just there where they live. This deeper responsibility to
the community would bring new life and deepened interest
to the monthly meetings which in many places have
become dull and thin.
A monthly meeting ought to have live and
quickening interests. Few things are more deadening than
perfunctory performances, dull routine wheezing occasions,
which everybody, especially everybody under forty, dreads.
Either such meetings ought to be freshened up by bringing in
new creative interests, or the number of meetings should
be reduced. Fifth wheels, with no functions, should be
removed. There is no reason why to the end of time
functionless meetings should be carried on, just because they have
always been carried on. Where there is little or no business
that needs attention in small meetings, the number of
monthly meetings held in the year might profitably be reduced
to four, and these four made vital occasions. The first
principle of spiritual efficiency is that no meetings shall be dull
and dead.
We are always in danger of having Ezekiel's vision
come true of wheels within wheels, wheels above wheels
and wheels underneath wheels, hoping always that some of
these wheels, as in the Negro spiritual, "turn by the grace of
God." It is just as serious for a meeting to be regimented by
the heavy hand of unexamined custom and habit as it is to
be regimented by other ways that we fear and dread. Each
age must find fresh and living ways of solving its problems
and doing its work, and not go on using static and
mechanized customs, merely because they have the sanction of
years behind them. We ought to get rid of our dead wood
and have "fresh groves and pastures new."
One of the most important concerns of this vital
cell ought to be for the spiritual nurture of the children
and youth of the meeting. The very continuing life of the
meeting depends on it. Imagine a military Chief of airplane
service who should build up a vast fleet of planes and then
do nothing to train the men who are to "fly" them. Well,
in some things the children of this world are wiser than
the children of light. Mothers in India begin training
their children to meditate when they are four years old. When
do our Quaker families begin to train their children in
the significance of silent worship and communion? We are in
a world beset with noises, with radio and jazz and movies
and dance and war and horrors. If ever the spirit needed to
be calmed and deepened with the reality of God, it is now.
But these infinite and eternal treasures of the soul do not
come without care and oversight and training. The dins and
noises, the hum and go, and secular attractions, beat in on us
on every side unsolicited. But the slow formation of
spiritual ideals and counter attractions which build the soul
and shape the character come only through patient
and painstaking nurture. To go along and keep step with
the prevailing mass-culture of our age, with its din and
noise, is to make a major betrayal of our Quaker faith.
That period of quietism in our Society, which we
are apt to call dull and peculiar, at one point at least was
superior to our present Quaker way of life. It had a high technique
of spiritual nurture. It got its Quaker ideals across to its
youth, and the home and the meeting passed on the torch to
the new generation. We cannot revive and adopt their
technique. It is past and gone with its century. Our task is to create
a new technique which fits our age and our mental
climate. But it must be done, or we shall fail at the source.
The home is the true place for this nurture, and
the atmosphere of the home is more important than any
overt method of training. Where the meeting becomes a vital
cell it will quietly invade the homes of its members with a
calm creative spirit and with new moulding forces. One
immediate effect of the vitalization of the meeting will be, I trust,
the silent renewing of the spirit of the homes that constitute
it. Nothing is more important for the rebuilding of the
moral structure of our national life, and the reconstruction of
the social order of the world, than restoration of the home
as the center of spiritual culture. Love is the greatest thing
in the world, and there is no substitute for the home as
the formative center for the growth and ripening of love.
But the meeting has a more direct duty to its
children and youth. Provision should be made for telling the
children the story of the Quaker movement in interesting
and attractive ways. It is a thrilling epic, full of heroic
events which children love. I used to sit and listen to "the life
and sufferings of Sarah Grubb," but there are better
methods now than that of reading of Journals,
mainly full of experiences foreign to our youth today. The aims, the
ideals, the foundation principles will always appeal if well
presented, and children respond very quickly to the reality of the
divine presence when they have an opportunity to feel it
and practice it, for children belong to the Kingdom of God
and expect to find God.
One of the most important features of this work
of nurture which falls to the home and local meeting will
be the training of heart and mind and spirit, the emotions
and the instincts, for the comprehension, the realization
and the expression of the Quaker Peace Testimony. Every
time there comes a war-crisis, and the issues are sharply
drawn, a large number of our youth meet it with confused
minds. Each time there is a war, it is ostensibly presented as
the occasion _ probably the last occasion _ to defend
and safeguard some profound and essential moral principle.
The war is fought in turn to end slavery, to end war, to
end fascism and save democracy. It looks each time as though
a supreme issue were at stake, and as though a
live-blooded man, with any stuff in him, must hear the call and be
ready to make the last full measure of devotion and sacrifice.
That of course is the natural way for a heroic spirit to react,
and there are always Friends in these crises who
spontaneously react that way.
There is always a larger group who are thrown
into mental confusion. They feel a stop in their mind. They
halt between two opinions. They hate war. They abhor
the thought of killing. They know vaguely the historic
position of the Society to which they belong. But they cannot
clarify their minds. They cannot get a clear and decisive voice
of conscience. They hate to go back on the cause for
which their fellows are dying. And so the moral issues are
batted back and forth in their minds, and they are unable to find
a sticking place. The words that are frequently used for
the person who is dedicated to the Peace Testimony have a
feeble sound and are negative words of weakness. "Pacifist" is
a noble word, if it is taken to mean
peace-maker, but it is usually pronounced and taken as "passivist," a person
who reneges and proposes to do nothing. It is an
ignominious position and one shorn of heroic fire or moral
passion. "Conscientious objector," shortened and further
weakened to "C.O.," is equally negative and unsatisfactory, if
not opprobrious. It is time we got our Quaker position over
into the glowing affirmative, and made it stand out as
the strikingly heroic position, the hero's choice of issues.
We can do that only by the dedication of the
entire inner being of ourself to a way of life which is seen and
felt and known to be good in itself, good without
any qualifications. It must be an adventure one enlists in for
his whole life, and not merely for the duration of a war. It
must be a holy experiment with forces of the Spirit, an
unceasing effort to put love and truth into circulation in the
currents of human life. It involves an uncompromising faith in
Christ's way of overcoming the world, not by miracle, not by a
legion of angels, but by self-giving, adventurous, sacrificial
love, that never lets go, never fails, but bears and endures
all things to the end. It is a lasting experiment year in and
year out to do away with the causes and occasions for war,
by removing, or aiming to remove, the fundamental
grounds and evils from which war springs. It endeavors to
eliminate the roots and seeds of it in the social order, and to form,
or to endeavor to form, an atmosphere and climate that
is unfavorable to war. This experiment with the armor of
light and the weapons of the Spirit, this purpose to overcome
evil by the forces of goodness, cannot come to a halt when
the larger world, not yet committed to the experiment,
decides to resort to guns and bombs, to slaughter and
destruction. The Quaker ideals cannot be dropped to suit the shift
of weather. The experiment cannot take a vacation or
a furlough. It continues in all weathers, even in
hurricanes and tornadoes.
If any one asks, why in a world depending on
weapons of violence and destruction, we go on with what seems
like a precarious experiment, we answer, first that it is
Christ's way, and we believe that He calls us to it, and that
the eternal will of God is fulfilled that way. In the second
place we believe that it is the most effective way to deal with
the issues of life, and in the third place it is the only way
to safeguard the infinitely precious treasure of man's
divinely touched personality. The most important thing in
the universe is to save and transmit Christ's estimate of
man, His spirit, His ideals of life and His way of life. That is
the experiment to which we are dedicated.
It is obvious, then, that neither of the twins
whose names begin with "Non" _ neither non-resistance nor
non-violence _ is good enough for our purpose. And it would
still be deficient if we had quintuplets named "Non."
Withdrawals and refusals, and the whole battle-line of negations,
leave the central problem of life unsolved. Nobody cares very
much for what we do not think or believe or stand for, or refuse
to do. The real issue is what peradventure we are going to
do with these recurrent crises that successively confront
us. Of course we are going to be non-violent in the face
of violence, for violence builds no kingdoms of the spirit,
but unfortunately non-violence does not of itself build kingdoms.
I have always loved Gerard Winstanley's confession
of faith: "My mind was not at rest because nothing was
acted; and thoughts ran in me that words and writings were
nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost
not act thou doest nothing." It is an over-statement, but it
is the kernel of the matter. In this business of
building kingdoms of truth or peace or love in the world,
thou must act. The action must be as brave, as fearless, as
sacrificial, as self-forgetful, as is the soldier's. We cannot sever
ourselves from community life, from public responsibilities. We
are tied in and enmeshed in the social order, and we cannot
cut the human connections which are as deep as life. When
we say: "Here I stand. I cannot fight with weapons
of destruction," we are bound by our inward convictions
to fling ourselves at some creative human task that will
help to build or rebuild the kingdom of love in the world. What
is done for that purpose ought as far as possible to be
a demonstration of the spirit of love and reconciliation.
We have in the past endeavored to make our demonstration of love and conservation effective on
both sides of the conflict. We rebuilt the French villages
which the Germans destroyed in the last war, and then we
went over the line and fed the German children. We brought
relief in Vienna, and at the same time plowed the fields and
fought the Typhus in the regions of Poland which the Austrian
army had desolated. We fed the children on both sides of
the warring lines in Spain. That principle of creative love
and reconciliation, that demonstration of the spirit, that
builds a kingdom of peace, is the more excellent way, which we
as a people cherish and practice. Our method of nurture
must build this spirit, this way, into the inner fiber of our
youth. We must form insight and conviction, vision and ideals,
in their souls. We must aim to organize and sublimate
natural instincts and make them the driving forces of
deep-lying faiths and ideals of life. There is no easy way in this
rugged world. We must pass over from the supremacy of things
to the supremacy of personality, and we must put the note
of eternity into all our activities and our concerns of time.
Finally, as St. Paul would say, we must take
ourselves much more seriously than we usually do _ at least
as seriously as the world takes us! We must be more
adjustable, more responsive to the Spirit of God who goes on before
us to lead us into greater truth and larger life for
ourselves and for the world. We must, too, draw much more than
we now do upon the leadership of our youth. Early
Quakerism was in the main a youth movement. George Fox was
twenty-three when he launched the movement, and
twenty-eight when he found "the Seekers" and organized the
Society. James Parnell was nineteen when he died a martyr to
the new cause. Edward Burrough, the son of Thunder,
was nineteen when he began his remarkable career of
leadership. John Audland was twenty-two. James Nayler was eight
years older than Fox, but still a young man. Richard
Farnsworth, one of the chief leaders of the movement in the North,
and William Dewsbury, the sweetest and wisest of the
leaders, were about the same age as George Fox. Richard Smith,
the first Quaker on the American Continent, was
apparently young and certainly a leader. Of the eleven Argonauts
who came over in the ship Woodhouse and planted
Quakerism in New England and on Long Island _ all but one _
William Brend, the chaperone of the party, were young, as was
Mary Fisher who preceded them. One of them, Christopher
Holder, had an ear cropped off, and one of them, William
Robinson, a youth of college age, was hung for his faith on
Boston Common. These men and women had very early in life
found their way to the heart of the new movement. Robert
Barclay was eighteen when he became a Friend, and
twenty-eight when he published the first edition of his famous
Apology. He was only forty-two when he died.
If we are to have a revival of spiritual power, our
youth must be at the front of it. And we must as Friends live in
a world of reality, and adjust our lives to the vital issues
of the present and the future. Never has this Society of
ours been more needed in the world than in this critical period
of human history, but we cannot be "matched with this
hour" without fresh awakening and a deep renewal of heart
and mind and vision. We need to feel the experience of
which Isaac Penington wrote from his Jail to Thomas Ellwood,
who was also at the time in Jail: "May the eye and heart in
thee be kept open, and mayest thou be kept close to the
feelings of life, and thy spirit be kept fresh in the midst of
thy sufferings. Mayest thou find everything pared off
which hindereth the bubblings of the everlasting springs,
the breaking forth of the Pure Power."