V.

If Fox had been only the liberator of the mystical forces moving and quickening under the drying crust of official and authoritarian theology, he would have left on the outward form of the religious life of his country as little mark as did his great brother Boehme on his. But he was more than liberator. He was also steersman. It was his organizing genius that laid the foundation of a new religious culture; a culture in which sacraments and symbols, politics and authoritarianism should play no part—a culture which took no account of “persons,” “notions,” or “theories,” which put being before “knowing,” intuition before intellection, which dared to trust in and enquire of women, not in name only, but in fact.

The vitality of the society he founded is the test of the organizing genius of this “madman.”

It has had its critical period. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it sank into Quietism, and thence back to a pre-Quaker pietist biblicism, in which the nature of Fox’s contribution to religion—his restatement, both in life and in church method of the immediacy, the “originality” of the Christ-life, the life of God in man—was almost lost to view. But the culture-ground, the means of grace, the Quaker “method” of quiet waiting on God, the unflinching faith, remained untouched, the little church survived and in due time revival took place. To-day, in spite of the strong leaven of biblicism, the Quaker church serves (as I have pointed out elsewhere)[1] as a sorting-house for mystics and persons of the mystical type, and lies a radiating centre of divine common-sense, of practical loving wisdom at the heart of English religious life.