George Fox

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21456, 24 April 1935, Page 10

George Fox

The conference of the Society of Friends, which has just ended in Christchurch, draws attention to a body of people, which, though little known in New Zealand, has a most interesting and distinguished history over the last 250 years. The founder of,the Quakers was George Fox. He was born in 1624, and his age was one which produced many men whose religious fervour can only astound us to-day. But with the possible exception of Bunyan, he was the most outstanding of them all. He was not, like Bunyan, a great literary artist, but his amazing energy, his uhflinching practice of what he believed to be right, and his skill in argument make the record of his life, as told in his journal, an absorbingly interesting story. Charles Lamb, at any rate, found it so when he borrowed it , from Skewell, the Quaker historian. " I have read through the ponderous " folio of George Fox," he wrote in a letter to Bernard Barton in 1823. " The kind-hearted owner trusted "it to me for six months; I think "I was as many days in getting " through it, and I do not think that " I skipped ft word of it." Fox's deep religious convictions would require careful analysis and consideration. To his contemporaries they appeared most evident in his refusal to bear weapons of any kind, to take oath, and to remove his hat in the law courts. His judges—and he was constantly on trial—were irritated beyond measure by his conduct and by his ability to justify himself at their expense: long verbal passages between the dock and the bench often occurred, and they make very good reading indeed. At Launceston he asked Judge Glynne, who commanded him and the other Quaker prisoners to take off their

hats, whether any magistrate, king, or judge, from Moses to Daniel, had ever given such a command. The judge ordered him to be taken away.

Presently after [continues the journal] he calls to the jailer, " Bring them up again." " Come," said he, " where had they hats, from Moses to Daniel; come, answer me: I have you fast now." I replied, "Thou mayest read in the third of Daniel that the three children were cast into a fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar's command, with their coats, their hose, and their hats on,"

Fox had a most comprehensive knowledge of the Bible, and he quoted it to good effect again when taxed with not taking the oath by Judge Turner. He asked for a copy of the Bible and said: " The Son " says in this book ' swear not at "'all'; and so also says the Apostle "James. Now, I say as the book " says, and yet ye imprison me. " Why don't ye imprison the book?" Fox adds that it got abroad all over the country "that the Bible was at "liberty and I was in prison for "doing as the Bible said/' It was his excellent memory that served Fox so well, for he could not only recall the Bible, but could trip his judges up on other details. When the justices swore that they had tendered hirn the oath on a certain date he recalled that they were a day out, and was able to accuse them of perjury. Incidentally, for all his verbal tussles with the judges, he married the widow of one of them, Margaret Fell. It must have been this power of repartee that gave Fox his attraction for Lamb, who admits quite a partiality for Quakers in his essay " Imperfect Sympathies." Lamb, who could make a smart answer himself, records with gusto an excellent reply made, not by Fox, but by his successor, William Penn, who was also somewhat of a habitue of courts:

"You will never be the wiser if I sit here answering your questions till midnight," said one of the upright justices to Penn, who had been putting law cases with puzzling subtlety. "Thereafter as the answers may be ; " was the Quaker's retort.

Penn worthily inherited the ready wit of George Fox. But apart from his wit, Fox has a very real claim to distinction for the stand that he made for individual freedom at a time when it was being weighed in the balance in England. Seventeenth century England was in a state almost as chaotic socially as Germany and Russia to-day. Fox had the courage to stand by his convictions against repressive measures which, in their obvious intent to enforce uniformity of religious and national outlook, were very much akin to decrees that are being passed in Europe to-day. To such men as Fox is largely due the credit for the ability of Englishmen to combine the enforcement of law with a healthy tolerance and respect for the man who opposes it on good principles.