THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3673, 5 August 1924, Page 67

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

[ALL RIGHTS RESB.IVI.D )

HALF HOURS IN A LIBRARY.

By

A. H. Grinling.

LXXII.—ON GEORGE FOX AND THE QUAKERS. It is curious how one thing leads to another; engaged in an investigation of the history of the Garnetts, I took from its shelf a copy of Dr Richard Garnett’s book on Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonisation of South Australia and New Zealand, in the “Builders of Great Britain” series, and turning its pages, my eye caught the sentence that the branch of the family of Wakefield established near Kendal, in Westmoreland, “embraced Quakerism soon after its promulgation in the middle of the seventeenth century.” And Richard Garnett went on to say— The profession and consistent maintenance of unpopular opinions, when not absolutely perverse or fanatical, is usually a token of moral strength, evincing independence of mind in the first instance, and tenacity of conviction in the second. Hence the influence of small nonconforming sects surviving through several generations, a choice remnant sifted out by a slow, selective process from age to age, is out of all proportion to their numbers; and much of this power and worth continue even with the families which have eventually relapsed into the general current, as has been the case with the majority of the Westmoreland Wakefields. This set me pondering as to how far the subsequent development of the Dominion of New Zealand was due to the Quaker ancestry of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This ancestry Dr Garnett carefully traces back to a Roger Wakefield who lived at Challon Hall in the village of Preston-Patrick, six miles south of Kendall, in 1592. This Roger Wakefield was in the habit of going and returning a twenty-four miles’ journey to “a possibly silent meeting,” but “the mere fact of his Quakerism in those days of intolerance reveals him as a man of resolute conviction.” Roger Wakefield died in 1724, and his son Roger also lived and died at Preston-Patrick. The second Roger’s second son, Edward, went to London, and became a prosperous merchant, marrying Isabella Gibbon, a distant relative of the historian. The pair were father and mother to another Edward Wakefield, who, inheriting a fortune, failed in business, and had as son another Edward, born in 1774. “The Wakefield family, says Dr Garnett, “possessed a fine irregular genius for marriage, and one characteristic of their unions was precocity. The first and second Edwards had each married at 21; the third broke the record by espousing Susannah Crash, daughter of a farmer at Felsted, Essex, at 17, the marriage taking place on October 3rd, 1791.” Of this marriage was born Edward Gibbon Wakefield, eldest son and second child of a family of nine, in London on March 20, 1796. Dr Garnett quotes Lord Norton as saying: “To Wakefield is due the chief merit in restoring our colonial policy—to let colonies be extensions of England, with the same constitution as at home — only not represented in the House of Commons, because of the thousands of miles of sea to cross—with their own Parliaments on the spot, and Governments responsible to them under the Queen’s viceroys, who connect them with the supremacy.” It is a fair deduction that the work of Wakefield’s forcible pen and ever-ready tongue, the two weapons which he mainly used in his battles for British Empire colonisation, was the outcome of the strong conviction and indomitable perseverance born in him by his Quaker ancestry. As showing Wakefield’s wonderful foresight, nearly a hundred years ago he delivered an eloquent speech on suitable fields for emigration, in the course of which he said: — Very near to Australia there is a country which all testimony concurs in describing as the fittest country in the world for colonisation ; as the most beautiful country, with the finest climate and the most productive soil, I mean New Zealand. It will be said that New Zealand does not belong to the British Crown, and that is true, but Englishmen are beginning to colonise New Zealand. New Zealand is coming under the dominion of the British Crowm. Adventurers go from New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land and make a treaty with a native chief, a tri-partite treaty, the poor chief not understanding a single word about it; but they make a contract upon parchment, with a great seal; for a few trinkets and a little gunpowder they obtain land. After a time. * after some persons have settled, the Government begins to receive hints that there is a regular settlement of English people formed in such a place; and then the Government at home generally has been actuated by a wish to appoint a governor and says, “This spot belongs to England, we will send out a governor.” The act of sending out a governor, according to British constitution, or law, or practice, constitutes the place to which a governor is sent a British province. We are, I think, going to colonise New Zealand, though we be doing so in a most slovenly and scrambling and disgraceful manner. From Richard Garnett’s life of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, I went instinctively to George Fox’s Journal, moved thereto by the remembrance that Fox was born in 1624, and that the tercentenary celebrations of that event were due. In his recently published volume on “English Diaries,” Mr Arthur Ponsonby says: “A diary differs from autobiography, as in the one we get the fresh relation of events at the moment, and in the other the events are moulded and trimmed into

a uniform whole, more often than not with a view to publication, such, for instance, as George Fox’s Journal, which is not a daily record, but an autobiographical survey.” He who desires to understand the real history of the English people during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, says a commentator, should read most carefully three books: George Fox’s “Journal,” John Wesley's “Journal,” and John Henry Newman’s “Apologia pro Vita Sua.” The reason for the comment, so far as George Fox’s Journal is concerned, has been made plain by Dr Selbie in his little book on “Nonconformity: Its Origin and Progress.” Dr Selbie says The Civil War in England resulted in large measure from the religious enlightenment that had been slowly spreading among the people. to use the familiar phrase of J. R. Green, the English people .had become the people of a book, and that book the Bible. They had learnt from it to attach a new importance to the individual, and to revolt against the claim of either Church or ruler to supreme authority over the soul of man. But they had learnt also to judge and measure things almost too exclusively from the standpoint of religion. The result was not merely a great religious awakening, but a political and social revolution in which religion played a very conspicuous part. . . . All over the country men of the Puritan temper were to be found who deplored and resented what they believed to be the departure from the pure doctrine of the Word on the part of many of their leaders. . . . We read of Seekers, Ranters, Anabaptists, Fifth Monarchy men, and the like, all of whom were openly discontented with the average religious expression of their time, and all of whom were more or less inclined to fanaticism. They gave way to the greatest extravagances, and most of them never reached any other position than that of rather barren protest. The revolt which they represented, however, was a real thing, and found for itself some lasting forms of expression. It was just at the time that Puritanism was becoming official and more formal that Quakerism began to be. Fox’s Journal has had its critics as well as its admirers. Macaulay in his history of the times under Charles II writes: “George Fox had raised a tempest of derision by proclaiming that it was a violation of Christian sincerity to designate a single person by a plural pronoun, and that it was an idolatrous homage to Janus and Woden to talk about January and Wednesday. His doctrine, a few years later, was embraced by some eminent men, and rose greatly in the public estimation. But at the time of the Restoration, the Quakers were popularly regarded as the most despicable of fanatics. By the Puritans, they were treated with severity here, and were persecuted to the death in New England. Nevertheless the public, which seldom makes nice distinctions, often confounded the Puritan with the Quaker. Both were schismatics. Both hated episcopaey and the Liturgy. Both had what seemed extravagant whimsies about dress, diversions, and postures. Widely as the two differed in opinion, they were popularly classed together as canting schismatics; and whatever was ridiculous or odious in either increased the scorn or aversion which the multitude felt for both.” In referring to the Journal, Macaulay adds: — Fox’s “Journal” before it was published was revised by men of more sense and knowledge than himself, and therefore, absurd as it is, gives no notion of his genuine style. . . Nor can the most corrupt passage in Hebrew be more unintelligible to tire unlearned than his English often is to the most acute and attentive reader. Although Macaulay exhibited a marked antipathy to Fox. yet, when recording the great Quaker’s death, he is compelled to admit that “an event had taken place which a historian, whose object it is to record the real life of a nation, ought not to pass unnoticed.” And if so with liis death, how much more so with his birth. Fox writes in his Journal, “I was born in the month called July, 1624, at Dray-ton-in-tlie-clay in Leicestershire,” but subsequent research throws doubt on the date, not only of the month but of the year. William Penn, one of Fox’s oldest and most intimate friends, wrote, “George Fox was born in Leicestershire about the year 1624,” and in appreciation he added He had an extraordinary gift in opening the Scriptures. He would go to the marrow' of things. But above all he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his address and behaviour, and the fewness and fullness of his words, have often struck even strangers with admiration, as they used to reach others with consolation. The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer. He was of an innocent life, no busybody nor self-seeker, neither touchy nor critical; what fell from him was very inoffensive, if not very edifying. So meek, contented, modest, easy, steady, tender, it was a pleasure to be in his company. He exercised no authority but over evil, and that everywhere and in all; but with love, compassion, and long suffering. A most merciful man, as ready to forgive, as unapt to take or give an offence. He was an incessant labourer. As he was unwearied, so he was undaunted in his services for God and his people; he was no more to be moved to fear than to wrath. I have a little book called “Some Fruits of Solitude,” by William Penn, with an introduction by Edmund Gosse, which reveals something of what it meant to be a Quaker in the seventeenth century. Mr Gosse writes : —“William Penn, born on the 14th of October, 1644, was still in his forty-sixth year when ‘Some Fruits of Solitude’ was licensed. He had enjoyed a large number of forced opportunities of retirement; he had languished

in quite a number of celebrated gaols. An enumeration of these opportunities may be worth giving. Penn went to prison for a few days in 1667 for publicly professing himself a Quaker. For publishing his attack on the Athanasian Creed —‘A Sandy Foundation Shaken’ — he was committed to the Tower from December, 1668, to July, 1669. There he wrote not only his celebrated arraignment of 'hat honour’ in the shape of the once popular treatise, ‘No Cross, No Crown,’ but three other controversial pamphlets. . . . In September, 1670, Penn was committed to Newgate ‘for speaking in Grasschurcli Street,’ as a friendly jury persisted in putting it, but he was released a few days later. Finally in February, 1671, he was arrested while addressing a Quaker’s meeting in Wheeler Street, and was thrown into prison again, this time for six months. Here was an opportunity for writing maxims, and yet 1 do not believe that the tempestuous young man, who was only twenty-seven still, was ripe enough to form such grave and serene rejections as fill the 'Fruits of Solitude.’ ” Lovers of Lamb's essay on “A Quaker’s Meeting” will have detected the fascination which the "simple grey creed of the Quakers” had for the gentle Elia. Early in 1797, Charles Lloyd, who was visiting London, called on Lamb and left behind him as a souvenir a copy of the Journal of John Woolman, the American Quaker. The book seems to have laid hold on Lamb —in Iris essay he says: "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart, and love the early Quakers’ for writing to Coleridge on February 13, Lamb says : Tell Lloyd I have had thoughts of turning Quaker, and have been reading, or am rather just beginning to read, a most capital book, good thoughts in good language, William Penn’s “No Cross, no Crown.” I iike it immensely. Unluckily I went to one of his meetings, tell him, in St. John street yesterday, and saw a man under all the agitations and workings of a fanatic, who believed himseif under the influence of some “inevitable presence.” This cured me of Quakerism; I love it in tire books of Penn and Woolman, but I detest the vanity of a man thinking he speaks of the Spirit when what he says an ordinary man might say without all that quaking and trembling. Lamb dropped all ideas of Quakerism until in 1822, he began his friendship with Bernard Barton, a Quaker of thirtyeight (by nine years Lamb’s junior) and a clerk in a Quaker bank at Woodbridge in Suffolk. Barton and Lamb first met at a “London Magazine” dinner —where Lamb had made a joke about the inconsistency of Quakers writing poetry; Barton, taking the joke seriously, protested in a letter to Lamb, thus commencing what developed into a most valuable correspondence. This relation of Quakers to poetry has another illustration in the case of Whittier. “Circumstances determine the poet,” writes Nathan Haskell Dole —“inheritance determines who the poet shall be. It somehow seems to be a marvellous thing that a thrifty, plain Quaker stock should come to such a flowering as was seen in John Greenleaf Whittier. That iridescent colours should play over the Quaker drab! That from the insignificant chrysalis should emerge the brilliant butterfly.” Whittier paid tribute to “The Quaker of the Olden Time” in the following lines : The Quaker of the olden time! — How calm and firm and true, Unspotted by its wrong and crime, He walked the dark earth through. The lust of power, the love of gain, The thousand lures of 6in Around him had no power to stain The purity within. With that deep insight which detects All great things in the small, And knows how each man’s life affects The spiritual life of all, He walked by faith and not by sight, By love and not by law; The presence of the wrong or right He rather felt than saw. He felt that wrong with wrong partakes, That nothing stands alone, That who so gives the motive, makes His brother’s sin his own. And, pausing not for doubtful choice Of evils great or small, He listened to that inward voice Which called away from all. O spirit of that early day, So pure and strong and true, Be -with us in the narrow way Our faithful fathers knew. Give strength the evil to forsake, The cross of Truth to bear, And love and reverent fear to make , Our daily lives a prayer! Has Quakerism a message for to-day? The continual output of books from the Swartlimore Press would seem to indicate that the followers of George Fox in the twentieth century are anxious to help solve the world’s problems. During the Great War, the Society of Friends extended over £1,000,000 in relief work, besides giving their services unstintedly in ambulance and other non-combatant duties. “The name of Friend,” says Mr H. G. Wood, “is held in respect throughout Europe on account of the Society’s work for the relief of war victims in every stricken land. And it must be increasingly recognised, one would suppose, that there is little hope of reconstruction in Europe except in the spirit in which Friends try to live.” The eulogy pronounced by Thomas Carlyle—it will be found in “Sartor Resartus” may well make conclusion of the whole matter: —- Let some living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and understanding heart, picture George Fox on that morning, when he spreads out his cutting board for the last time, and cuts cowhides by unwonted patterns, and stitches them together into one continuous all-including Case, the farewell service of his awl ! Stitch away, thou noble Fox; every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery, and World-worship,

and the Mammon-God. Thy elbows jerk as in strong swimmer strokes, and every stroke is bearing thee across the Prisonditch, within which Vanity holds her Workhouse and Rag-fair, into lands of true Liberty; were the work done, there is in broad Europe one Free Man, and thou art he!