To the magistrates and clerics of seventeenth-century England, the Quakers were an alarm. They walked into parish churches and called the priest a hireling. They refused to remove their hats. They would not swear an oath in court. They addressed the lord and the laborer with the same plain thou. They quaked, sometimes literally, when the Spirit fell upon them.
To themselves, the Quakers were nothing of the sort. They were not innovators. They were not a sect. They were Friends — friends of Christ, friends of one another — and they believed they had been given to recover what had been lost: the immediate experience of God which the apostles knew, which the medieval church had buried, which the Reformation had only half-recovered, and which the wars and revolutions of their own century had finally cracked open again.
The crucible: England, 1640s
To understand who the Friends were, it helps to remember the world that produced them. The 1640s in England were a religious laboratory under enormous heat. The Civil War had broken the bishops’ authority. Cromwell’s army was full of preachers — many of them ordinary tradesmen — convinced that the Spirit was speaking again. Old certainties had been pulled apart. New voices were everywhere.
Out of that ferment came Seekers, Ranters, Familists, Fifth Monarchy men, Diggers, Levellers, Baptists, Independents — and, eventually, Quakers. Most of these movements rose and fell within a generation. The Quakers, alone among the radical voices of the Civil War, survived.
What they survived on was an intuition deeper than any of their slogans: that the truth of religion was not a doctrine to be argued but a life to be received. The trouble with the priests, with the gathered churches, with the godly Parliament, was not chiefly that their theology was wrong. It was that they were talking about God when God could be known.
George Fox and the seeking
George Fox was born in 1624 in Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicestershire, the son of a weaver of “righteous Christer,” as the locals called him, and a mother of “the stock of the martyrs.” He was a serious child. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker. He was, by every account, painfully sincere.
In his late teens he left home and walked. He sought out the most reputed preachers and divines of his time, and was disappointed by every one. One sent him for tobacco and Psalms. One advised bleeding. One spoke of natural causes of his troubles. One told him he should marry. None of them, to use Fox’s own word, spoke to his condition.
In 1647, in the depth of his despair, he heard what he later described as a voice:
And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, “There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition.” And when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.
This is the seed of Quakerism. Not a doctrine. A discovery. Christ — not the Christ of the catechism, not the Christ argued for in pulpits, but the living Christ — could be heard, now, by anyone who would attend.
Fox spent the next several years walking the north of England, preaching this message in markets, on hills, on the steps of “steeple-houses” (his name for parish churches), in the homes of seeking gentry like Margaret Fell at Swarthmoor Hall. Wherever he went, those who had been waiting on God in the silence of their own dissatisfaction recognized him. They gathered.
The Inner Light
What Fox preached was not a system. He preached an experience. But the experience had a shape, and Friends came to describe it in a few simple terms.
There is, they said, an inward light — something of God — given to every person who comes into the world. It is not a fancy. It is not an idea. It is the very Christ within. In a saint, this light has begun to burn. In an unconverted sinner, it still flickers, accusing him of his sin. The work of religion is to turn to it, to attend to it, to obey it.
This is the doctrine usually called the Inner Light. It has roots that reach back into the Gospel of John (“That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”) and into the medieval mystics. But the Quakers gave it a sharper edge than anyone had given it before. To them it was not a theological position. It was the basis of the church.
If God speaks directly to the soul, then no priest is needed to mediate. So the Quakers had no priests.
If the Spirit gives the message, then no prepared sermon is needed. So Quaker meetings sat in silence until someone was moved to speak.
If God is no respecter of persons, then no man should be doffed to. So the Quakers kept their hats on before judges and gentlemen.
If the Spirit will not lie, no oath is needed to make the truth more binding. So Quakers refused to swear, in court or out of it.
These were not eccentricities. They were the necessary consequences of believing — actually believing — that the Spirit who spoke through the prophets and the apostles still speaks, and that he speaks first to the heart.
Why “Quakers”?
The nickname was not flattering. In 1650 Fox was hauled before Justice Gervase Bennet at Derby. Fox bid the magistrate “tremble at the word of the Lord.” Bennet, with the wit of an irritated judge, fired back: Quaker, are you? The name stuck.
Friends were never comfortable with it. They preferred Children of the Light, Friends of the Truth, or simply Friends. But like Methodist a century later, the mocking nickname won. By 1660, every Englishman knew what a Quaker was, even if he was not sure where one might be found.
The trembling itself was not invented for show. Many of the earliest Friends, under what they took to be the immediate operation of the Spirit, did shake; some wept; some cried out. This was not held up as a mark of grace — Fox himself was suspicious of mere physical manifestation — but in the early years it was undeniably common, especially among the convinced.
A movement, not a sect
It is important to understand that the first Friends did not think of themselves as founding a denomination. They thought of themselves as the recovery of the true church. The steeple-houses were not churches; they were parish buildings. The priests were not ministers of Christ; they were paid men. The sacraments in stone fonts were not the inward baptism of the Spirit. The whole apparatus of seventeenth-century Christianity, in their view, had become a husk; the kernel had been gathered into a different barn.
This is why the early Quaker preaching was so confrontational. Fox and his companions did not see themselves as polite dissenters offering an alternative service. They saw themselves as the prophets sent to announce that the day of the Lord had come and the priesthood of believers had been restored. To go quietly was, to them, to refuse the commission.
It is also why early Quakerism cannot be reduced to a list of distinctives. Plain dress, plain speech, refusal of war, refusal of oaths — all of these followed from a deeper conviction: that the Spirit of God is the only true authority in matters of religion, that he is given immediately to the believer, and that the church is the company of those who attend to him.
What they offered, what it cost
The Quaker offer was severe and beautiful. To anyone who would turn inward and obey what they found there, Friends promised the same thing the prophets had promised: the knowledge of God himself, without mediator. No priest could give it. No magistrate could withhold it. It was as available to the maidservant as to the magistrate.
The cost was equally severe. To accept the Quaker proposal meant losing one’s standing — sometimes one’s livelihood, often one’s freedom, occasionally one’s life. By the end of the seventeenth century, more than 13,000 Friends had been imprisoned. Hundreds had died in jail. Goods had been distrained for tithes. Children had been turned out of schools. Husbands and wives had been separated by the long stays in prison that came of refusing to take off a hat.
They went anyway. They went because they were convinced — convinced was their word for it; they did not say converted — that they had touched something true. They had not invented a new religion. They had remembered an old one.
Now I was sent to turn people from darkness to the Light, that they might receive Christ Jesus; for to as many as should receive him in his Light I saw he would give power to become the sons of God. — George Fox, Journal
That, in the end, is what the Quakers were. Not a sect. Not a Reformation echo. Not a Puritan splinter. A movement of people who believed the Spirit of Christ was speaking to them as plainly as he had spoken to Peter and Paul, and who lived as though that were true.
The rest of their story — the marketplace preaching, the prisons, the Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania, the long quietist eighteenth century, the painful schisms of the nineteenth — flows from that one conviction. Whatever else may be said about the early Friends, they took God at his word.