USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > Two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, held at Moses Brown School, Providence, R.I., sixth month, 24th, 1911 > Part 3
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It is not a pleasant task to point out defects. We have been so accustomed to hear ourselves praised and the great deeds and greater influences set forth that any one who pictures a different view cannot but seem ungracious and unappreciative. I can only set forth what appeals to me as some of the reasons, quite aware at the same time that when one stops to analyze the immediate prospects, one is more than likely to miss the cosmic sweep of events and lose the greater in the less.
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That some of the influences which I consider hindrances may have had some ulterior purpose and effect, and in these unknown respects have had beneficent results, I will not attempt to deny, because religious truth advances by a zigzag journey and not in a direct line.
After our great ingathering, we did just as the Catholic Church did-allowed our forms to encrust us. We insisted upon maintaining the temporal branches from the root, and while these were goodly for their time because they were instru- ments for the emancipation of the human soul, some became obsolete, and meaningless to an age in which any one was at liberty to follow his own conscience.
Our tendency to adhere to external form of Fox's day, even to the subversion of his idea of personal liberty, has often reminded me of a schoolboy experience of my father. His position was at the foot of the spelling class when the teacher gave out the word turkey. Down the line it came-terkey, tarkey, tur- ky, etc., but when it reached him he spelled t u r ke y and pro- ceeded to march to the head of the class. The next word went down the line and came to him at the head of the class. T u r- key he spelled, trusting to the word that had carried him up, and losing his place as a consequence. The policy of the Society of Friends appears to me to have been exactly the same.
Under this repression of authority multitudes left the Society, married out or were disowned for some trivial offence; and while there was much sincere religion and love of the brethren and of the world, there was practiced an extremely individual- istic form of Christianity.
The idea of personal infallibility, undoubtedly fostered by Fox, bore fruit in many divergent doctrines and changes in the form of worship. The exaggeration of certain phases of belief, coupled with the unyielding conscience of men, sure of their own perception of the leading of the Lord, gave rise to separations which are the chief hindrance to an effective deliverance of our message to the world. Instead of a united people carrying the glad tidings to those about us, we present the anomalous posi- tion of Friends contending with each other. What salutary effect this may have upon ourselves I do not pretend to know; but I am quite confident that it is a great source of weakness so
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far as relates to our appeal to thoughtful people outside, and even inside, our own ranks.
If we could only unite and quit doubting one another, and stop fighting one another, we might accomplish wonders in this generation.
Another effect which militates against the promulgation of our message is the condition of the great majority of our minis- ters; for many of them, while filled with the love of the gospel and held in high esteem, are persons of little education and small comprehension of the needs of our own time; and while I fully believe that Oxford and Cambridge are not indispensable to the call to preach, I do believe that a well trained and a well stored mind is a powerful aid in bringing the gospel to the people. Perhaps its chief advantage is that it enables ministers to know what not to say occasionally. Facts revealed by scien- tific investigation are sacred truths. They are God's order, discovered by following His methods. Man is a rising being, created an animal he has breathed in the spirit which is lifting him from the animal appetites and passions into a fellowship with God. To this life of triumph Christ is the door. He opened the way to a living, personal, experimental relation to God, the Father of the Spirit.
In the 8th chapter of Romans, Paul gives us a very clear statement of the truth :- "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. So then, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh: for if ye live after the flesh. ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God."
Our ministers need to know science, and not argue against what they do not understand. It is not necessary to preach evolution nor higher criticism, because the love of God as mani- fest in Jesus Christ our Lord and the redemption from sin are universal needs: but it is necessary, if our message is to reach
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this age, to take scientific facts for granted and not preach against them.
There is a prophetic ministry which, when truly baptized, is the most edifying and uplifting form of ministry, and should be encouraged; but in most places we need also a teaching ministry which shall be able to meet the questions and perplexities of our own time, and for this we need educated men and women, men and women who understand both the nature of our message and its adaptation to the present crisis in the religious world.
Another hindrance to our message bearing is the fact that as a denomination we have never learned to contribute liberally to work of the church. Individuals amongst us have been most liberal, generous and benevolent, but their very generosity has made the rank and file willing to allow the few to bear the bur- dens and do the work of the church while they themselves excuse themselves and hold on to their silver. We have been so impressed with the freedom of the gospel that we are in dan- ger of becoming free from the gospel. If we are to teach others to help save society and the world, we must have ministers to do much of the teaching who are not encumbered with the neces- sity of providing a living.
Perhaps the saddest and most far-reaching cause of our fail- ure is to be found in our own love of ease and freedom from responsibility. We have become so accustomed to let "Con- cerned Friends" bear the burden and the heat of the day, while we enjoy the eminently reputable position of members of the Society of Friends and rejoice in a kind of religious cultured ease, that when the time comes for every one to buckle on the armor and exert himself for the extension of the Kingdom of God, we are nerveless and irresolute. Is it a want of that burning, loving loyalty to God and man, which was the mainspring of our fore- fathers' zeal, which paralyzes us? If so, we must arouse our- selves. We need not preach from wash-tubs, as some of our forebears in the church did, but we can open closed meeting houses and gather in the children and teach them the Way of Life. A message such as ours is the very word which needs to be spoken to this age, distracted by its myriad voices and oppres- sive doubts. Scientific fact does not disturb him who knows that God is One and that His spirit is in all His works. There
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is no fear for the Bible, because it, too, has its foundation in Him.
The old barriers which prevented our people from uniting with their fellow Christians in efforts for amelioration of suffer- ing and eradication of evil have happily long ago disappeared, and one of the open doors for service is that which invites co- operation with other churches, and yet there is a reason for the maintenance of a separate church. To what church could a young Friend go, if he be a thoughtful conscientious Friend? He must in the outset undergo some form of ritual in which he has no faith; and while in all the deeper phases of the Christian life there is a unity in the churches, in these external testimonies, as well as in some matters of more vital import, there is a difference which calls for us in the family of churches. "The world still needs its Quaker."
The Y. M. C. A. is a great and beneficent institution and one specially attractive to our young people because of its generous inclusiveness. But it is not a church, and particularly empha- sizes the fact that it is not. It does not reach that phase of life which is the special mission of the church-the family and the home, so it cannot sever our church connections, but should make us more loyal.
If one thinks the Society of Friends has done its work, let one look abroad and survey the work which is yet to be done and see whether the mission of our message has yet been accom- plished and gird one's self to do one's part in carrying it on until the souls and bodies of men are free, and women bow no longer beneath the burdens of their own and other people's sins, and the little children have what is the God-given but man- destroyed right of childhood-leisure and play and learning and happiness and comfortable homes.
In the testing times which are upon us and which are destined to increase rather than diminish, a church with the message of spiritual reality and the possible union of the human and divine in every life; in short, with the message which our Quaker faith makes possible, is the church which "in the mad- dening maze of things" may comfort the quailing thought and bring relief to the storm-tossed, which may in the words of Isaiah quoted by Jesus, preach good tidings unto the meek and
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bind up the broken hearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, the opening of the prison to them that are bound, and proclaim the year of Jehovah's favor. The original message was not in its detail just what would suit our age, but it did contain as others did not that vital developing norm which, if we had but been true to our own evolutionary principle, would have made us in this age a fearless people. This cloud of suspicion and doubt and hesitation which enshrouds such a large part of the Christian church needs the dispelling power of our message. Men are afraid of this teacher and that; afraid of this doctrine and that; afraid that something is going to destroy the Bible. What has a church to fear whose whole polity is based upon Eternal Love, and the perfect knowledge exemplified in life and conduct, that we are heirs of God and joint heirs of Jesus Christ.
"The letter fails and systems fall And every symbol wanes; The Spirit over-brooding all Eternal love remains."
And there is no fear to those who are rooted and grounded in this truth, and we might well go forth with the message, "Be- hold we bring you glad tidings of great joy."
In the past we have discovered that separations settle nothing and generate weakness; that wholesale disownments are contrary to the law of inclusive love; that science is of God, and that a scientific fact is as sacred as a moral principle; that fear is the worst heresy; that, in spite of our misconception and our failures, God's Spirit is with His children. With this experience and with the sunshine of His love and grace upon us, the time is propitious for us to gird ourselves anew, and, with Him as leader, who was never foiled in battle, press with fresh vigor for the enlargement of His Kingdom.
MARY MENDENHALL HOBBS.
ADDRESS BY GOVERNOR POTHIER OF, RHODE ISLAND
Governor Pothier's address was an interesting appreciation of Quaker influence on Rhode Island Citizenship.
. OUR FIRST YEARLY MEETING
Let mem'ry turn for us the leaves of life's old book Till once again on dream-kissed page of youth we look. When first we joined the armies of the Lord, and heard The world-wide discord, sin's Philistine army stirred, And saw that giant Greed, grown great on pandery, Like old Goliath, virtue's feeble host defy; How burned our hearts with zeal to slay the monster then, Make virtue triumph and bring Godly peace to men! Our faith and hope and will seemed pebble weapons meet To bring the world reformed to our dear Master's feet. How oft we posed, in thought, as Michael with bright blade At heart of prostrate Evil! We were ne'er afraid The task might prove too great, our arm too impotent, Never a doubt of victory, since with God we went. Such fiery zeal and faith in early Friends we see; That crisis of our race's youth, its spiritual puberty; When England's Parliament, for two long months debates If in James Nayler Christ or Satan dominates; When rapt George Fox with awful power of God did quake And shook men's souls till firm earth seemed to shake; When men had time to spend long days in wordy strife, And for the Life within, men scorned the outward life. How grandly fearless and how stiff those God-filled men! And how this shifty age needs just such faith again!
Not in these cloistered groves of studious ease, Where quiet meditation woos the soul Did our forefathers meet, but where the sea's Strong waves on wild Aquidneck loudly roll.
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Not in these times of peace, when, conscience free, All men may think and worship as they will, But while the martyr fight for liberty Round Boston's "bloody den" was raging still.
And yet how deep the peace those fathers knew, How clear they heard the still small voice of God, And how the Light within still brighter grew, As they remained obedient to the Word.
In New England's month of flowers, Sixteen hundred sixty one, On the Isle of Aquiday, Our yearly meeting was begun.
Then from all the country round, In their boats or through the wood, Thronged the Quakers old and young At the call of Rofe, the good.
Up from Salem came the seed, From Boston, Roxbury, and Lynn, Duxbury, Sandwich, Providence Friends All led by the Light within.
Coddington, Coggeshall, Easton and Clarke Lovingly welcomed the pilgrims there, Opened their houses, opened their hearts, Hunted and whipped find refuge here.
Under the trees and in the house Gather the people unto the Lord, Seekers and sufferers peace find at last, Filled with the Spirit, fed on the Word.
Epistles were read from English Friends: "Edward Burrough sendeth word Charles has promised that vein to stop Of innocent blood now flowing abroad. 3
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Shattuck of Salem will soon arrive With missive to muzzle their cruel law; Friends take courage and spread the truth, Unstopped of the halter or prison's maw.
George Fox and seven hundred Friends, Set free by Charles, rejoice in God, Whose power triumphing over all Thus breaks the persecutor's rod."
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Our Martyrs not in vain had died, Wharton and Christison, just set free,
With a score from Boston jail Are here to sing their jubilee.
Edward Wharton, Leddra's friend, Who, banished, still with Leddra stayed,
From the scaffold caught his clay, Tenderly the burial made;
Now his friend's last message reads, Written just before he died,
"To the little Flock of Christ" Followers of the crucified.
"Joy of the Lord so fills my house" My soul no longer dwells in clay
"Sweet influence of the Morning Star" Bears it in eternal love away.
Of the other martyred Friends Daniel Gould had much to tell,
"Sweet and heavenly sayings" of theirs, While he shared their prison cell.
How hand in hand that joyful three Went to Boston Common, there Glad to die to make truth free, And thus the way of God prepare.
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Triumphant and content they go, "This day we shall rest in God," Faith unshaken, Vision splendid! Such joy ends not neath the sod.
Mary Dyer, on the scaffold, Hears "reprieved" almost with pain. "In the Lord's good will I came here 'In His will I would remain."
In vain her son now bears her home, In vain her husband's love and prayer,
Ever her spirit feels the call To rescue Friends or with them share.
Next Spring again in that same work, "Your laws repeal, my earnest prayer" She faced her stern judge, Endicott, And died, heroic, Christlike, there.
Devotion such as this was felt Through all the commonwealth, and so E'en Endicott was glad to let The prisoned Quakers freely go.
And Wenlock Christison, condemned To die this very month, is here To tell how sweet the peace that fills Death-waiting cell when Christ is there.
Martyr fires and Altar coals Warm the heart and touch the head,
Christ is there to Grace the feast And many pass the broken bread.
Thus burning messages were given By those whom suffering had made whole, Spirit and power flowing through them Knit the Friends there soul to soul.
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In love and unity they part Promising each year's return; Each carries home a glowing heart And zeal for God, of knowledge born.
Let us who bear the name of Friends Possess their spirit, courage, faith, Their zeal to do his will, and hear "Ye are my Friends," the Master saith.
W. S. MEADER.
THE RELIGIOUS DISCOVERIES OF GEORGE FOX EDWARD CALDWELL MOORE
We are accustomed to think of religion as a conservative force in human society. Religious institutions have shown themselves perhaps, on the whole, the most immobile of insti- tutions. Religious movements have tended to crystallize more quickly than have movements of almost any other kind which I should be able to name. Their deposit, once it has been made, has resisted more successfully than has any other the all-dissolv- ing process of time. Religious reformations, even where they have worn, for a time, the aspect of revolution, as of course they often have done, present the almost uniform phenomenon of speedy arrest. Their new maxims, at first asserted as liber- ties, have been quickly transformed into principles of authority. The same man, who was, in his youth, the prophet of a new era, persecutes, in his age, the prophets who come after him. A rite or ceremony of worship, originally natural and transparent, becomes conventional. Yet it persists unaltered and unalter- able far into the period of the clarifying and exalting of the religious sentiment. Scarcely anything is so persistent as ritual.
One may verify these statements from the history of Bud- dhism and from that of the rise of Mohammedanism. One may illustrate them from the careers of many of the Protestant reformers and from the history of the Protestant sects, as truly as from that of the Greek or Roman Catholic churches. The French revolutionaries felt that the normal condition of religion was that of resistance to progress. They found no difference on this point between Gallicans and Jesuits. The learned, the politically mobile, the socially enthusiastic, stand in much the same attitude towards the Church in France today. There may be reason for this in the position which the Roman Church has taken as over against Modernism. But even in England and America, where there are surely fewer causes of tension and embitterment, the indifference at the present
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moment to Church and religion has at least one main root in the sense of the stationariness of religion. The notion is widespread among peoples possessed-not to say obsessed-with the ideal of progress that religion is not only not one of the causes of progress, but is unable even to keep the pace of progress which the other factors of civilization set. Of it in many minds the prophet's word is true: "Its strength is to sit still."
Not merely is this, which I have been saying, true of religion as it has expressed itself in institutions, customs and practices. The same fact may be illustrated from the history of thought. Religion as expressed in doctrines and dogmas has tended in preeminent, and most would say in absolutely characteristic fashion to become and to remain stationary. It has consti- tuted at times a very serious hindrance to advance in all other departments of thought.
The great historic religions have always received their form- ative and, again, their reforming impulses from epoch-making personalities, like those of Moses, Gautama, Jesus, Mohammed. But it has been a standing trait in their development that dicta of these revered personalities have ceased to be spirit and life- to borrow one of Jesus' phrases. They have ceased to be spirit and life, as He warned men that His words were to be. They have become mere dicta, literal and verbal oracles. To these not in their inward sense but in their very phrasing authority has attached. Exactly that which Jesus denounced the Scribes for doing with the words of Moses, His own disciples and their disciples did with His.
Jesus Himself spoke so largely the language of religious intuition, the language of imagination and of feeling, of poetry and ethical enthusiasm, that the remark which I am making applies less strictly to His own words than to those of some others. But Paul, besides being a man of intuition, was a thinker. He expressed his religious consciousness in terms of the Rabbis and, again, in terms borrowed from the Greeks. The Fourth Gospel may be said to be completely transfused with Hellenism. The religious magnitude, which Jesus was, a magnitude of incomparable significance, is painted against a background of notions which are historically traceable and of only relative significance.
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In very reverence succeeding generations totally confused two things which widely differ. They confounded the docu- ments of revelation with revelation itself .. As to creeds and systems, which are but the interpretation of religion in terms of current thought, men have given themselves to that which must seem to an historian the naivest of assumptions, that they were all in consonance, one with another and with the Scrip- tures. The outside world can hardly be blamed for thinking Christian thought unprogressive. It is this which traditionally Christian thinkers have been most insistent and emphatic in asserting for themselves. No word has been more constantly upon ecclesiastics' lips than that about the faith once delivered to the saints-whereby they usually mean, not the faith, but the statement of the faith. The area of the conventional dis- cussion of religion is the sphere, and one might almost say the only sphere, in which still survives and is potent that which Schelling called the æsthetic prejudice, riz. that which is Divine must, by conception, be perfect and unchangeable. In almost all other spheres men have accepted with enthusiasm the idea that the Divinest of all things is the mystery of growth.
When one thinks of the way in which historic formulations of religion, achieved in a remote past, have been lifted out of the relativity which belongs to everything historic, and made the absolute and authoritative external standard for the present and even for a limitless future, one can hardly wonder that men -some men, at all events-have felt that the progress of the world of thought, as well as of life, might be due to almost any other cause, but not to religion.
In the light of all this which we have been saying, it may be surprising to hear so great a man as Hegel say, and that not once but repeatedly, that the religious spirit has been, as a matter of fact, the bearer-"Träger" is his word-the great furtherer- of the life of the spirit of mankind. It has often anticipated the philosophical reflection and scientific discovery of sub- sequent ages. It has frequently divined that which later gen- erations only were able to prove. It has often asserted with the sublime confidence of true prophecy that which the world had, as yet, no logic to sustain. It has confidently declared
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that which flatly contradicted the reflections upon God, man and the world, in which the prophets themselves, being the intellectual children of their own age, indulged.
Between this sentiment of the great idealist and the common notion given above there would seem to be completest contra- diction. In reality there is no contradiction at all. All that sharp arraignment had to do only with religion as formulated and organized, with religion in doctrine and institution; while that which Hegel says, has to do with religion itself as dis- tinguished from any and all of its manifestations. It has to do with religion itself as interior and personal experience, as purely spiritual magnitude, ever freeing itself from passing and partial embodiments, ever entering into new and living mani- festations, ever laying aside its old garments, or, in Paul's yet profounder image, ever dying that it may rise again.
But while it is thus clear that there is here no contradiction, that both Hegel's praise and the current blame remain, each in its own way true, yet certainly we have here suggested a most startling comparision of that which Christianity has often been with that which it might have been and ought to be. I say Christianity, because it is easiest to illustrate my truth from the religion which we all know most about. But I could draw my examples quite as well from the Old Testament, and the propositions would be equally true of Buddhism or of the Mohammedan faith. Or, perhaps, I might put it in this way. The comparison is not between that which religion, alas! has too often been, and that splendid thing which it might have been. Thus to put it is to lack insight. The true asser- tion is that the same religion, Christianity or any other, has been, by the very law of its being, both of these things at the same time, in the same place and to some at least of the same per- sons. It has been both of these things at all times and in all prophetic souls. It has been and is, to any man, both wing and fetter. It has been both help and hindrance, both the furtherer and the retarder of the great aims and gains of humanity.
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