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A PRIMITIVE QUAKER.

I.

"Theological matters have their residence above all others in the human mind, and among these the Idea of God is the principal or supreme; wherefore if this be false, all beneath it,-in consequence of the principle from whence they flow,must likewise be false or falsified for that which is supreme, being also the inmost, constitutes the very essence of all that is derived from it; and the essence, like a Soul, forms them into a Body after its own image; and when in its descent it lights upon Truths, it even infects them with its own blemish and error.' SWEDENBORG (B. E. 40).

To see a few pious and energetic individuals,-fired with the Enthusiasm of Humanity,-go itinerating through England, preaching Christianity as indeed Good News from God;-to see the example of these people become so contagious that numbers of other men and women start forth and carry the same Evangel not only into Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, but abroad into France, Holland, Germany, Italy, Turkey, the West Indies and our American Plantations ;-to see the peculiar tenets of these people accepted by a divine like Fisher, a peasant like Nayler, a soldier like Dewsbury, a magistrate like Pearson, a mystic like Shewen, a statesman like Jaffray, a philosopher like Keith, a theologian like Penington, a scholar like Barclay, a man of position like Penn;-to see how, within forty years of their first promulgation, the doctrines of these people so diffused themselves over the length and breadth of our land that they had their advocates in the obscurest villages ;-to see how, during this period of fervid piety and rapid evangelisation, the central fact of this people's faith was that God is One and that the Lord Jesus Christ is that One God;-to see how, at the end of the seventeenth century, this faith suffered eclipse, -was by internal schisms more or less revoked into doubt,-and a breach made through which a devastating scepticism should enter, and by the middle of the eighteenth century so weaken and corrupt, that upon numbers a condition should be induced which would justify Samuel Neale's lamentation: "Leprosy has appeared where light had its abode," and Mary Peisley's judgment upon many elders,-"the Dragon, by his tail, has drawn them to the earth; wells they are without water; dry withered fruitless trees, twice dead :"2_this is the sight the early history of Quakerism presents to those who care to make the survey. Never, since the close of the seventeenth century, has Quakerism, as such, returned to its first love; ever, since the seventeenth century, it has languished as if of a disease that could 2 Ibid. 277.

1 Life of S. Neale, 134.

terminate only with death. Noble Quakers,-men and women of pure life, spiritual thought and heroic endeavour,-have, in every successive period demonstrated that the Christ-life is still a possibility and Christianity a vitalizing power; but it was the few like these that the many opposed and paralysed. "I could see," says John Griffith, "an afflicted suffering remnant, lie very low, as under the ruins, panting, and as it were, struggling for life."1 Quakerism has never

rallied.

The early history of the Friends, then, has a special interest and use for the New Churchman. The peculiarities of his faith dimly manifested yonder are a prophecy of light to follow. He may learn the more to prize the scientifics of the New Church philosophy by seeing what a confusion was induced through the absence of such a philosophy, when theological speculation was enforced through sheer pressure from without. Other equally,-nay far more important,-considerations may be left to suggest themselves as we study together the history of one of these primitive Quakers.

William Dewsbury 2 was born about the year 1620, at Allerthorpe in the East Riding of Yorkshire. From childhood he was of a singularly susceptible nature, and claims to have had spiritual "openings" from a very early age. In the retrospect of his life he tells us how, at eight years old, he "saw the Book of Conscience opened within him, where all was written he had done in the body ever since he had any remembrance." At a later period, and under the sense of sin, we find him ceasing from "the vain conversation he had lived in;" he betakes himself to the Scriptures and inwardly mourns the apparent absence of God as Love. "I felt the hand of the Lord within me executing judgment upon the wicked in me," he says, "and whatever way I turned to seek Him in observations [mere reasonings of the worldly], thither the Flaming Sword turned, which was placed against me to keep the way of the Tree of Life."

A few years later and, Dewsbury's father dying, the lad is sent to Holbeck, near Leeds, and is apprenticed to a clothmaker. Here the heart-craving for religious satisfaction still asserts itself; the young man meets with disappointments of a spiritual character and grows aweary of the world. He sought comfort from those who he thought should give it; but though professors and preachers did indeed speak

1 Journal of J. Griffith, 192.

2 Vide "The faithful Testimony of that ancient servant of the Lord and minister of the Everlasting Gospel, William Dewsbury, in his Books, Epistles and Writings" (circa, 1690),-a strange quarto of improvisations from the spirit mainly.

smooth things,-telling him to believe in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, yet that the Lord Jesus Christ was to be found within him, none told him; all was "notional."

Soon after this the Civil Wars began, and Dewsbury, impressionable, enthusiastic, and anxious to be doing something for the right, "joined with that little remnant which said they fought for the Gospel." He found, however, that it was the letter and not the spirit that these men called the Gospel-he could not be content to feed upon the husks they did eat. Not here could the Messiah have due welcome controversy everywhere without, and the war-spirit of disputation supreme within! Not in this army was the Prince of Peace to be found-Him who maketh all things new, and "causeth wars to cease, and the voice of the turtle to be heard in the land."

Dewsbury next received pleasing tidings of the Reformed Church of Scotland; he availed himself of an opportunity of proceeding to Edinburgh. Alas! here likewise did our soldier find creedism and formality supreme: so as soon as practicable he returned to England, and, for a time, went among the Independents. These, he tells us, were now thought to be "setting up a more glorious image in outward observations," and declared themselves to be the children of God. Dewsbury soon found they were far from being the children of the Light, and "if what they set up be only an Image," said he, "will it outstand the Stone cut out without hands, at whose touch thrones, principalities and powers have crumbled into dust?" Again was the young thinker-soul-sick and in loneliness of spirit, though possibly one of Cromwell's Ironsides-thrown back upon his own cares! He could not join any of these notionalists, he tells us, for what his soul wanted was "the testimony of God's Love," and this he was through sorrow discovering "could not be attained in any of these outward observations." He was realizing the truth of the words another great man addressed to the Almighty: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart is disquieted till it resteth in Thee."

"

But as thy days, so shall be thy strength" is the unfailing promise of God to His Gospel-Israel. Dewsbury remained true to his convictions, and finally, as he assures us, "rent [were] all his fig-leaf coverings, and destroyed [was] that mind which had looked outwardly to seek the Kingdom of Heaven in observations. . . . My mind was turned within, by the power of the Lord, to wait in His counsel, the Light in my conscience, and to hear what the Lord would say." This primitive Quakerism, however, distinguished between merely intellectual lumen and true spiritual light. The Bible was the educator of con

science. Divine influx was the living fact.

Revelation was an inspiration within an inspiration-it was "Christ within the hope of glory."

1

When discoursing of Regeneration years afterwards, Dewsbury speaks thus of this new condition he had reached :

"Now to enforce people to come to this great work, and to set forward from earth to heaven-all [now] being driven out of Paradise by the cherubim set with a flaming sword—there is no returning to that blessed life but by the loss of that life that did grieve the Spirit of God, and which did cause man to be driven out: there is no other way of return, but by this new birth. As you are all driven and forced out of Paradise, and the cherubim are set to keep the way of the tree of life-so you must return into the favour of God again by the light of Christ; and you have line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little, to direct your minds to the light of Christ Jesus. No man or woman can be quickened and raised up into the life of the Second Adam till the life of the first Adam be taken away. So now every one of you deal plainly with your own hearts, how you came to be a slain people to the life of the First Adam, in which life there was a working of the mystery of iniquity in every part of man."

To make matters clearer to William Dewsbury the command was now discerned from within: "Put up thy sword into the scabbard!" The soldier of Cromwell had now to become a soldier of the Cross: must know that the Kingdom of Christ is within; the enemies also within, and spiritual;" thus that his sword must be spiritual likewiseit must be the Power of God. He put away his "carnal" sword then, and leaving the army, resolved to labour at his proper calling, and to know only the Lord and His peace. Like other primitive Quakers he had realized a conviction that one result of the Lord's incarnation is Humanity's ultimate emancipation from sword-craft, the constable, and all forms of bondage-that through the promise involved in the prayer for "Our Father's will to be done on earth as in heaven," armies and jailers, law-books and bonds, shall be found to have been the products of sin against the destroying influences of its own spirit, and have no ground of necessity in a really regenerate people-a Christian Commonweal :

"Be words of Light alone our javelines, hurled
While Truth wings every dart;

The ensigns we would bear are passions furled,—
Love and a child's young heart."

1 We find this prettily stated by one of the first Quaker martyrs, James Parnell, in 1665-Christ within the hope of glory, or else no hope of glory; for they who cannot witness Him so, are in the reprobation, as saith the Apostle. And here is the Son in the saints, and the Father in the Son, and thus all are made perfect in one."

Dewsbury was now, he tells us, "of the number of the slain of the Lord;" and by example could say to others, "So will you become epistles, written in one another's hearts with the pure Spirit of the Living God, which will bind you up in the unity of the Spirit and the bond of Peace."

William Dewsbury's "growth in grace and in the knowledge and love of God;" the temptations also which he underwent in entering upon the Way of the Blessed Life,-these are described by him in mystical phraseology. Let us pause a moment among these symbolsthe strength of Primitive Quakerism is manifest in the ability of the "Flock of the Companions "1 to discern the underlying facts; and blind-nay, unworthy of the name of Christian-is the Church to whom such speech involves mere empty show and noise.

I. "The Witnesses that stood before the God of the Earth and had power to plague the Earth-having finished their testimony-the Beast ascendeth out of the bottomless pit and makes war against them and kills them, and their dead bodies lie in the streets of the Great City-spiritual Sodom and Egypt 2-where our Lord was crucified. This Scripture was fulfilled in me in the year according to account 1648."

Interpreted by the Science of Correspondences, we gather from this that the Lord's goodness and truth (Witnesses) in Dewsbury's inner man, here make manifest awhile the presence of the Divine Mercy brooding over the faces of the dark earthly spirit of selfhood, out of whose hidden deeps Intellectual Pride (the Beast) arises in renewed strength, and seeks to deprive aspiration and faith of their God-given life, and leave them mere formalisms, languishing in the pravity of evil and falsity (the Great City). "The things over

which the Mercy of the Lord moves," writes Swedenborg, "are such as the Lord has hidden and treasured up in man, which in the Word throughout are called Remains, or a Remnant, consisting of the knowledges of the true and of the good, which never come to light until external things are vastated" (A. C. 19). In the temporary reflux of Sin the things of God are for awhile obscured, Dewsbury nevertheless shall yet be able to say that the Divine Love, who never sleeps, shall succour His own: "for it is God-He who commanded light to shine out of darkness-that hath shone in our hearts for 1 One of the epithets applied to the Primitive Quakers.

The first of the great Quaker Missionaries, George Fox, writes, "I have been in spiritual Babylon, Sodom, Egypt, and the Grave, but by the eternal power of God I am come out of it, am brought over it and the power of it, into the power of Christ."