William C. Braithwaite

“ The Christian Church is being invaded by this uncertainty with regard to God. There is a loosening, it seems to me, of that close grip upon the eternal verities which enables men perpetually to draw upon the resources of God, to throw themselves in the abandonment of faith upon a living Savior and to find that faith justified at every step of the way. Men do not like to set forth upon a path without knowing whither it leads. The prevailing scientific temper leads men to test everything many times, to trust nothing beyond the range of verifiable scientific facts. ”

“ It is not the passion of bigotry which will enable us to deliver our message. Let us remind ourselves again that we are one with all who love the Lord in sincerity and truth. If we expect others to understand us, let us be at least as patient in seeking to understand them. Let us beware of the sectarian spirit. Let us emphasize the fundamentals which we hold in common with others even more than our own distinctive views. ”

“ Whether, indeed, we should work for organic unity or not will evoke large divergence of opinion. Whether or not we should cultivate the spirit of unity—the atmosphere in which the beautiful flower of unity will come to perfection—this is a question upon which there can surely be no divergence of view. ”

“ I know no other form of worship which fulfils my idea of a united act inspired of God. As we wait together upon Him we are together called into His Holy presence. The silence represents to us not merely the touch of each individual spirit with the Spirit of God; it represents rather the uniting of our spirits together in harmony with His Spirit. Thus are we privileged to understand something of that true Communion of the Saints which is to be fully experienced in the life beyond. ”

“ For Quakerism is essentially a religion of sincerity, answered by the incoming of the living Christ.
VI.
What then shall groups of Friends, who have reached the vital experience of which I have been speaking, do with their experience? Surely there are great demands confronting them to-day, great duties and convictions to be entered upon, great Messianic hopes stirring in the world. This world of change is also a world that is fertile in the promise of richer life. There is the passionate craving after truth. Surely we are to stand for reality in religion and life. ”

“ I desire an atmosphere of large-hearted charity and brotherly confidence, which will allow the Seeker after truth to live in the power of his experience, even if it is not a full experience, without being expected to live beyond his experience, an atmosphere which will allow him to make use of all the great aids which we have to-day in the search after truth—the great aids of scientific investigation, and what is still more important, in my opinion, the modern historical method which we are using to-day. ”

“ There are psychologists and theologians, too, with whom I could not venture to compare myself, but it is enough to take the great experience simply as historical fact. There can be no question that two hundred and fifty years ago actual living intercourse with the Divine, such as Burrough describes, gathered the first Friends into their wonderful fellowship. It lifted them into an order of life which set them in a place of vision and power and joy. They saw the things of time in the light of eternity. They knew what it was to overcome the world, so that nothing could daunt their faith. ”

“ As George Fox said, every man hath an office and is serviceable. We witness against oaths, because we uphold a single standard of truth speaking, and against distinctions of dress and address, because all men are equal in the sight of God; we oppose war because the armor of the children of light is the armor of righteousness, and disuse the outward form of baptism because the all-important thing is not the form but the inward repentance and cleansing by the blood of Christ. ”

“ It is the duty of the Church to discountenance all the manifold insincerities which disfigure our current Christianity, and to give free scope to honest-hearted love of truth. Sincerity is a plant that thrives under freedom and light, but withers under authority. The Church must use methods of illumination and education and fellowship as its means for cherishing true-hearted allegiance to the Lord. ”

“ One of the most notable features of the last century has been the progress of the democratic movement. Every one who has watched that movement must realize the great danger of the tyranny of majorities. It is true that this danger seems to most of us to-day a smaller one than the [84] danger of the tyranny of a bureaucracy or of an autocrat. But, whichever way we look at it, it does not seem that we have found the true solution. Is it not possible that the pendulum has swung too far and that we have yet to discover the highest principle upon which a State may be governed? ”

“ And when Fox told these honest-hearted Seekers that he knew in his own experience that Jesus Christ was come to teach His people Himself, their souls leapt up to welcome the Divine Guest. Fox himself was a man of intense sincerity, who found actually in his own spirit the place where the seed of Divine life was springing up, the place where the voice of a Divine teacher was being uttered, the place that was being inhabited by a Divine and glorious presence. ”

“ There you see clearly the three-fold play of these [44] same forces of personal responsibility, group-fellowship and spiritual guidance. Worship in fellowship is an intensely active thing. Its basis is not an inert stillness, but a waiting upon God in the unity of the spirit. The meetings of the first Friends were radiant with the joy of Christ’s indwelling life. There were times of living fellowship and communion, warm with the central fires of Divine love, so delightful that sometimes they could hardly break them up and would stay far into the night. ”

“ We are probably living in the midst of as great a period of transition as that which formed the bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern Europe, and those alone [49] will find the fuller truth and lead men into it who will bear the travail and follow the trail of the Seekers of the Light. We want men who will get on the top of the situation, men in the spirit of George Fox. ”

“ I am far from denying that beautiful forms of worship, that stated seasons of prayer, or that time-honored ritual may have a real place in the spiritual experience of very many. Doubtless, these things have been of value in bringing numbers of souls into the Kingdom of God, and will still be so. To me it seems, however, that they are fraught with great danger. Especially at the present time, when men intensely desire reality, they are apt to become impatient with the forms of a bygone age, however zealously they may be followed by some of their contemporaries. ”

“ Men are learning what the early Friends reached as a fact of inner experience, that their hearts could be places where the Divine side of life could spring up, and that here in this world of our own [52] personality, in personal responsibility, personal dedication, personal service, is the very heart of religion.
There is another Messianic hope: Woman’s place in the universe in equal fellowship with man. Surely we can stand for that. We have expressed that in our Church life long before it came as a great hope to the mass of the people. ”

“ Such vision of reality will over and over again be translated into action and consecration. The common worship, if it is the act of all, and done in deep seriousness, passes out of the formal into the effective, with or without mystical rite or element, it becomes communion, and we understand in a new and quieter way what the early Church meant by its doctrine of the Holy Spirit. God’s Spirit is not bound by our choosing, but it is possible for us to become more receptive. It is easy to see how men have come to the view that through the Church the gift of the Spirit is mediated. ”

“ We are not called to give just the same thing as was given by our spiritual forefathers; but we are called each and all to give our best, without stint, without counting the cost, and, unless we do, we cannot be true to that which God has given us.
Out of the dedicated spirit of the body as a whole there will be born a race of apostles. To each is given his ministry—“To some apostles.” We must have such if our message is to ring forth with its ancient power and in new and living tones. It should be the peculiar task of the Society of Friends to raise up apostles. ”

“ Jesus Christ, so far as we know, wrote nothing, He organized no religious society, He formulated no creed, but what He did was to gather around Himself a band of disciples, men and women, who received His spirit, and in turn would bring others into touch with the life which had redeemed them. His life, springing up in the lives of men, was to be fundamentally that which should regenerate the world. ”

“ The Church, we say, is a living fellowship—not in the first place an organization, but in the first place an organism—not an institution, but a body, built up of many cells, many individuals, just as the body has cells that grow and change and perform their several functions under the direction of an all-pervading, all-embracing life. That is what a living fellowship means. This life received through direct contact with the Divine life is the one essential of the Christian Church. ”

“ It needs to have the purposes of the Kingdom of God ringing in its ears all the time. It needs to be vowed to the great redemptive work of seeking and saving the lost. It will be rightly judged by its output of service for the Kingdom of God. I fancy that the weakness of modern Christianity is very similar to the besetting weakness of civilization. We grasp our privileges and shirk our responsibilities. The healthy Church fixes each member with personal responsibility for using the life which he has received. It finds work for all to do. ”

“ I fancy these meetings may have been rather like some of your pioneer meetings in the West. But the pioneers of the London work, Howgill and Burrough, would find modern Quakerism, whether in England or in the Middle West, a strange thing. It takes a wise man to recognize his own great-great-great-great grandchildren. They have an inheritance that connects them up with their ancestor, but their environment is so different that on the surface they seem to have been changed into another type of man. ”

“ We see before the Society of Friends, as it renews its spiritual communion and its warmth of fellowship, a great service for which it has been wonderfully prepared—a service for the revival of vital, prophetic religion and for its expression in righteousness of life—but the service will be fruitful through discipline and suffering; if it is to be redemptive of society it will cost much ”

“ As our forefathers led the way in the understanding of sympathy with other races; so we to whom these still more intricate problems present themselves, must stand for the ideal, however hard it seems—the ideal of spiritual kinship and the strenuous effort to realize it in our relationship with other races; and so it comes about that the Foreign Missionary enterprise seems to be of the very essence of Quakerism, and that we find it closely akin to the great causes of Peace and Anti-slavery with which our Society has ever been identified. ”

“ To me it seems evident that there is a great place for the Society of Friends in this movement, just because we stand upon the side of idealism in all these complicated issues.
Right along the line Quakerism ranks itself on this side. The Society of Friends, as I read its history, has stood for an idealism which is well in advance of the current practice. In the holding of our Meetings for Worship we have stood for the absolute ideal; many of our Christian brethren admit it in theory, but regard it as quite outside the sphere of practical religion. ”

“ Those living forces are the spiritual force of the individual, which we call individual responsibility, the living force of the group, which we call fellowship, and above all, the Divine vitality, the incoming of the life of Jesus Christ, which we call spiritual power and spiritual guidance. Church arrangements, important in themselves, must be regarded as simply machinery through which forces can work, and the more efficiently the machinery allows the forces to work, the richer will be the service of the Church. ”

“ If we are mere imitators of others, the ideal may seem beautiful, but it is not compelling enough for us to take up the cross and go all lengths in the service of the Master. When we draw our inspiration from Him direct, there comes into our lives that intensely personal motive which the Apostle described in the words “The love of Christ constraineth us.” In this spirit of consecration to Him we shall be united with one another, and, being thus joined together, we shall be permitted to bring our message home to others as we could in no other way. ”

“ If spiritual life is allowed to be the controlling, directing, molding force in Quakerism I have no fear for our future. We shall put in the forefront of our Church work the things that belong to life, the gathering of disciples, the raising of leaders and prophets, the maintenance of warm fellowship, the encouragement of service, the fostering of growth. ”