YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

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DIVINITY SCHOOL

Swartbmore Xecture
1914.

SWARTHMORE LECTURES.
Cloth boards, is. net each.
1908. — Quakerism : A Religion of Life.
By R. M. Jones, M.A., D.Litt. (Also in
paper covers, 6d. net.)
1909. — Spiritual Guidance in the Ex
perience of the Society of Friends.
By William C. Braithwaite, LL.B.
1910. — The Communion of Life.
By Joan M. Fry.
1911. — Human Progress and the
Inward Light.
By Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L.
1912. — The Nature and Purpose of a
Christian Society.
By T. R. Glover, M.A.
1913. — Social Service : Its Place in
the Society of Friends.
By Joshua Rowntree.
1914. — The Historic and the Inward
Christ.
By Edward Grubb, M.A.

Swartbmore Xecture
The Historic and the
Inward Christ :
A STUDY IN QUAKER THOUGHT

BY
EDWARD GRUBB, M.A.
Author of ''Authority and the Light Within, &c.'

Published for the Woodbrooke Extension Co.\j . nm
BY
HEADLEY BROTHERS,
BISHOPSGATE, E.C.
1914.

fale Divinity Library

KW6

[all rights reserved.]

preface
One of the deepest and most pregnant
distinctions between early Quakerism and the
other forms of organized Christianity in the
seventeenth century lay in the place it assigned
to Behef in the doctrines which were regarded as
orthodox. While it by no means asserted that
correctness of Belief is unimportant, it did not
regard it as the first thing necessary for sal
vation. The essence of true Christianity it
found in a saving experience of the life of God in
the soul, transforming the character into the
character of Jesus Christ : and it relegated to a
secondary place intellectual definitions concern
ing the nature of His Person and of His saving
work. Its primary emphasis was inward and
ethical. Salvation it regarded as essentially a
work to be wrought in man, and not merely for
him ; as ^transforming experience to be known
in the soul here and now, and not mainly as a
vmeans of, escaping penalty in the world to come.
7^ In the words of William Penn :
g It is not opinion, or speculation, or notions of
-5 what is true ; or assent to, or the subscription of,

6 preface
articles or propositions, though never so soundly worded,
that makes a man a true believer or a true Christian.
But it is a conformity of mind and practice to the will
of God, in all holiness of conversation, according to the
dictates of the divine principle of light and life in the
soul, which denotes a person truly a child of God.1
Since the days of Schleiermacher and Ritschl,
this primary emphasis on the inward and
experiential nature of Christian faith has
gradually permeated Protestant thought, and
now appears in the teaching of many of the
spiritual descendants of the Puritans to whom
in the seventeenth century it seemed a pestilent
heresy. But, just as those two great Christian
thinkers, especially Ritschl, went too far in
rejecting as unnecessary and even harmful the
attempt to frame a philosophy of Christian
doctrine, so I believe the Society of Friends has
suffered throughout its history from a tendency
to undervalue and even to despise theology.
The human mind is so constituted that it cannot
permanently rest in a method of thinking that
divides religious from ordinary experience, and
places them in watertight compartments of
thought ; it inevitably seeks for the unification
of its knowledge. As a recent writer has said :
Christianity is unable permanently to dispense with
the work of the scientific theologian. The example of
1 A Key opening the Way to every Capacity (1692).

preface 7
those Churches where intellectual darkness has been
followed by spiritual decline leads us to infer that no
high level of spiritual experience can evei'long be main
tained except where its results are garnered by careful
intellectual labour.1
The following pages will illustrate, I beheve,
the truth of this contention in the case of the
Society of Friends. They have been written in
the desire to help forward, in however small a
measure, the discovery of a true statement of
Quaker faith, in the central field of Christian
thought and experience : the finding of an
answer that may satisfy ourselves and others to
the great question, What think ye of Christ ?
That answer should be one that unites in a
luminous whole of thought the Jesus of history
and the Christ of inward experience.
Edward Grubb.
26, Avondale Road,
Croydon.
March 28th, 1914.

1 Religion in an Age of Doubt, by Charles J.
Shebbeare, M.A., p. 22.

Gable of Contents PAGE
I. Introductory - - I3"23
The practical importance of this enquiry 13
Two elements, historic and spiritual, in
herent in Christian faith — - 15
Necessity of seeking an answer to the
question "Who and what is Jesus Christ ?" 17
The New Testament answers 17
The progress of Creed-building 20
The Reformation and its outcome 21
II. The Quaker Revival 23-27
Recovery of the experience of an Inward
Christ 24
His " light " given in measure to all men 26
III. Early Quaker Controversies 27-3i
Alleged denial of the historic Jesus 28
Answers by Fox, Burrough and others 30
The central difficulty not met - - 30
IV. Isaac Penington's Christology 32-39
The body of Jesus human, His Spirit Divine , 34
Sources of this theory ... 36
V. Isaac Penington's Successors 39~42
Doctrines of William Perm 39
No intentional depreciation of the historic
Jesus 41
Barclay's Apology 41

10 Gable of Contents PAGE
VI. Later Controversies - 43-47
Want of insight in attacks on the Quakers 43
Their apparent denial of the Incarnation - 44
Replies by George Whitehead and Daniel
Phillips ..... 44
VII. Criticism of the Early Quaker Christology 48-53
Two strains of teaching imperfectly
harmonised - - - 48
A dualistic mode of thought hindered
expression of the Divine immanence - 49
The danger of " Docetism " - - - 50
Penington's doctrine ignores the human
mind of Jesus - - - 51
Defective ideas of Personality - - 52
VIII. The Eighteenth Century : Job Scott 53-58
Salvation not by imputation of merit,
but by the imparting of life - - - 56
Christ born in each believer - - 56
IX. Elias Hicks and the Separation of 1827-8 58-63
Hicks's character and influence 59
Doctrines of Penington carried to an extreme 61
Depreciation of the outward and historic 62
X. The Great Reaction : Joseph John Gurney 64-71
The uprising of Evangelicalism 64
The influence of Stephen Grellet 64
Crewdson's Beacon - - - - - 65
Character and work of Gurney - 66
His doctrinal position - - 67
His wide influence - - - - 69
His abhorrence of Mysticism - 70

Gable of Contents n
PAGE
XI. Conclusion - - 71-83
Importance of uniting the historic and the
inward elements of Christian faith 71
Hints towards the search for a sound
Christology - - - 75
1. The place and function of scientific
thought - 75
Christ the goal of Evolution 76
The study of Personality - 77
2. The foundation in Christian experience 78
3. The scientific and religious attitudes of
mind - 79
Faith, not in facts, but in a Person 81, 83
4. The enduring value of the doctrine of
the Logos - - 81
Appendix. A. Penn's Christian Quaker 84
B. Illustrations of Attacks on the Quakers 86
C. The Attacks of Bugg and Keith 89
D. Elias Hicks's Sermons - - - 94
E. J. J. Gurney 's Essays - - 96

Gbe "Ibietoric anb tbe 3nwarb
Cbrist

i.
INTRODUCTORY

The question suggested in the title of this
lecture is of fax more than academic or theological
importance. In the interests, not of abstract
truth merely, but of our corporate usefulness as
a religious Society, I feel the duty laid upon me
of urging upon Friends the necessity for careful
thought and study concerning the basis of their
message for the world.
We hve in a day of free enquiry, when
authorities, however venerable, are questioned
on every hand, and when doctrines, however
sound, that are received and taught from
tradition merely, will not furnish a living witness
to the Truth. Many of our own members,
and multitudes in the great world around us, are
seeking for a spiritual hfe which they have not

i4 Gbe Distoric anb
found ; some have reached an inward experience
of God, but do not yet know what to do with
Jesus Christ. The common presentation of
Christianity repels them, because it assures them
that through Christ alone can access to God be
obtained ; and this does not find a witness in their
own consciousness, which has become aware of
God but not of Christ. To many, who revere
Him as saint and prophet, there appears no
reason why they should try to think of a person
who lived so long ago as the centre of their own
religious life to-day ; they may be prepared to
welcome the thought of Incarnation, but question
why this should be ascribed to Christ alone.
Behind all this, there is the old difficulty of the
relation of Faith to Facts : the question whether
Faith, which should yield absolute certitude of
its Object, is not out of place in relation to events
in history, which must always be subject to
criticism. There is a tendency, which is worthy
of respect, to take refuge from the uncertainties
of historical enquiry in the search for a faith that
is wholly independent of events that are alleged
to have happened in the past. Faith, it is felt,
is within the reach of all, whether educated or
unlearned ; but belief in past events, to be of
any real value, demands the careful examination

tbe 3nwaro Cbrlst 15
and weighing of evidence, for which only the
few have leisure or ability.
If the Society of Friends is to do its work in
bearing witness to the world of the truth of
God, it must be willing to face with courage
these and kindred questions. If it is to help
the struggling souls, within and without its
borders, into the sure anchorage of Christian
faith, it must, in particular, seek for clearer
hght than it has yet attained on the connection
between the direct experience of God in the soul
and the revelation brought in history by Jesus
of Nazareth ; it must unite, more effectively
than in the past, the Jesus of history with the
hving " Christ " of experience.
Now, the Christian rehgion took its rise in a
historic Person, whose character and influence
were such that His followers, within a few years
of His departure from them in the body, felt
themselves compelled by an irresistible necessity
to worship Him as Divine. Those followers, we
must remember, had been neither pagan Greeks,
nor Emperor-worshipping Romans, nor Oriental
mystics, most of whom would have found little
difficulty in the thought of a deified man, or of a
God appearing in human guise ; they were Jews,

16 Gbe ifoistorfc anb
trained in a severe and even fanatical mono
theism. Their confession of the Divinity of
their Master cannot therefore be accounted for
by supposing that their minds became a prey
to mythology and superstition ; it can only be
explained by two facts, one outward and the
other inward : first, the fact of the personahty
and career of Jesus of Nazareth ; and second,
the experience of a new relation to God into
which Jesus had lifted them, and of which they
felt Him to be still the foundation.
It follows that Christianity, from the earliest
days, has blended together two elements, which
we may call the historical and the inward or
spiritual. It has involved belief in certain
outward historical facts — those, namely, concern
ing the personality and work of Jesus ; and at
the same time it has meant an inward conscious
ness of being saved from sin and brought into
a personal relation to God, of which Jesus has
remained, alike to the individual and to the
community of disciples, the centre and the basis.
This blending of two distinct elements in
evitably gave rise to questioning — particularly
when the subtle Greek intellect was brought into
touch with the new faith, and when the followers
of Jesus had to meet the attacks of opponents

tbe 5nwarb Cbrist 17
trained in philosophic thought. The question
that could not long be suppressed was this :
Who and what is Jesus of Nazareth, that He
should be able to bring to men this new moral
hfe, and give them this fresh and happy
consciousness of God ?
The first attempt to answer this great question
that has come down to us is that of the Apostle
Paul — some of whose letters are probably the
earhest Christian writings we possess. His
answer is to be found in the thought — which
undoubtedly he felt he owed to the inward teach
ing of his Master's Spirit — of the pre-existence
of Christ : that the historical hfe of Jesus on
earth was the manifestation in a real human
personahty of an eternal Spirit, who was (to
use a specially Pauline expression) the
" image " of God Himself. But Paul's main
interest was neither speculative nor historical :
he does not dwell on his theory of Christ, and has
httle to say about His hfe or teaching : what
he is mainly concerned to do is to bring out the
new life of sonship with God into which Christ
raises the believer by leading him into a
" mystical union " with Himself. It is the
inward or spiritual side that mainly interests
Paul.

18 Gbe ibfstorlc anb
The first three Gospels, on the other
hand, though written probably when Pauline
thoughts concerning Christ had found acceptance
in the Church, are yet mainly written from the
historical standpoint ; they reproduce, it is
beheved with wonderful fidelity, the impression
made by that marvellous hfe on those who
witnessed it. The " Acts of the Apostles "
carries on the history, dealing with the early
Apostohc preaching ; and here also there is but
little of theory about Christ beyond the
declaration that He fulfilled, in spite of a shame
ful death, the Jewish prophecies of a Messiah.
The Epistle to the Hebrews develops, in the light
of Alexandrian thought, the Pauline doctrine of
Christ as the " Son " and " very image " of
God, but it displays a stronger hold than is found
in Paul's writings on the facts of the real
humanity of Jesus, especially in the sphere of
temptation. It is, however, in the Fourth Gospel
and the first Johannine Epistle that the two
elements, the historical and the inward, are for
the first time brought closely together. The
author of the Fourth Gospel (as is being power
fully shown by Dr. E. A. Abbott in his exhaustive
study of " The Fourfold Gospel ") endeavoured

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 19
to rewrite the story of the life and death and
resurrection of Jesus from a new point of view —
that of His hfe in the body being an Incarnation
of the eternal Divine Word or " Logos." This
thought of the Logos was a conception familiar
to the educated people of the first century, both
Jews and Greeks. One of the writer's objects,
apparently, was to re-interpret the earlier
Gospels in the hght of this conception, and to
bring out the hidden and spiritual meaning
of the facts they had recorded. At the same time
he clearly wished to correct a tendency, which
had begun even in the first century, to use the
spiritual teaching of Paul in such a way as to
undervalue the historical facts in the life of Jesus,
even to the point of representing them as mere
appearances, or at best as symbols of spiritual
truth. This insistence on historical reality
is seen especially in the opening words of his
first Epistle, concerning " that which we have
heard, which we have seen with our eyes, and
our hands have handled."1 The first Christian

1 It appears also, probably, in the strong insistence,
both in the Gospel and the Epistle, on the " blood and
water " which flowed from the side of Jesus on the
Cross, and which seem to have afforded to the writer
positive evidence that His body was identical in
character with our own.

20 Gbe ifofstorlc anb
heresy, which is combated in these writings,
was the denial of the real and true humanity of
Jesus, and it is known under the general name
of Docetism (from a Greek word meaning to
" seem " or " appear ").
The history of Christianity during the four
centuries that followed is very largely the story
of the efforts made by the Christianised Greek
intellect to find a satisfying theory of the nature
of Jesus Christ. The endeavour was made so
to formulate the theory as to commit the whole
Church to one uniform answer, and to excom
municate as heretical all who refused to accept
it. The result was to generate the almost
universal conviction that correctness of in
tellectual belief was the first and chief condition
of winning eternal salvation : " he that would
be saved," says the Athanasian Creed, " must
think thus." Into the history of creed-building
we cannot enter here. The edifice was completed
in the statement issued by the Council of Bishops
at Chalcedon in 451 a.d., which has remained the
standard of Christological orthodoxy ever since.
The principal affirmation is that Jesus was " of
the same nature " as God, and also " of the
same nature " as men : that in Him the two

tbe Snwarb Cbrlst 21
" natures," Divine and human, were united in
a single " Person," neither being lost or
absorbed in the other. The Creed never
explained how this could be. It left the two
" natures," which were regarded as radically
different, side by side, and the difficulty
remained unresolved how, without confusion or
contradiction, they could be combined in an
undivided " Person." The beautiful phrase of
the Athanasian Creed, that Christ was One
Person " by taking up the manhood into God "
does not really explain anything. In short,
the orthodox Creeds leave the intellectual
difficulty where they find it. Their value is in
giving danger-signals against paths of thought
that have been tried and failed ; they have httle
to offer in the way of positive guidance.
The consequence is that there has always been,
in the Christian Church, a tendency to simplify
the matter by ignoring one side of the problem ;
and, as the Church has always wished to magnify
the Divine character of its Lord and Redeemer,
it is the human side that has mainly been
depreciated. The Docetist tendency, under
various names, has been constantly recurring in
Christian thought, and is with us still.

22 Gbe Ibistoric anb
The Reformation of the sixteenth century
scarcely touched the standard of orthodox
belief in the matter of Christology. At first it
meant a great recovery of the inward life of
personal Christian experience, which had been
strong in Pauline and early Christianity,
which the " mystics " in the Church had striven
to reproduce, but which had often been sup
pressed as heresy. But the Reformers found
themselves faced with a double conflict : on the
one hand against the mighty authority of the
Roman Church, and on the other against the
wilder spirits who were turning the new-found
liberty into licence. In this two-fold struggle
the successors of the first Reformers had
recourse to the weapon that lay nearest to their
hands ; and in the place of the authority of an
infallible Church they set up the authority of an
infallible Bible or " Word of God." This meant
that the note of personal religious experience,
which the first reformers had powerfully touched,
was largely lost. God had spoken directly to
men, in the days when the Bible was being
penned, but He spoke so no longer. All that
could be authentically known of Him was to be
found in the pages of a book to which no word
had been added for fifteen hundred years.

tbe Snwarb cbrlst 23
Once more salvation was made to depend in
effect, if not in intention, upon correctness of
behef. Acceptance of the literal truth of every
word of Scripture — interpreted, as in fact it
was, in the hght of the historic Creeds — became
the first condition of being a Christian. God
was in effect driven to a distance from men.
Jesus Christ was a dim historic Figure who had
wrought salvation for His chosen ones in the
far-back ages of the past. Any assertion that
He is hving and reproducing His own hfe and
character in the experience of His true disciples —
that through Him they have access to the
authentic Voice of God as the early Apostles had
— was denounced as heresy, and those who held
it were fiercely persecuted as enemies of Christ.
The historic and speculative side of Christian
faith had almost destroyed the inward and
spiritual. II.
THE QUAKER REVIVAL.
In the middle of the seventeenth century,
when George Fox began his pubhc ministry,
many souls were hungering for a message of
living reality such as the Puritan pulpits did not
offer. In the later chapters of Dr. Rufus

24 Gbe Ibistorlc anb
Jones's Studies in Mystical Religion,1 it is shown
how, even before George Fox heard the " Voice
which said, There is one, even Jesus Christ,
who can speak to thy condition," great numbers
of " Seekers " after God, in various parts of
England, had left the organized worship of the
Puritan Churches, and were eagerly looking for a
new revelation of truth. Some of these believed
they found it, and anticipated, in greater or less
degree, almost all that the Quaker pioneers
declared. Among the pioneers themselves were
those who had reached a personal experience
similar to that of Fox before even they joined
the Quakers. James Nayler, who, in spite of
his sorrowful lapse from sobriety, was one of the
most lovely and gifted spirits of the Quaker
revival, made this declaration when brought
before the justices at Appleby in 1653 :
I was at the plough, meditating on the things of God,
and suddenly I heard a Voice saying unto me, " Get
thee out from thy kindred and from thy father's house."
And I had a promise given in with it. Whereupon I did
exceedingly rejoice, that I had heard the voice of that
God which I had professed from a child, but had never
known Him.1
1 See esp. chap, xix., The Seekers and the Ranters.
2 Works, p. 12. Also printed in Saul's Errand to
Damascus (1653), p. 31.

tbe Snwarb Cbrist 25
And after he had become a Quaker he wrote to
his friends in the North :
Dear hearts, it's by the arising of the Almighty we
have unity and strength ; the Morning of our Light
he is in us, and his Rising is our glory and crown, and
he is the Father of all our righteousness in the harm-
lessness of our hearts. How often doth he revive us
with new life, and refresh us with the streams of his
pure virtue, and is more in our hearts many times than
tongue can utter.1
Wilham Dewsbury, another of Fox's earhest
collaborators, thus summarises his convince-
ment and preaching : —
' And this I declare to all the inhabitants in England,
and all that dwell upon the earth, that God alone is the
Teacher of his people, and hath given to everyone a
measure of Grace, which is the Light that comes from
Christ . . . And this I witness to all the sons of
men, that the knowledge of Eternal Life I came not to
by the letter of Scripture, nor hearing men speak of the
name of God ; I came to the true knowledge of the
Scripture, and the eternal rest, by the inspiration of
the Spirit of Jesus Christ.'
Clearly such expressions point to a recovery
of the experience of an inward Christ, which
Puritanism, with all its moral earnestness, had
nearly lost. The Christian hfe of these men
does not stand in what they have heard from
others, or read in a book, about Jesus Christ and
1 Works, p. 733. * Works, p. 54.

26 Gbe Ifotstortc anb
His work for men in the past ; but in what they
have known for themselves as a hving present
reality. The Christ whom they proclaim as
Saviour and Redeemer is
No dead fact stranded on the shore
Of the oblivious years,
but One who may be known as a bright reahty
in the soul of everyone who will but seek for Him
in sincerity and obedience. This living
Presence — cleansing, renewing, inspiring, which
they believed in because it was the deepest fact
of their experience — they called the " Light,"
or the " Seed," and they placed in the very
forefront of their message the assurance that in
some measure it was given to all men. Whether
they spoke of the " Spirit," or the " Seed of
God," or the " Light of Christ," they meant the
same : that this, which they felt within them,
was no prerogative of a favoured few, but was,
as the Fourth Evangelist declared, a " Light
that lighteth every man," so that " all "
human beings were in some measure " taught of
God," if only they would " hear and learn "
(John vi. 45). They had recovered something
of the largeness and breadth (as well as depth)
of vision of that great Christian seer — which,

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 27
though most of them did not know it, is also
abundantly reflected in the writings of many of
the early Greek Fathers.

III.
EARLY QUAKER CONTROVERSIES.
But, as we have seen, such affirmations were
the rankest heresy to the Puritan theologians of
that day. Accordingly, the Quaker pioneers
found themselves embarked on a sea of religious
controversy, the character of which has been
vividly sketched by W. C. Braithwaite in
chapter xii. of his Beginnings of Quakerism. It
is no part of my present purpose to deal with this,
except in so far as it turned on the question
whether, in preaching a present and living
Christ manifested in some measure in the soul
of every man, they denied, or ignored, or under
valued the historical manifestation of God in the
person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. To
many of their orthodox opponents it seemed very
clear that they.did so. Among these opponents
were saintly men like Richard Baxter, who, in
his Quaker's Catechism (1657) quite unjustly
charged the Friends with denying " that there is

28 Gbe Ibistoric anb
any such person as Jesus Christ, who suffered at
Jerusalem " ; and John Bunyan, whose contro
versy with Edward Burrough, the young
Quaker, is well known. In 1656 Bunyan bitterly
attacked the followers of Fox in his book Some
Gospel Truths opened, and being replied to by
Edward Burrough followed this up by a Vindi
cation of his former work (1657). In this he
asserts that the Quakers, along with the
r " Familists and Ranters,"
either deny Christ to be a real man without them,
blasphemously fancying him to be only God manifested
in their flesh ; or else make his human nature, with the
fulness of the Godhead in it, to be but a type of God
manifested in the saints.
With the crudity of youthful dogmatism,
Bunyan insists that Jesus, at His ascension, went
away from His disciples into heaven, " in his
body of flesh and bones," and not into them, as
the Quakers falsely declared ; and that their
only " hope of felicity " is in the belief '* that the
Son of Mary is now absent from his children
¦in his person and humanity, making intercession
for them in the presence of his Father."
Insistence on this strange doctrine, that the
actual body of Jesus must be regarded as now in
heaven, was quite frequent among the opponents

tbe 5nwarb Cbrfst 29
"of the early Friends, including George Keith,
who himself had long been a Quaker.
A somewhat more scholarly opponent than
Bunyan was Matthew Caffyn, also a Baptist.
In his book, The Deceived and Deceiving Quakers
Discovered (1656), he admits that the Quakers
" say that they own him who suffered upon
Mount Calvary," but charges them with mean
ing only " the Spirit within him, which spirit
they say is now within their bodies of flesh " ;
and he continues :
Now we cannot but know that it was a fleshly sub
stantial body of Christ that they slew, murdered and
crucified upon the tree ; and in so doing the apostles
unanimously affirm that they slew Jesus (which in
English is Saviour), and yet doth he not through it
save ? . . . Now by what hath been said, 'tis
evident that the Quaker confesses bim not come in the
flesh as all the Apostles did, so as through the breaking
of it [the flesh], and blood-shedding of it, to effect man's
salvation. It is clear that to these opponents the Quaker
assertion of the Inward Christ appears to be the
denial of the Historical.
Attacks such as these, and many others, were
replied to by George Fox and Edward Burrough1
1 Edward Burrough signs the Preface only, but I
suspect that he had a hand in writing a good deal of
the book.

30 Gbe HMstoric anb
in The Great Mistery (1659), which deals with
charges made against Friends in over one
hundred books and pamphlets. Another
redoubtable champion of the new faith was
Samuel Fisher, a learned man, whose prodigious
work Rusticus ad Academicos (1660) " is the
most important piece of Quaker controversy
belonging to the Commonwealth period." It
contains, however, very little bearing on the
subject now before us.
In none of these early Quaker writings was the
central difficulty really met. Perhaps, indeed,
it was not even realised at all. In the writings
of George Fox, so far as I have been able to
discover, there is no sign that he, in the
simplicity of his heart's experience, felt that there
was anything that could give rise to question
in using the same term " Christ " for the hving
and saving Presence which he and his friends felt
in their souls, and for the man who hved and died
in Palestine sixteen hundred years before. Of
course, they all accepted, in full sincerity of
conviction, the behef that Jesus was Divine;
but this is no solution of the intellectual diffi
culty how, being one with God, and therefore
eternal, He was also fully and truly a man,
living at a particular time and place.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 31
The centre of Christian faith, on its intellectual
side — and it has an intellectual side, because
human faith is the response of our whole being
to God — is the behef that " The Word became
flesh " : that a Timeless and Omnipresent
Spirit, in some sense one with God, took upon
Him the limitations of time and space and
finite humanity. To the bare intellect, this
behef seems to involve a hopeless contradiction ;
and though countless devout Christian souls
have always been satisfied to hold it by " faith,"
though they could in no way resolve it, others,
no less devout, have felt that their love of truth
impelled them to make the attempt to transcend
the contradiction it apparently contains. The
orthodox Creeds, as we have seen, left the
difficulty where they found it. We cannot be
too thankful that, in form at least, they preserved
both elements — the divine and the human, the
eternal and the temporal ; but the doctrine of two
(as it seemed) radically different " natures "
united in a single " person " has not satisfied,
and does not now satisfy, many sincere and
earnest Christian souls who are compelled to use
their reason.

32 Gbe Ibfstoric anb
IV.
ISAAC PENINGTON'S CHRISTOLOGY.
Most of the early Friends did not feel it right
to use their reason on these matters. Their
assurance of the " Inward Light " of the
Divine Spirit was so strong that they feared any
use of their own minds would but obstruct its
beams. And so their weakness in theology,
on which some of them rather prided themselves,
too often exposed them to the easy taunts of their
adversaries. The first of them, so far as I can discover,
whose mind was vigorously exercised on the
problem of Christology was the saint and
mystic, Isaac Penington — a man of wealth and
liberal education, who had passed through very
deep waters of doubt and perplexity before he
found at last, in the year 1658, through associ
ation with the Quakers whom he had long
despised, the heavenly Presence that satisfied
his soul's hunger. Penington seems to have
reached for himself a fairly clear and definite
theory of the Person of Christ, which apparently
was accepted by his friends, and which moulded
their thoughts on the subject for several genera-

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 33
tions. It is first clearly enunciated, I believe,
in his Examination of the Grounds or Causes
which induced the Government of Boston, New
England, to make an order for the banishment
of the Quakers from that Colony on pain of
death ; under which order four of them were
actually hanged on Boston Common. The Order
of banishment was made in 1659, an<i though
Penington's Examination is undated, it was
probably written in 1660. It contains a section
" Concerning the Person of Christ," which was
obviously very carefully written, and the
major part of which runs as fohows :
They [the Quakers] believe that Christ is the eternal
light, life, wisdom and power of God, which was
manifested in that body of flesh which he took of the
Virgin : that he is the king, priest and prophet of bis
people, and saveth them from their sins by laying down
bis life for them, and imputing his righteousness to
them ; yet not without revealing and bringing forth
the same righteousness in tbem, which he wrought for
them. [Note his insistence on tbe inwardness of real
' Christianity.] And by experience tbey know that
; there is no being saved by a belief of his death for tbem,
and of his resurrection, ascension, intercession, etc.,
! without being brought into a true fellowship with him
(in his death, and without feeling his immortal seed of life
¦ raised and living in them. And so they disown tbe
faith in Christ's death which is only received and enter- '
tained from the relation of the letter of the Scriptures,
and stands not in the Divine power, and sensible
experience, of tbe begotten of God in tbe heart.

34 Gbe trfstoric anb
So far, Penington's exposition is but an
excellent statement of what the Friends had
always urged — that salvation is not to be known
by belief in, or acceptance of, any doctrines
about Christ or God, but only by the actual
experience of His regenerating life in the soul :
that a historic or speculative belief is valueless
if it is not the outcome of hving and inward
experience. It is in the following paragraph
that Penington's special theory appears :
Now tbey distinguish, according to the Scriptures,
between that which is called Christ and the bodily
garment which be wore. Tbe one was flesh, the other
spirit. "The flesh profiteth nothing (saith he), the spirit
quickenetb ; and he that eatetb me shall live by me,
even as I live by the Father," John vi. 63, 57. This is
the manna itself, tbe true treasure ; the other but the
visible or earthen vessel which held it. Tbe body of
flesh was but the veil, Heb. x. 20. Tbe eternal life was
tbe substance veiled. Tbe one be did partake of, as
tbe rest of the children did ; tbe other was he which did
partake thereof, Heb. ii. 14. The one was the body
which was prepared for the life, for it to appear in, and
be made manifest, Heb. x. 5. The other was the life
or light itself, for whom tbe body was prepared, who took
it up, appeared in it to do the will, Psalm xl. 7, 8, and
was made manifest to those eyes which were able
to see through the veil wherewith it was covered,
John i. 14.1
1 Works of Isaac Penington (Edn. 1784), Vol. I.,
p. 360.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrlst 35
This theory of the person of Christ runs all
through Isaac Penington's voluminous writings.
He divides in the sharpest way between the
Eternal Divine and saving Spirit, known in the
heart, who is properly called " Christ," and the
human body of the man of Nazareth, in which
for a time He, the true Christ, was clothed and
manifested.1 1 Elsewhere he writes :
The Scriptures do expressly distinguish between Christ
and tbe garment which be wore ; between bim that
came, and the body in which be came ; between the
substance that was veiled, and tbe veil which veiled it.
" Lo I I come ; a body hast tbou prepared for me."
There is plainly he, and the body in which he came.
There was the outward vessel, and tbe inward life.
This we certainly know, and can never call the bodily
garment Christ, but that which appeared and dwelt in
the body. (From An Invitation to Professors, etc.,
Works, Vol. III., p. 61.)
Again, he writes :
To whom do tbe names and titles Jesus and Christ
chiefly and in the first place belong ? Do they belong
to tbe body which was taken by him, or to him who took
tbe body ? The body hatb its nature and properties ;
and the Eternal Word or Son of God (tbe pure spotless
lamb, tbe fountain of innocency) its nature and proper
ties. Now the query is, which was the appointed
Saviour of the Father ? Which was the anointed of the
Father, chiefly and in the first place ? Whether tbe
body prepared, or be for whom tbe body was prepared,
to do the will, and offer up the acceptable sacrifice in ?
(From Some Queries concerning Christ and His
Appearances, Works, Vol. III., p. 46).

36 Gbe Ibtstortc anb
If we ask what was the origin of this sharply
dualistic theory, which makes the Spirit that
was in Jesus Divine, and His body human, the
answer is that it seems to have been reached by
Isaac Penington himself. I have not been able
to discover, though I have made careful enquiry,
that it was held before him by other mystics
or sectaries of the seventeenth century.1 It
' The only seventeenth century writer, so far as I
have ascertained, who uses this passage from Hebrews
in the same way as Penington, without (apparently)
having been influenced by him, is William Bayly, the
Quaker sea-captain, who, in his " short Discovery of the
State of Man," dated 24th of Fourth Month, 1659, a
few months only after Penington's convincement,
writes :
" Tbe power that was in that Man (or Body), which
suffered without tbe gate of Jerusalem, was before tbe
Body or Creature was made ; and it was tbe Power of
the most High which overshadowed tbe Virgin ; and,
said he, A Body hast thou prepared me; (mark) this
was the Life and Power in the Body which spoke, in
whom the fulness of the Godhead dwelt."
Wh en James Nayler was before the justices at
Appleby in 1653, a question was asked him which, we
may be fairly certain, would have been answered in
Penington's manner had Nayler been familiar with that
doctrine :
" Question : Was Christ man, or no ?
" James. Yes, he was, and took upon him tbe seed
of Abraham, and was real flesh and bone ; but [it]
is a mystery not known to the carnal man ; for he is
begotten of the immortal seed, and those that know
him know him to be spiritual ; for it was the word that
became flesh and dwelt among us ; and if he had not
been spiritual he had not wrought my redemption.

ERRATUM.
p. 37, line 12. — For Heb. vi. 6 read Heb. x. 5.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrtst 37
has some kinship with the Docetic doctrines
of the early Christian centuries, with their
sharp separation between spirit and matter,
to the detriment of the latter — doctrines which
the religious instinct of teachers like Ignatius
and Irenaeus rejected, and which became
known as " heresies." Undoubtedly Penington
beheved himself to be in harmony with the real
teaching of the New Testament, yet his theory
seems to be based on a single text in the
Epistle to the Hebrews, " a body hast thou
1 prepared for me " (Heb. vi. 6), which a little
reflection might have assured him was a very
insecure foundation. For that text is nothing
but a mistranslation, or perhaps a misin
terpretation by the LXX translators, of a
passage in the Psalms which no one can suppose
to contain any reference to Christ at all. The
passage is Ps. xl. 6-8 :
Sacrifice and offering tbou hast no delight in ; mine
ears hast thou opened ; burnt offering and sin offering
has tbou not required. Then said I, Lo, I am come ; in
tbe roll of tbe book it is written of me : I delight to do
thy will, O my God ; yea, thy law is within my heart.

" Justice Pearson : Is Christ in thee as man ?
" James : Christ filletb all places and is not divided ;
separate God and man, and he is no more Christ." From
Saul's Errand to Damascus (1653), p. 31.

38 Ube Iblstoric anb
The words " mine ears hast thou opened "
are plainly the Psalmist's declaration that God
had led him to perceive the uselessness of out
ward sacrifice as compared with the inward
sacrifice of the heart and life. They mean,
in the original Hebrew, ears hast thou bored for
me ; and the Septuagint translators interpreted
it to mean, or more probably a careless copyist
rendered it as, a body hast thou prepared for me.
The author of Hebrews found this in his copy of
the Psalms in Greek, and gave it a Messianic
significance. So that it is not Penington
alone that is to be credited with the mis
understanding ; though a reference to the original
passage in the Psalms would surely have
shown him that he was pressing this single
expression far beyond what it would really
bear. It is hardly too much to say that some of the
greatest troubles and disasters through which
the Society of Friends has passed were caused
by this theory, based on an erroneous Greek
text. James Nayler (in his answers at Appleby,
quoted in the footnote on pp. 36, 37), showed a
better insight into the problem than any of the
other early Friends. If they had followed these

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 39
hnes, had fixed their thoughts, as Nayler did, on
the Fourth Gospel, instead of the mistranslated
passage in Hebrews, and had taken heed to the
caution, " Separate God and man and he is no
more Christ," the history of the Society of
Friends might have been very different.

ISAAC PENINGTON'S SUCCESSORS.
^ The ablest (in many ways) of Isaac Penington's
successors, though he can hardly be called a clear
; or logical thinker, was his intimate friend and
'.neighbour, the statesman William Penn.
" Convinced " by the preaching of Thomas Loe,
in Ireland, in 1667, he was in the next year com
mitted to the Tower for the supposed heresy of
his book The Sandy Foundation Shaken, in
which he attacked the doctrines of a Trinity of
Persons in the Godhead, and of the Atonement
understood as a substitutionary satisfaction of
the wrath of God. After a short confinement he
was released, having made clear the fundamental
orthodoxy of his position by writing Innocency
with her Open Face. In this book he gives

40 XTbe Iblstoric anb
emphatic statements, mostly in Scriptural
language, of his belief in the Deity and Incar
nation of Jesus Christ, while maintaining that
He is (in His resurrection life) the same as the
Holy Spirit, " a manifestation whereof is given
to every man to profit withal."1
In his Serious Apology for the Principles and
Practices of the People called Quakers* (1671) he
replies to the charge that the Quakers denied
" the Person (the Son of God) who died at
Jerusalem to be our Redeemer." It will be seen
that he uses almost exactly the language of
Penington, sharply dividing the Divine from the
human in Jesus Christ, and identifying the
human element with His body :
Which most horrid imputation has been answered
(I believe) more than a thousand times, by declaring that
he that laid down his life and suffered his body to be
crucified by the Jews, is Christ the only Son of the Most
High God. But that the outward person which
suffered was properly the Son of God, we utterly
deny. . . . A Body hast thou prepared me, said the
Son. Then the Son was not the Body, though the Body
was the Son's.
It will be seen from this, and from other extracts
in the Appendix, that neither Penington nor
' See Works, Ed. 1726, Vol. I., p. 269.
2 Works, Vol. IL, p. 32.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrlst 41
,'Penn ever meant to depreciate the person or
work of Jesus of Nazareth, still less to deny His
'historical reality. And the same is true of all
the early Friends, if we except a few careless
utterances of some of the less thoughtful
adherents of the new teaching, which were made
the most of by their enemies.
The most learned of the Friends of the second
generation was the young Robert Barclay, who
in 1675, at the early age of twenty-eight, pubhshed
his Apology for the True Christian Divinity.
In this book, which became for some hundred
and fifty years the chief standard of Quaker
orthodoxy, he deals only incidentally with the
problem of Christology. His statements are
carefully worded. " Christ," he says, " is
fitly called the Mediator betwixt God and men ;
for having been with God from all eternity, being
himself God, and also in time partaking of the
nature of man, through Him is the goodness and
love of God conveyed to mankind." Combating
the objection that the Quaker doctrine of the
indwelling Light made Christians the equals
of Christ Himself, he says :
Though we affirm that Christ dwells in us, yet not
immediately, but mediately, as he is in that seed which is

42 Zbc Ibistoric anb

was with God, and was God, dwelt immediately in that
holy man. He then is as tbe bead, and we as the
members ; be the vine, and we tbe branches. . . .
We also freely reject tbe heresy of Apollinarius, who
denied him to have any [human] soul, but said the
body was only actuated by the Godhead. As also the
error of Eutyches, who made tbe manhood to be wholly
swallowed up of tbe Godhead. Wherefore, as we
believe he was a true and real man, so we also believe
that he continues so to be glorified in the heavens in
soul and body, by whom God shall judge tbe world. '
1 Barclay bas previously endeavoured to explain this
by using the scholastic term Vehiculum Dei, for " the
spiritual body of Christ, on which tbe saints do feed,"
but he does not succeed in making his thought at all
clear. (Apology, Prop, v., vi., § 13). He is hampered
by an inadequate idea of Personality.
1 The influence of Penington's peculiar doctrine
appears where he is discussing " the body and blood of
Christ," specially in reference to the Sacrament of tbe
Lord's Supper. He insists, of course, that tbe " body "
of which the disciples were to partake is spiritual and
not outward, and distinguishes it from " that body or
temple of Jesus Christ which was born of the Virgin
Mary, and in which He walked, lived and suffered in the
land of Judasa."
"Now as tbe outward body and temple was called
Christ, so was also his spiritual body no less properly,
and that iong before that outward body was in being.
. . . Which spiritual body of Christ, though it
was tbe saving food of the righteous both before tbe
law and under the law, yet under the law it was veiled
and shadowed, and covered under divers types, cere
monies, and observations ; yea, and not only so, but it
was veiled and hid, in some respect, under the outward
temple and body of Christ, or during the continuance
of it ; so that the Jews could not understand Christ's
preaching about it while on earth." (Apology, Prop. XIII.,
§ 2)-

tbe Unwarb Cbrtst 43
VI.
LATER CONTROVERSIES.
Barclay is much more careful than Penington ;
he writes more as a theologian, less as a seer and
mystic. Had the other Friends been equally
cautious, the edge would have been taken from
many of the attacks that were made upon them.
Most of these turn on unguarded statements,
which, when read apart from their context, often
have a harsh and uncouth sound, but when
carefully examined, in the light of the main
thought and experience of the Quaker preachers
and writers, are seen to be much less unorthodox
than they appear.1
Towards the close of the seventeenth century
and the beginning of the eighteenth, when the
Quakers had won toleration and had become
a formidable element in English society, menac
ing the organized forms of Christianity, both
established and free, there was a violent out
break of polemic against them. To a large
extent this was directed to show that their
doctrine of Christ denied at once His humanity
1 See Appendix B, page 86.

44 Gbe Ibtstoric anb
and His divinity, and made Him nothing but a
vague impersonal principle that all men shared ;
and that Quakerism, therefore, was an anti-
Christian religion.
It was still more serious when men who had
been Quakers turned against their friends, and
joined with their opponents in endeavouring
to prove them unbelievers. Chief among
these "apostates" were Francis Bugg and
George Keith, whose polemics are briefly noticed
in the Appendix.1
One of the main objects of Keith's attacks
was the elderly but still active Friend, George
' Whitehead, who, after the death of Fox, in 1691,
had held the foremost place in maintaining the
Quaker position in London. He was a man of
sane mind and saintly temper, modest and
careful in his statements, and he issued volumin
ous replies to the attacks made on Friends by
Bugg, Keith and others. He drew up at different
times several confessions of faith, the most
noteworthy of which was issued in 1693, to clear
Friends of the charges made against them by
Keith. The declaration that the Quakers hold
to Christ as the Light given in measure to all
men is set side by side with their affirmation of
1 See Appendix C, page 89.

tbe 3nwarb Cbrtet 45
entire belief in the historic record in the
Scriptures and in Evangelical Christianity gener
ally, with little attempt to show how the two can
be united. The Mystical and Evangelical
elements in Quaker teaching — the inward and the
historic sides of Christian faith — are carefully
brought together, but imperfectly harmonised.
Whitehead and his friends who signed the
Declaration of Faith did not " esteem it neces
sary to make themselves wise above what is
written," and were quite willing to leave the
matter there.1
Many of George Whitehead's abundant writ
ings are directed to explaining the passages
in the writings of Penington and others which
had been objected to as heretical. For instance,
answering F. Bugg in The Counterfeit Convert
(1694), he takes Penington's doctrine of the
" body " of Christ as a garment or veil, and says
Penington only meant that the bodily garment
was not chiefly or in the first place Christ. This,
he adds :
is no proof that the Quakers deny Jesus to be
Christ, for he did not consist only of an outward body
or vessel, be had both inward life, soul and spirit, even as
perfect man, much more as God. And therefore
1 The Declaration is printed in full in Sewel's History
of the Quakers, Vol. II. , pp. 542-555.

46 Ube Iblstoric anb
F. Bugg's inference that the Quakers would divide the
humanity from the Godhead, is false ; they are distin
guished but not divided in the entire being of Christ.
A similar line to that of Whitehead was taken
by Dr. Daniel Phillips, who in 1702 pubhshed
Vindicice Veritatis, to defend the Quakers from
some " Seasonable Advice " that had been
offered them by Dr. John Stillingfleet. Phillips
admits that " several of our ancient Friends'
expressions are, without considering their context,
harsh, and may be construed in a sense which we
dislike as much as our opposers can." But he
does not believe that any passage needs to be
retracted ; he is sure that all are capable of
" orthodox interpretations." Dealing with the
familiar charge that the Quakers " will not allow
Christ Jesus to have now a human body in
heaven," he says :
It is our faith that the same man Christ Jesus that
died without the gates of Jersalem is now in heaven,
with the same body-— so far as a natural and spiritual,
terrestrial and celestial [body] can be the same ; . . .
but we cannot admit that human is a proper epithet for
celestial body.
He goes on to enquire, as a medical man, what
a " human " body really is, and concludes that
it can only be a material one. Stillingfleet's
heaviest charge was based on William Penn's

tbe 5nwarb Cbrist 47
statement : " That the outward Person which
suffered was properly the Son of God, we utterly
deny."1 After a careful enquiry into the
meaning of the words, Phillips concludes (as also
Penn himself declares, in the preface to the book)
that what^-was intended was the denial that
God Himself died on the Cross — a " heresy "
known by the technical name of Patripassianism,
and held at that time by Lodowick Muggleton.
He also offers an interesting explanation of
Penington's oft-quoted passage about " not
calling the bodily garment Christ": that Isaac
Penington was combating views attributed to
the Socinians, " as if the manhood of Christ that
was born of the Virgin, excluding the Eternal
Word, was the only and the whole Christ." It
will be seen that Phillips, while admitting that
such expressions were not sufficiently guarded,
shows (and I think successfully) that the
authors of them were sincerely endeavouring
to combat serious errors.

See page 40.

48 XCbe tbtstortc anb
VII.
CRITICISM OF THE EARLY QUAKER
CHRISTOLOGY.
Whitehead and Phillips, the former especially,
did very useful work in mediating between
extremes, and faithfully presenting the two
elements, the mystical and the evangelical,
that were both present, though imperfectly
combined, in the early Quaker thought. The
later years of the seventeenth century did not
produce men of great original power or insight,
and the double strain of teaching flowed through
these Apologists unresolved.
It seems needful at this point to dwell a little
on this early Quaker teaching, and to show where
its weakness lay. I wish at once to express
sympathy with the objection that it is some
thing like a desecration to take the glowing
utterances of the saints and mystics, and subject
them to the cold criticism of the philosopher or
theologian. We must always remember that
the Friends of the first generation spoke and
wrote out of the white heat of a most living
experience of reality, and their words should be
read with the sympathetic insight with which

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 49
we judge the poets, rather than the cool analysis
which we apply to theological arguments.
But all of us have a philosophy of some kind
latent in our minds — a framework of general
ideas into which our experiences are un
consciously fitted, and in accordance with which
they find expression in our words. And the early
Friends were no exceptions. They inherited
a " dualistic " mode of thought which sharply
divided the world of matter from that of spirit,
the natural from the supernatural, the human
from the Divine. Everything fell into one or
other of those categories of thought, which were
regarded as mutually exclusive. The thought
of Divine " immanence," which was strong in
the early days of Christianity, and to which we
are now returning, had little if any place in
their minds. They could not think of a
" natural " world which was at the same time
spiritual or supernatural ; for them the two
orders of being could not overlap and inter
penetrate one another. They missed the real
significance of the Johannine doctrine of the
Logos : that God and man have something in
common : that there is no chasm between them
except that which sin has caused : that man at
his best can be a real manifestation of God, and

50 XTbe Ibfstoric anb
that God has that in Him which can find real and
true expression in a perfect man.
They did their best to explain, by the help of
the framework of ideas they had inherited, the
rich and living experiences into which they had
entered : that God was close to them, saving,
cleansing, inspiring and guiding them, and
that this experience was in some way connected
with the personality and work of Jesus Christ.
Few of them seem to have felt the need to
explain how it was connected, or to probe the
mystery of Christ's nature ; but those who did
feel it had recourse to the theory of the
" prepared body," which means that while His
body was human His spirit was Divine : that the
true Christ was the living eternal Spirit whom
they felt inspiring them, who had entered for a
brief period the body of the man Jesus, but was
no more really identified with His " outward
person " than a man is identified with his
garments. Now, it should be clear at once that this
doctrine, strictly considered, does not save the
real humanity of Jesus Christ. It is, as I have
suggested before, akin to the " Docetic "
heresies. So far the opponents of Penington,
obtuse and unsympathetic as most of them

tbe Jnwarb Cbrlst 51
were, seem to have been in the right. A real
man or " person " is much more than a material
body. A man or person is a self-conscious
being, who feels and thinks and wills : he is
essentially a mind, or soul, or " ego," of which
his body is the organ. The connection between
mind and body, in a self-conscious person, is
indeed a mystery we cannot fathom ; but it is
much closer than is indicated by such terms as
" entering," " inhabiting," " clothing itself
with," and the like, which the early Friends used.
It would be unfair to blame them for their
defective psychology, but we must recognise
that it was defective. And it should be noted
that they have hardly a word to say about the
mind of Jesus, which, if the Incarnation is to be'
taken seriously, must have been a human mind.
They rarely dwell on the growth of His know
ledge, on His consciousness of Himself as a man
distinct from God and wholly dependent on Him,
on His use of prayer, His experience of temp
tation, His struggle — deep and intense, though
always victorious — to know and do the will
of His Father in heaven. They have little to
say about His thoughts of the Messiahship and
what it meant, His anticipation of the coming
Kingdom, His anxiety to train His disciples

52 Ube Ibistortc anb
sufficiently to enable them to carry on His work
when He should be taken from them, His suffer
ing and desolation in the prospect of death.
This absence of insight into the human mind
or self-consciousness of Jesus, of realisation of
His character and personality as a man, was
universal in their day, as indeed it had been since
the first century (except among the Nestorians);
and the Friends did not, in this matter, diligent
students as they were of the New Testament,
rise above the common level of their time. We
must, I think, regretfully admit that they
hindered rather than helped the attainment of
such insight, by their intense insistence on the
inward and spiritual nature of " Christ," —
which (given their rigid separation of the
spiritual from the material) led them, however
unconsciously and unintentionally, to a relative
disparagement of the outward and historical
facts of the Incarnation. This, their successors,
towards the close of the seventeenth century,
tried to make good by stating with the utmost
exphcitness their acceptance of the New
Testament story ; but (as we have seen) the two
elements were never clearly harmonised.
Their defective thoughts of Personality,
which most of them seem never to have been

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 53
able to think of apart from bodily form, also led
them to an impersonal way of speaking of the
inward " Christ." Daniel Phillips admits that
the Friends objected to " attributing Personality
to God, conceiving it too gross a term to be
predicated of the Almighty." "Persons" were
for them rigidly separate beings. They could
not conceive that one " person " could overlap
or interpenetrate with another ; and hence
that which they felt stirring in them, purifying
and enlightening and guiding, they were obliged
to speak of as a thing or principle rather than a
Person. " That of God in you " was what they
would direct their hearers to. This mode of
speech was not that of primitive Christianity,
and it afterwards led to serious consequences.
VIII.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : JOB
SCOTT.
During the eighteenth century the Quaker
movement in this country, from causes which
it is beyond our province to consider at large,
but one of which I believe to have been their
weakness in theology, rapidly declined. In

54 XTbe Ibistoric anb
the American Colonies it made much greater
numerical progress, and it seemed at one time
as though Quakerism might have become the
dominant form of Christianity in more than one
of those communities. But on both sides of the
Atlantic there was a lamentable decline in
spiritual life — as indeed there was in all the
Churches until they were awakened to new zeal
by the Methodist revival. There is only one
name of importance for our present study
among the Friends of the eighteenth century —
that of Job Scott, a Rhode Island schoolmaster,
who joined the Society " by convincement "
about the year 1770.
Job Scott was a man of saintly life, com
bined with much force of mind and fearlessness
in original thinking on religious subjects. He
travelled extensively in the ministry, and his
Journal is full of instruction. In 1793 he came
on a religious visit to this country, and died of
small-pox in the North of Ireland at the early
age of forty-two, as John Woolman had died
at York nineteen years before. His views were
as far removed as those of Penington from the
prevailing orthodoxy of the churches of his time,
but they encountered no breath of censure in
the Society of Friends on either side of the

tbe 5nwarb Cbrlst 55
Atlantic, until, more than thirty years after his
death, they were attacked as unsound by Luke
Howard, of Tottenham, in 1825.1
Job Scott's position in regard to the nature
and work of Jesus Christ was substantially that
of Isaac Penington and William Penn. He
constantly uses in the same way the expression
about " the prepared body," but manifests a
deeper insight into the humanity of Jesus, and
the influence of His personality on those who
came in contact with it. He dwells much on the
sufferings of Jesus, which he feels he shares, as
George Fox did. " How the divine life unites
itself with humanity so as to be capable of
suffering " he wisely professed himself unable to
explain2 ; and, if at any time he did make the
attempt, he fell into the usual dualistic mode of
expression which was based on the idea that the
true Christ, being pure Spirit, could not suffer.3
1 See Job Scott, an Eighteenth Century Friend, by
Henry W. Wilbur, pp. 85-94. Luke Howard left the
Society of Friends shortly after the " Beacon " contro
versy of 1835-6, having identified himself with the party
of Isaac Crewdson.
1 Journal, Vol. I., p. 499 (Essay on " Salvation by
Christ ").
' Journal, Vol. I., p. 281. " Not but that his
omniscience as God could see and behold it all [the
suffering on tbe Cross] without feeling it in a body of
flesh ; but as the brethren were partakers of flesh
and blood, he willingly took part of tbe same."

56 TTbe iblstoric anb
But such criticism must not blind us to the
depth and power of his apprehension of Christ
and of fellowship with Him.
Some may call me an heretic when I confess unto
tbem that I expect no final benefit from the death of
Jesus, in any other way than through fellowship with
bim in bis sufferings. But after the way in which
they call heresy, worship I tbe God of my fathers,
truly believing in tbe history of Christ's life, death,
resurrection, ascension and glory.1
But Job Scott's chief contribution to Christian
thought was a reinforcement of the Quaker
teaching that salvation by Christ is no kind of
external imputation, but must, if it is to be real
at all, be experienced as an actual birth of the
Divine in the human soul. This he insists on
throughout his writings, as the chief thing he has
to say ; and he enforces it by treating the
metaphor of a " new birth " as much more than
a metaphor — as literally expressing the experi
ence that all who are " saved " must pass through.
Christ, he thought, must actually be born in
each believer : God is His Father, and the
believer is His mother. To emphasize this
thought he presses beyond what they will bear
such passages as Mark iii. 35, " Whosoever shall
1 Journal, Vol. I., p. 221.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrfst 57
do the will of God, the same is my brother and
sister and mother," and Paul's expression to the
Galatians (iv. 19), " until Christ be formed in
you." This birth of the Divine in the human
soul seems to him to be a part of the Incarnation
itself :
In all ages, the true mystery of godliness was and is
" God manifest in the flesb," etc., not in the flesh of that
one body that was born of Mary, only ; but in the flesh
of all tbe godly. For there never was any true godliness
without the mamfestation of the very life and power
of God in the creature, bringing forth a new birth of
" the incorruptible seed and word of God."1
From all this it is evident that Job Scott, like
Isaac Penington, was a typical mystic ; he
realised more deeply the inward than the historic
side of Christian faith ; but he was one who
lived out with rare faithfulness the life to
which God had called him, and he always knew
that this life was his through Jesus Christ.
Many of his expressions are strikingly beautiful.
In his first letter written to Eunice Anthony,
at the age of twenty-nine, after he had asked
her to be his wife, he says, " it is my crown,
my chiefest joy, to feel the holy harmonious
influences and inshinings of the love of Jesus my
1 Journal, Vol. I., p. 443.

58 "Ebe Ibtstorlc anb
Saviour upon my soul." In 1782, at the crisis
of the War of Independence, he wrote :
Though storms without arise,
Emblems of those within,
On Christ my soul relies,
Tbe sacrifice for sin.
Though clamour rear its head,
And stalk from shore to shore,
My food is angel's bread —
What can I covet more ?

IX.
ELIAS HICKS AND THE SEPARATION OF
1827-8.
I now approach, with considerable hesitation,
a very difficult part of my task — that of endeav
ouring to give a brief but faithful account of the
Christological doctrines of Elias Hicks, which
were the immediate occasion of the most
disastrous event in the history of the Society of
Friends. The Separation which took place in
America in 1827-81 laid waste the Society on
that side of the Atlantic, almost destroying its
corporate witness for spiritual Christianity,
1 See my Separations, their Causes and Effects (Headley
Bros., 1914, is. net), pp. 16-49.

tbe Snwarb Cbrlst 59
and the reports of it which reached this country
produced much confusion in the minds of
Friends. Ehas Hicks was three years older than Job
Scott, and, like him, travelled extensively in the
ministry in Eastern America. He was a farmer
of Long Island, and a man of limited education
though of great natural abilities, and an acute
and logical mind. He was an eloquent and
powerful preacher, and where he laboured
longest he found the most devoted following.
Not until he was past sixty years of age do we
find evidences of disagreement with his ministry.
The earliest reference I have been able to find
is in the life of Stephen Grellet, who mentions the
great uneasiness he felt in regard to some of
Hicks's utterances in the year 1808. It seems
to have been ten or fifteen years later that
opposition first began to be shown in public.
The Journal of Elias Hicks is a singularly
colourless document, and it contains very little
indeed that might not have been written by any
Friend who travelled extensively in the ministry
during the later years of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the next. It is evident that
he was a fervent preacher of righteousness,
taking a strong line against slavery and on all

60 Gbe "Ibtstoric anb
moral questions. In doctrine, he followed what
he believed to be the teaching of the early
Friends, exalting the sufficiency of the Inward
Light, and using almost the language of Job
Scott in insisting on the necessity of " Christ
being born in you " — of an actual experience
of the saving power of God's Spirit in the soul.
It was certainly this, and no " mere morality "
or self-righteousnesss that he taught. He
disavows the Unitarian doctrine, and expresses
his deep sorrow at the spread, even among
Friends, of deistic and " infidel " ideas.
After he had been openly attacked as " un
sound " great crowds of Friends and others
frequently gathered to hear him, and many of
his sermons were taken down in shorthand, and
published, with his sanction though without
being revised by himself. It is from these
volumes, covering (it must be remembered)
only the later years of his life, when controversy
seems to have rendered him more extreme,
that our knowledge of his peculiar views is chiefly
to be gained. Through them all runs strongly
the flow of the preacher of righteousness. Fond
as he was of argument, there is httle or nothing to
show that he indulged in speculation or contro
versy for its own sake ; and, though he combats

tbe Jnwarb Cbrfst 61
strongly what he believes to be error, it is
always without rancour, and because he sees in it
some moral flaw or unreality.1
I believe it to be quite unjust to say, as has
often been said, that Hicks consciously or
intentionally denied the Divinity of Jesus Christ.
But he understood it in his own peculiar way,
which he fully believed to be the way the early
Friends had understood it. In some passages,
however, he explains it in a manner which I
have not found exemplified in their writings.
For example, in a carefully written letter he
says2 :
As to the divinity of Jesus Christ, the son of the
virgin : when he had arrived to a full state of sonship
in the spiritual generation, he was wholly swallowed
up into the divinity of his heavenly Father [here he
refers to 2 Peter i. 4, " partakers of the Divine nature,"]
and was one with the Father, with only this difference :
his Father's divinity was underived, being self-existent,
but the Son's divinity was altogether derived from the
Father. . . . But this was not the case with Jesus
in the spiritual relation, until be had gone through tbe
last institute of tbe law dispensation, viz., John's
watery baptism, and had received additional power
from on high, by the descending of the Holy Ghost
upon him as he came out of the water.3
1 See Appendix D., page 94.
a Quoted at length in The Quaker, vol. IV., p. 284,
See also Sermons, pp. 254ft.
3 This view of the taking up of tbe manhood of Jesus

62 TTbe Ibtstorfc anb
So also, I do not believe that Elias Hicks had
any thought of denying the Incarnation or the
humanity of Jesus Christ ; but the outcome of
his mode of thought, which (as we have seen) he
inherited from some of the early Friends and
carried to an extreme, is undoubtedly to belittle
the importance of the historic side of Christian
faith, by concentrating attention on the inward
and the spiritual. For instance, dealing with
our Lord's miracles, he says :
Here he became an outward figure of the power of the
gospel, the wisdom and power of God. Here he is
acting upon tbe outward man ; by healing the sick,
cleansing tbe leper, and raising the dead ; it is all figure
together. Therefore, he told his disciples, "It is
expedient for you that I go away ; for if I go not away,
the Comforter will not come." He speaks nothing but
the truth : for so long as the Jews had bim to look at,
they never could rise any higher, — while he was bodily
with them. That part must be entirely taken away.
It must be dissolved, and be so no more. We must
have no remembrance of it ; because, if we did worship

into God is technically known as " Adoptionism," and,
though not considered orthodox, bas been held at
various times in tbe history of the Church from the first
century onwards. It calls attention to an experience
of our Lord which has been too much neglected in
Christian thought : the fuller consciousness of His
Divine mission, and of power to fulfil it, which came to
Him after His baptism. Tbe idea of a " progressive
Incarnation," to which it is allied, has been held by
some theologians who have been counted orthodox
e.g., Dorner.

tbe Snwarb Cbrfst 63
it, it would be the worship of an image. Let us only
remember the glorious works which he did ; but no
more remember the flesb and blood. Let us have no
hand in it. It was only an organ through which tbe
power of God passed, and brought about all these effects ;
effects supernatural to tbe power of man ; to any
ability or power of bis own.1
That passage is, I beheve, typical of his whole
position, and the least we can say about it is
that, while it was certainly meant to be Christian
and spiritual, it does not ring true to Christian
experience. It was not so that Jesus brought
inward healing to the woman who was a sinner,
who washed His feet with her tears and wiped
them with the hair of her head. Such a doctrine,
moreover, empties of real significance the thought
of Paul, which filled him with adoring gratitude,
that though the Lord " was rich, yet for your
sake he became poor " ; that while equality
with God was within His grasp, He " emptied
himself, taking the form of a servant, being
made in the likeness of men."
At this point, I think, we may suitably leave
Elias Hicks, and pass to the great reaction
against mysticism which occurred in England,
and changed the face of Quakerism here.
1 Sermons, p. 261.

64 XTbc Ibfstoric anb
x.
THE GREAT REACTION : JOSEPH JOHN
GURNEY.
The uprising of " Evangelicalism," which was
largely the outcome of the Methodist revival in
the eighteenth century, produced a new tide of
spiritual life in most of the churches of this
country, including the Society of Friends. In
our own body it was aided by the labours
of Stephen Grellet, the young Frenchman who,
in 1795, had, on Long Island, undergone
a very remarkable conversion (so far as
appears, without human instrumentality) from
Voltairean unbelief to Christianity of a markedly
Evangelical type, and who had joined the
Society of Friends. He was, as we have noted
already, a strong opponent of Elias Hicks,
whose views appeared to him to be mere deism
and infidelity, and he had witnessed many of
the desolating scenes that accompanied the
Separation. His fervent and self-sacrificing
missionary labours in many parts of the world,
and the very deep Christian experience of which
they were the outcome, gave great weight to his
preaching, and I cannot doubt that he was
largely instrumental in altering the views of
Friends on both sides of the Atlantic. He paid

tbe Jnwarb Cbrfst 65
four visits to these islands — in 1811-13, in
1820, in 1831-2, and again, after his return from
the Continent, in 1833-4.
The most noteworthy symptom of the new
movement was the publication, in 1835, of A
Beacon to the Society of Friends, by Isaac
Crewdson, of Manchester. Into the history of
the controversy it aroused it is beyond our scope
to enter. Crewdson's main contention was
that the Scriptures and the Scriptures alone
are the source of our knowledge of God and His
salvation, the only standard of Christian truth ;
and that the origin of Hicks's errors, which, he
believed, endangered the eternal salvation of
men, lay in supposing that " impressions on the
human mind " could be superior to the Bible.
He charges Hicks with denying the divinity of
Christ and His Atonement, and refutes him by
quoting many passages of Scripture. His
position is almost precisely that of the Puritan
opponents of Quakerism in the seventeenth
century, and of Francis Bugg and George Keith
after their apostasy, and the whole doctrine of
the " Inward Light " he denounces as a dangerous
delusion. As, however, he makes no positive
contribution to Christological thought, it is
needless to devote further attention to his work.

66 Zbc Ibistorfc anb
A postcript to the book refers the reader to Joseph
John Gurney's Essays on Christianity, to which,
with other writings by this Friend, we now turn.
Joseph John Gurney1 was one of the very few
great Biblical scholars whom the Society of
Friends has produced. In early life he mastered
the Greek and Hebrew languages, and as years
went on he read widely in the Fathers, and in
Biblical criticism as it then was. But he was
very far from being a clear and consistent thinker
on religious subjects ; indeed his views on
Authority gave little scope for free and inde
pendent thought, like that of Job Scott.
Brought up in worldly surroundings, with his
sisters, one of whom was afterwards Elizabeth
Fry, he turned like her, though without any
sudden conversion, to the " plain path " of
Quakerism. He was wealthy, genial and popu
lar, and had a large acquaintance with leading
people of various denominations, particularly
Evangelical Churchmen. He was a man of very
deep and sincere piety, and alike by his writings
and public addresses and preaching he exer
cised a very wide influence. Though he had,
after some early misgivings, thrown in his lot
whole-heartedly with our Society, he never
1 See my Separations, etc., chapters v. and vii.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 67
understood the deep strain of mysticism which
marks the teaching of the Early Friends, and
indeed he frequently condemned all " mysticism"
as near akin to infidelity. His Essays on the
Evidences, Doctrines and Practical Operation of
Christianity were first published in 1825, and
went through many editions. I have read them
carefully, without finding any trace of the
distinctively Quaker spirit. They might have
been written by any learned and devout evan
gelical Christian at that day, of any denomi
nation. The argument to show " the truth of
Christianity " is directed to proving the absolute
and infallible authority of Scripture, and it was
on this ground that Gurney always stood.
Revelation he defines as " the introduction
into the world of divinely authorised knowledge."1
Christianity for him was mainly a system of
truths, promulgated to men on the authority of
God Himself, and vouched for by miracles.2
1 Essays, p. 2.
' Cf. Letter to a Friend (1824) : " Christianity, then,
being the religion of God — the true and only religion
— where are we to find an authorised record of the
doctrines of which it consists.? I answer, not in tbe
scholastic productions of polemical divines ; not in the
treatises of modern and uninspired theologians ; not
in the declarations of any particular church ; but in
the genuine compositions of inspired men : in the
Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament "
(P- 24)-

68 ttbe Ibfstorlc anb
Faith, saving faith, was for Gurney just what
it was for the Puritan theologians who attacked
the Quakers without really understanding their
meaning : it was an assent to propositions given
on Divine authority. He explicitly identified it
with belief, and made our eternal salvation de
pend on the holding of certain views.1 This was
certainly a retrogression from the view of Barclay
and his predecessors, for whom Faith was the
response of our souls to the inward and im
mediate revelation of God.2
In many passages in his writings J. J. Gurney
exposes what seems to him the danger of Hicks's
position ; but I do not think he traces it exactly
*to its right source. The mistake that led to a
depreciation of the historic element in Christian
faith appears, as I have indicated, to have been
1 Cf. Biblical Notes and Dissertations (1830), chapter
on " The Importance of Faith in the Deity of Christ " :
" Since it has been demonstrated to our reason that
God has revealed to us a system of truth for our
salvation, reason itself proclaims that we must be saved
through tbe operation of that principle in the mind by
which alone revealed truth is accepted and appropriated.
Now that principle is belief or faith." It is fair to add,
however, that in a later work Gurney denies that faith
is " tbe mere assent of our understanding," and says,
" it is a practical and operative principle of wonderful
energy." (Observations on the Distinguishing Views
of Friends, Seventh ed., 1834, p. 46.)
2 Barclay, Apology, Prop. II., § 8. For a discussion
of Gurney's Essays, see Appendix E., page 96.

tbe -Jnwarb Cbrtet 69
' < twofold : first, a dualism that divided too
': sharply between the material and spiritual, the
, , human and the Divine ; and second, a defective
idea of Personality. These limitations, in
herited from the early Friends, affected the
doctrine of Ehas Hicks more seriously than it did
theirs, both because he was more logical, and
because he was further removed from the great
uprising of spiritual life in which the Quaker
movement began. But Gurney himself shared
those limitations, and he added others of his own
which, I am afraid, greatly lessened the influence
for good which in many ways he exerted over
the Society of Friends in this country. To enter
at large into this subject would be beyond our
range ; but to prevent misconception I think it
right to say that in my judgment his teaching
and influence, the outcome as it was of deep
and devoted Christian character, aroused new
spiritual life and a richer evangelical experience
in many Friends, stirred them to a far deeper
sense of the value of the Bible and the importance
of Biblical instruction, and helped to free the
Society from the stiffness and traditionalism
which was keeping it in bondage. It seems
certain that no other Friend stamped his person
ality on the Society in this country during the

70 XLbc ifofstortc anb
nineteenth century as Gurney did. From the
time of the Beacon controversy onwards, most
of its official utterances expressed his thoughts,
often almost in his words ; and many Friends
who knew him only indirectly, or not at all,
grew up into something like his image.
Among his limitations, however, must be
reckoned a constitutional incapacity to grasp
the meaning of the mystical element in the
teaching of the early Friends, and, behind them,
in early Christianity itself. He based himself
absolutely on the Bible ; but he overlooked
almost entirely one of the most deep and vital
elements in the New Testament — the mystical
teaching of Paul and John in regard to the
actual indwelling of Christ in the Christian soul.
" Christ liveth in me " — " Christ in you, the hope
of glory " — " I am the vine, ye are the branches "
— " If we love one another, God abideth in us "
— this is the language of the deepest Christian
experience, but Gurney either barely notices
it, or else explains it away. He was learned
in patristic lore ; but there is no sign that the
deep mysticism of the early Greek Fathers
touched him in the least.
The result is that since his time the Society
of Friends, the world over, has been speaking

tbe Snwarb Cbrtet 71
with two voices, and has had no clear and ringing
message for the world as it had in its early days.
Most of us, in our devotion to doctrine and the
historic side of faith, have been in danger of
losing the inward Christ, and with this the heart
of Quakerism ; a minority have maintained the
latter, but (for the most part) without the large
outlook and the missionary spirit that marked
our founders, and which seems to require, as its
inspiring force, a devotion — not to doctrine
or tradition — but to the person of the historic
Jesus as the Redeemer and Healer of men.

XI.
CONCLUSION.
The greatest of the problems that confronts the
Society of Friends to-day — so at least it appears
to me — is the reunion, in the bonds of clear
thought and living experience, of the outward
and the spiritual elements in our faith, of the
historic and the inward Christ. It is, I believe,
idle to ask which of the two elements is the more
important. Unless the two are harmonised and
held together, we can no more do our real work
for the world than we can cut with one blade of

72 XTbe Ibfstoric anb
a pair of scissors. Without the historic Jesus
as the Revealer of the Father and the Redeemer
of our souls, we shall be little more than an
ethical society of a few select spirits, alienated
from the great heart of Christendom, and
following (it may be) wandering fires. What He
was to His first followers.what He has ever been to
the Christian society, was powerfully portrayed
two years ago, in this lecture, by T. R. Glover, and
it is needless now to repeat it. But, on the other
hand, without a deep experience, and a firm
conviction, of the inward Christ — both in His
perennial influence in the heart of all mankind,
as the Divine Word who is the Light and Life of
men, and in His more personal presence as the
Holy Spirit in the souls of His redeemed and
faithful followers — we shall be a mere evangelical
sect, with no reason for our existence, no living
message for the troubled and seeking souls
around us; for the multitudes in countries
like France and Germany, as well as at home,
who are alienated from the Churches ; or for the
millions in India for whom religion is mystical
or nothing.
The task of seeking for a thought of Christ
which will unite these two elements is one that
is worthy of the dedication of our best powers

tbe Jnwarb Cbrtst 73
of heart and soul and mind. We cannot indeed
all think alike, and it would not be well for us
if we could. Some are natural mystics, many are
not. But there is an urgent need that some of
us at least — those especially who have gifts of
intellect and education — should devote these
gifts, according to their ability, to the earnest
endeavour, by prayerful thought and wide and
earnest study, to master the truth of our religion
and express it in harmony with the thought and
knowledge of our time. I appeal to the young
men and women among us — those especially
who have the advantages of university training
— to follow in the steps of Barclay and of Gurney
in sparing a large part of their lives from the
pursuit of business and pleasure, and to dedicate
it, as they did, to religious study. Particularly
I ask them to devote it to the endeavour to
find an answer to this great question : how can
the historic and the inward Christ be held as one ;
how can that one Life, lived so long ago, be also
the inward Light in the souls of all men, how
can it be the hope of the world to-day, the well-
spring of love and joy and power for service in
Christian hearts ?
We do not want to seek a denominational
answer; to exalt ourselves as a people ; or harden

74 XTbe ibistoric anb
the sectarian divisions that are melting away
as men faithfully seek the truth that unites them.
We must recognise that this great question is
being worthily attacked by the best thought of
our day, in many lands, and by men and women
representing all shades of Christian thought.
What we have to do is to share their labours, and
to learn if we may what is the contribution that
we as a people have to offer, what it is that God
has raised us up to do.
It is not for me to attempt to indicate the
kind of answer we shall find. We need not be
fettered in our search for it by the formulae of the
past, which indeed we ought to respect as
danger-signals warning us against blind paths,
but which must not bind us as if they had
exhausted truth. So orthodox a student as
Professor James Denney says :
It is faith which makes a Christian ; and when tbe
Christian attitude of the soul is found, it must be free
to raise its own problems and work out its own
solutions. . . . We are bound to Christ, and would
see all men so bound ; but we must leave it to Christ
to establish His ascendancy over men in His own
way — by the power of what He is ar^d what He has done
— and not seek to secure it beforehand by the imposition
of chains of our forging.1
' Jesus and the Gospel, p. 383.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 75
But, though it will take long thought and study
and much prayer and Christian experience, on the
part of many of us, to find the answer, I may
venture to offer a few hints as to the path along
which it may be sought.
i. In the first place, we must come to terms
with modern Science in its largest sense : we
must show, if we can, that our theology does not
contradict, but is in harmony with, what is
known of the facts of the universe. Purely
physical science — the study of " dead " matter
and the forces that move it — may not have much
to teach us ; we must indeed be on our guard
against the assumption, too often made, that the
purely mechanical order of necessary and
inevitable causation, which physical science
seems to reveal to us, holds also of living things
and of self-conscious personality. The work of
Bergson and others in this field should claim
our earnest attention. Biology, which now is
based on belief in Evolution, is shaking itself
free from the fetters of the mechanical theory,
and is more and more reaching the conclusion
that the free creative energy which manifests
itself in the personal life of self-conscious beings
is present in some measure in all life.1 We
1 See Bergson, Creative Evolution ; also Mechanism,
Life and Personality, by J. S. Haldane, F.R.S.

76 XCbe Ibtstoric anb
should consider carefully whether a sound view
of Evolution really shuts the door against such
an inflow into the world of creative moral
energy such as Christians believe was associated
with the personality of their Master ; whether
the life He lived does not give us an assured
conviction of the kind of goal for which Evolution
is making, and so add a new significance to the
words of Paul that " unto Him are all things " ;
whether the personal freedom that Evolution,
rightly studied, is compelled to recognise does not
bring us also to the fact of Sin and the need of
Redemption. But there are other fields, not of Science
strictly so called, in which we should yet carry
with us the scientific spirit that seeks to hold
only to what is true and verifiable. Our study
of History and Criticism must be scientific, in
the sense that we seek only for the facts, and for
all the facts that can be known. We must not,
in reliance on some a priori and impossible
definition of the miraculous, rule out without
investigation such alleged facts as seem to trans
cend the common order ; we must study them
with an open mind. In particular, we shall
concentrate our energies, as the best students in
many lands have long been doing, on the historic

tbe Jnwarb Cbrfst 77
personality of our Lord : on His self-conscious
ness, so far as we may penetrate it ; on what
He believed Himself to be, in relation to God and
men ; on the impression He made on His
disciples ; on the experience of God into which
He raised them. Incidentally to this, of course,
the New Testament itself must be read in
the light of the best historical and literary
criticism.1 Further, the Comparative study of
Religions should have our attention, that we may
understand something of the resemblances as
well as the differences between our own and
other faiths, and see what each has to offer for the
true life of man.
Especially we should recognise that the study
of Psychology — that is, of human personality —
though it has only as yet made a beginning, has
already thrown much light on our difficulties
It has shown us that the real person, which each
one of us is, is far larger than our consciousness :
that there are abysmal depths in each of us,
which we call the " sub-conscious " ; and that
there may well have been depths beyond depths
in the personality of Jesus Christ, depths of
relation to God and to the whole of humanity,
1 On the scientific study of history, see Sanday,
Christologies Ancient and Modern, chapters iv. and v.

78 Ube Ibfstoric anb
which did not appear to others, and of which
He Himself, in His humiliation, may have been
only dimly and fitfully conscious. Also,
psychology is teaching us more and more the
fallacy of supposing that " persons " are as
isolated from one another as are their bodies
and their conscious lives : it is showing that our
personality is essentially conjunct : that it is
developed by the interpenetration, mainly in the
sub-conscious region, of our own personality with
that of others, and most of all by communion
with the Universal Spirit. Consequently it
removes altogether the ancient difficulty that
in saying Christ is the " Light " or " Seed "
in men we are reducing Him from a person to a
principle. 2. But, while in these ways our search should
be scientific, we must never forget the debt we
owe to Ritschl and his followers especially —
though in some respects they have been antici
pated by men like Penington and Penn— for
insisting that any religious doctrine, to be of
value, must be the outcome, not of intellectual
scrutiny merely, but of personal religious
experience. Historically, it was the experience
of the followers of Jesus — their outward
experience of His life and teaching, death and

tbe Snwarb cbrtst 79
resurrection, and their inward experience of
salvation through Him — that was the cause of
the wonder as to who and what He was, out of
which Christology arose.1 And any attempts
at speculative construction will be unhelpful,
if they proceed without constant recognition
of this ethical basis, on which alone any worthy
Christology can be built up. We ourselves, if
we are to take any part in the building, must
be sharers in that experience, just as truly as,
if we aspire to be artistic or literary critics, we
must be able to enter into the soul of the painter
and the poet. In other words, without the light
of the Holy Spirit we shall accomplish nothing.
3. There is, indeed, a very real and long-
recognised difficulty in combining these two
attitudes of mind — the scientific and the religious.
The scientific spirit urges us to be cold and
critical ; to weigh all evidence with the utmost
care ; to take nothing for granted that is not
proved ; to regulate the degree of our belief
entirely by the strength of the evidence that is
forthcoming. The religious spirit, on the other
hand, urges us to "let ourselves go' ' in the warmth

' Among the followers of Ritschl a very high place
should be given to W. Herrmann, whose book, The
Communion of the Christian with God, must be studied.

80 Obe ibfstortc anb
of adoration; it longs to believe everything; it is
utterly alien to the spirit of cautious investi
gation. Which of these two spirits should be
ours in the study of the Person of our Lord?
Or how can we combine them both ? This is a
large and very difficult question, and I can only
offer one hint by way of answer. When the
subject we are investigating is a bare historical
event, I believe the cautious scientific spirit
is the only right one ; we must seek earnestly to
go no further than the evidence warrants. But,
when we are face to face with a Personality, it is
very different. There is, in all interpretation of
Personality, just as there is in our perception of
beauty and moral worth, an element that, while it
is based on outward facts, goes far beyond them
into something that we can only call an inward
light . Our sense of the beauty of a sunset is some
thing far more and deeper than the forms and
colours which we perceive with our eyes ; our
appreciation of a friend's character comes to us
indeed through our outward perception of his looks
and words and acts, but these are interpreted
by us through the inward knowledge, in our own
consciousness, of what these things mean — deep
answers to deep. And so when we have gained
one real glimpse of the Person of our Lord,

tbe 5nwarb Cbrtst 81
though it comes to us through outward know
ledge of the Gospel story, which we may have
criticized carefully, we are in a region not of
evidence merely but of intuition, — where, the
more abundant our love and devotion, the deeper
will become our knowledge of the character.
We must not talk about having faith in
, facts, but we may have faith in a Person :
that, indeed, is what Christian faith essentially
is — the response of our whole being to the Person
we recognise as perfectly beautiful and good.
4. This, I take it, is one of the great truths
that Ritschl and his followers have taught us.
But they have, like all of us, their limitations ;
and one of these is, I believe, the discarding
as useless of the conception of the " Logos "
or Divine Word, which the author of the Fourth
Gospel (and after him the Fathers) made the
foundation of their doctrine of Christ. For
myself I cannot so discard it ; it appears to me
to contain essential and most serviceable truth.
It was, says Dean Inge, the doctrine of the
Incarnate Logos that " converted the intellect
of Europe to Christianity "r ; and a missionary
in India has recently stated his belief that one
great cause of our failure to appeal to the Hindu
1 Personal Idealism and Mysticism, p. 37.

82 ftbe ibtstoric anb
mind is that we have forgotten it.1 Now, of
course, the philosophical conceptions of the
Greek Fathers are outgrown, and we may need
a new terminology. But the truth endures
that in the " Logos " they found a thought of
God that makes a real Incarnation possible:
the thought that God has that in Him which
is essentially human : that He is not pure
absoluteness and infinity and omnipotence —
qualities that we may find words for but do not
in the least understand — but has that in His
nature which leads Him to limit His infinity
that He may come, as He has always been
coming, into real relations with men, revealing
Himself to them as they are able to bear it. In
the light of this thought we may see that the
Incarnation and the Cross were (if we may say so
reverently) the natural culmination of this self-
sacrificing, self-revealing quality of the God
whose name is Love.2 But the doctrine of the
Logos also suggests that the age-long search
of man for the Divine — the upward movement
1 Andrews, The Renaissance in India, pp. 160, 161.
1 For a severely philosophic argument that it is only
by attributing self-limitation or self-renunciation to the
Divine nature that we can get any valid thought of God
at all, see Ward, The Realm of Ends, especially
PP- 243, 453-

tbe -Jnwarb Cbrist 83
of the human soul towards God — is the outcome
of that downward movement by which, in
self-reveahng love, He has always been seeking
man. And in the incarnate Christ the two
movements unite in one.1 Jesus expresses the
highest and purest experience of sonship with
God that the human soul has reached; and, in
that same experience of sonship, He is the very
manifestation to men of the Father's heart of love.
" No one knows the Father, save the Son, and
he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him."
Our faith, then, as Christians and as Friends,
centres in a Person : a Person who has always
been present in the souls of men, the revealer of
God, though unrecognised or dimly apprehended ;
a Person who in the fulness of time took outward
form in Judaea and Galilee, healing the bodies
and the souls of men ; who brought the age
long process of revelation and redemption to its
climax by laying down His life to save them ;
who through the very depth of humiliation and
sacrifice reached His exaltation in glory; who
ever lives, not in some far-off heaven but in our
midst, evermore to be the inward source of light
and love, of power and joy, to those who are
united to Him by faith and obedience.
1 See Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ, p. 500.
6a

84 "Cbe "OMstorfc anb
APPENDIX.
A.— PENN'S " CHRISTIAN QUAKER."
The Christian Quaker (1673)1 is one of Penn's
most elaborate works, and is largely directed
to elucidating his thoughts of Christ as the
Light of the world. He deals with the evidences
that there was a Divine Light in the souls of the
Jews before Christ came in the flesh, and even in
the heathen ; and quotes, with sound knowledge,
many of the early Fathers — Justin, Clement of
Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius,
Athanasius, Chrysostom, and even Augustine —
as recognising this. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue is
quoted, with more questionable judgment, as
evidence that the heathen had some prevision
of the coming of Jesus. He defends the practice
of calling this universal Light by the name
" Christ," quoting Paul's words in 1 Cor. x. 4,
" That Rock was Christ " ; and explains that
what is meant is not that the whole " Christ "
was in every man, but that " He is that fulness
from whence all receive a measure of Divine
Light and knowledge." Treating of the types
and shadows through which he believed that the
1 Works, Vol. I., p. 521.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrfst 85
coming of Christ in the flesh was prefigured, he
says :
So then we ought, and we do, by absolute force of
Truth, conclude (i.) that the Seed, which is Christ, was
in all ages, with Abraham, with the Israelites, and with
the prophets ; therefore he was as well before he came
in that prepared Body, as then and since, (ii.) Yet
it is confessed that he was not so clearly revealed,
perfectly brought forth, and generally known before
his coming as then and since, but more darkly figured
out by types and shadowy services ; which, though they
cleansed not, saved not, redeemed not, yet did they show
forth a more hidden and spiritual substance that was
able to cleanse, save and redeem, and did actually all
that received it, and were truly subject to it.
Penn recognises very fully the load of human
sin that lay upon Jesus in the garden and on the
Cross, but, like most of the other early Friends,
f he maintains that this suffering for the sin of the
: world had its eternal as well as its temporal
j aspects. The Light or Seed has always been as
1 a " lamb slain from the foundation of the
! world," and it has suffered in other holy souls
I who have experienced the evil of the world,
' " filling up the measure of Christ's sufferings "
before ever He came in the flesh.
But . . . never did that Divine life so eminently
show forth itself as in that sanctified and prepared
( Body, so that what he then suffered and did in that
j transcendent manifestation may by way of eminency
\ have the credit of the whole work unto itself that he

86 Ube Ibistortc anb
ever did, or might do afterwards, for man's salvation.
. . . The weight of tbe iniquity of the whole world
lay hard upon bim, nor was his manhood insensible of
it. Under the load of this did he travail, he alone trod
tbe wine-press ; that is, all others were then insensible
of that eternal wrath which would be the portion of
impenitent persons. . . . And as outwardly he
gave his life for the world, so he might inwardly shed
abroad in their souls the blood of God, that is, the holy
purifying life and virtue which is in him as tbe Word-
God, and as which he is the light and life of the world.
Not that we should irreverently rob tbe holy body
of whatsoever acknowledgment is justly due, nor yet
r separate that which God bath joined ; though I confess,
with holy fear, I dare not attribute that to an external
prepared Being, which it is the natural proper and only
' work of the Divine Light and Life to operate and effect.

B— ILLUSTRATIONS OF ATTACKS ON
THE QUAKERS, (p. 43).
For example, William Burnet, in The Capital
Principles of the Quakers Discovered (1668),
quotes this from Humphrey Woolrich's Declar
ation to the Baptists (1659) : " Christ was never
seen with any carnal eye, nor his voice heard
with any carnal ear." So quoted, it sounds like
a direct denial of the Incarnation ; but when we
turn to the actual passage this is what we find :
This is your fallen estate, saith the Lord God, which
know not Christ in you the hope of glory — even tbe same
that was before the world was, one with the Father, and

tbe Jnwarb Cbrtst 87
filleth heaven and earth, and was never seen with any
carnal eye, nor his voice heard by any carnal ear, but in
the pure eternal unchangeable light is he revealed and
seen more and more.1
It is quite clear that the passage objected to
means essentially what is clearly stated in the
Fourth Gospel, " No man hath seen God at any
time." So, again, William Russell, endeavouring
to prove (1674) that Quakerism is Paganism,
writes that at a Quaker meeting he heard
Josiah Coale affirm that " the Man who was
born of the Virgin, and who suffered at Jerusalem,
is not the Christ the Saviour of the world,"
and that " the true Christ, in respect of himself,
never died." Now the first part of the state
ment attributed to Coale is only a crude render
ing of Penington's distinction between the
eternal Christ and the bodily " garment " which
for a time He wore; and the other is but a
different rendering of what the youthful George
Fox said before his parish priest, Nathaniel
Stevens, of Drayton-in-the-Clay, — winning the
approval of that theologian, — that Christ, as
He was man, was an offering for the iniquities
1 Humphrey Woolrich, A Declaration to the Baptists.
See volume of Tracts in Devonshire House Library,
Vol. 56, No. 43.

88 Ube Ibistoric anb
and transgressions of men, " but he died not
as he was God."1
The following is typical of many of these
attacks. The anonymous writer of A Parallel
between the Doctrine of the Quakers and that of
the Chief Heretics (1700) quotes both Penington
and Penn and compares them to the Ebionites,
who denied the essential divinity of Christ.
And in this the Quakers outdo the Ebionites. They
subtiUy distinguish between Jesus and Christ, denying
both the divinity of Jesus and tbe humanity of Christ,
so that they do not allow Jesus Christ in one person to
be either God or man. . . .
That he took the manhood into God, and hyposta-
tically united it into his own Person, this they cannot
believe ; for, according to their notion of him, Christ
is not a Person but a principle only. Hence it is that
tbey call the body of Jesus a garment, a vail, which
Christ some time wore, and a vessel, in which he was
pleased some time to dwell, so that they wholly despoil
him of his humanity, and utterly deny him to be the Son
of Man. Charles Leslie, in The Snake in the Grass
(1696) charged the Quakers with denying the
Incarnation. They deny any proper Incarnation of Christ ; that is,
that be was made flesh, or that he and Jesus were one
Person. Yet they allow Jesus to be called Christ, from
the dwelling of Christ in him ; but for the same reason,
1 George Fox's Journal, Ed. 190 1, p. 5.

tbe Snwarb Cbrist 89
they take tbe name Cbrist to themselves, and say that
it belongs to them as well as to Jesus, from the same
dweUing of Cbrist in them as in Jesus.1
G— THE ATTACKS OF BUGG AND KEITH.
(p. 44).
Francis Bugg joined Friends about 1659, but
after twenty years turned against them,
apparently because he thought, with Wilkinson
and Story and Rogers, that the organization set
up by George Fox, of monthly and quarterly
meetings and the like, hindered the liberty of the
Inward Light. In the issue he abandoned his
belief in the Inward Light altogether. In 1684
he left the Society, and became a bitter and
rancorous opponent. In New Rome Arraigned
(1693) he violently attacked the doctrine of
Penington, saying that it was a denying and
disowning of the Jesus Christ who was born and
died, through faith in whom alone is salvation
possible. 1 This charge is based on passages in Penington's
writings such as this : "Is not the substance, the life,
the anointing, called Christ, wherever it is found ? Doth
not the name belong to the whole body (and every
member in the body) as well as to the head ? Are they
not all of one ; yea, all one in the anointing ? " (Some
Queries concerning Christ, Works, Vol. III., p. 54.)
We may remember that the Mystics have always used
language expressing the oneness of the believer with
Christ, including Paul, who wrote " He that is joined
to the Lord is one spirit " (1 Cor. vi. 17).

90 TTbe ibistoric anb
The tenor of it [Penington's doctrine] runs to own the
Light, the Life, the Substance, something in the body
which was not capable of being seen otherwise than by
the eye of faith, nor capable of weariness, of thirst, of
hunger, of buffeting, of scourging, of being crucified,
and hanged on a tree ; this in a confused mysterious
sense they will own to be Christ ; and this is no other
than they dream is in them, and which they attribute to
one another ... so that consequently so many
Quakers, so many Christs.
His principal charge, repeated with persis
tency, was that the Quakers " divide the
humanity from the Godhead, which is, in plain
terms, a plain denial of Christ."
George Keith, a Scotchman, was a more
scholarly man than Bugg, and was indeed one of
the ablest of those who joined the Quakers.
" Convinced " about 1663, he became one of the
most powerful preachers of the " Inward Light,"
and travelled on the Continent and elsewhere,
with George Fox and William Penn, bearing
bis full share of persecution and imprisonment.
He shone particularly in public discussions,
especially with the Presbyterians, among whom
he had been brought up. About 1689, after some
years in America, he settled as a schoolmaster in
Philadelphia, having been for more than twenty-
five years in close unity with Friends. Soon
after this, dissatisfaction began to be felt with

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 91
some of his public utterances, in which he charged
his brother ministers with undervaluing the
historic Christ and the Scriptures. A scholarly
" mind like his might well be dissatisfied with the
crude and ignorant way in which, when the Light
was growing dim, the inward Christ was doubtless
often preached ; and Keith might have rendered
good service in keeping things in a true per
spective, had he been of a less contentious spirit
and more able to control his temper. A breach
occurred between the leading Friends in
Pennsylvania and himself, and he began to
organize a separate body, which he called " The
Christian Quakers." In 1692 the Yearly
Meeting disowned him for " a spirit of reviling,
railing, lying, slandering and falsely accusing."
The next year, having secured a considerable
following in America, he came to England, and
laid his case before the Yearly Meeting in
London. Several days were spent in hearing it,
and the minutes that were adopted show
delightfully the patience, brotherly love, and
spiritual insight which still remained among
Friends, and a most earnest desire that all
should be settled in a Christian spirit. Un
fortunately Keith again lost his temper, and the
meeting at last decided that he had " gone

92 Ube Ibtstoric anb
from the blessed unity of the spirit of our Lord
Jesus Christ." He gained but few adherents
in this country, and after establishing himself
in Turner's Hall, where he preached eloquent
sermons against the Quakers, he joined the
Established Church and was ordained by the
Bishop of London. His followers in Penn
sylvania were soon disorganized, most of them
joining the Episcopalians or Baptists.1
f In 1679 Keith had written a book The True
1 Christ Owned, as he is True God and Perfect Man,
in which he tried to give a rational answer,
based on New Testament teaching, to the attacks
made on the Quaker position. It is a solid and
weighty treatise, according to the religious ideas
of the day, and much more learned than most
of the Quaker writings. He makes no use
of Penington's theory which identified the
humanity of Christ with his body, expressly
maintaining that His " flesh " included His
" soul." In The Plea of the Innocent (1692), he replied
to the charges that were already beginning to be
made against him, urging that the " Christ
f ' For a full account of this controversy, see Chap. III.
; in Book V. of The Quakers in the American Colonies,
I by Dr. Rufus M. Jones.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrfst 93
within " is not all that is needed, but must be
supplemented with historical belief.
All the imposition they can allege on G. K. is that
he did preach faith in the Man Christ without them,
as well as faith in Christ tbe Light in tbem ; and
that Christ hath the true body of man in heaven, and
in that body he will come and appear without us to
judge the quick and the dead.
In various printed Sermons, delivered in
London in 1694, he labours to show that
historical belief must enter into saving faith,
denying that his thoughts had changed, and
avoiding direct attacks on Friends. In his
Christian Catechism (1698) he states (in the
Preface) that he now sees no objection (as earlier
he had done) to speaking of " three Persons in the
Trinity," and (in the body of the book) he
insists on belief in doctrines being necessary to
salvation, and points out the " great errors " of
those who say that " Christ is only God, that
neither his flesh nor his soul was any part of him,
but only as a garment," that " Christ is nothing
else but the Light Withinevery man," and that
" Christ and the Holy Ghost are one." He
argues that just as a field needs good seed as
well as fertile soil to produce a crop of wheat,
so the Inward Light is not enough without the
outward knowledge of Jesus Christ.

94 TEbe Dtstortc anb
In his Fourth Narrative of Proceedings at
Turner's Hall (1700) he throws off restraint,
and gives railing answers to many passages
quoted from Quaker books, plentifully inter
spersed with such epithets as " vile heresies."
Ignoring entirely the deep and lively Christian
experience of which most of the expressions he
criticizes were the outcome, he gives a narrow
and illiberal interpretation to them. Most of
them he treats as being a denial by the Quakers
of the reality of the Incarnation. The book is a
melancholy exhibition of intolerance, consisting
of long disquisitions on points of speculative
theology, always insisted on as vital to faith.
D.— ELIAS HICKS'S SERMONS.
I have thought it right to say so much in
defence of Hicks, because I believe that, owing to
the exclusively one-sided reports which reached
this country, he has been sadly misjudged. But
when we come to consider his Christology, I can
only characterize it as deplorable. I do not
think it fair to judge him, as has often been done,
by isolated extracts, torn from their context,
which cannot be rightly understood except in
relation to his general line of thought ; and as

tbe Snwarb Cbrist 95
it is impossible to quote long passages I can
only refer those who wish to understand his
thoughts to the Sermons themselves, which
may be consulted at Devonshire House. What
he did was to carry to its logical issue the
dualism that underlay the teaching of Penington
and Penn ; and he consequently fell into
" Docetism " in a still more pronounced form.
" Spirit " for him was all that counted in the
religious sphere ; the outward or visible could
not possibly be Divine, or have any rehgious
significance, except as a type or figure of some
thing spiritual. " Spirit can only beget
spirit " was one of his central thoughts ; and
consequently Christ the Son of God was for him
a purely inward and spiritual conception.1 The
holy life lived by Jesus in the flesh he fully
recognised, and he used it freely, including the
story of His victory over temptation, as an
example and encouragement to us.2 The death
1 Cf. Sermons, pp. 10, n. " Who was his [Jesus']
father ? He was begotten of God. We cannot suppose
that it was the outward body of flesh and blood that was
begotten of God, but a birth of the spiritual life in the
soul. We must apply it internally and spiritually.
For nothing can be a son of God, but that which is spirit ;
and nothing but the soul of man is a recipient for the
light and spirit of God."
* Sermons, pp. 67-70.

96 tlbe Iblstortc anb
upon the Cross is also quoted as a subhme
example of self-sacrifice, and as figuring the death
to sin that all must die ; but that it has any
relation to the forgiveness of sin Hicks could not
see.1 The miracles of Jesus he entirely accepted,
as having been really wrought by Him, but he
found them chiefly of value as allegories or
figures of spiritual blessing.2 An outward
person, he would say, could heal people's bodies,
but only an inward Saviour could cure their
souls. E._ J. J. GURNEY'S ESSAYS.
The longest of the Essays (160 pages) Gurney
devotes to " the Scriptural Account of Jesus
Christ." He says " he hopes not to forget "
His humanity, and does indeed state quite
explicitly, rather as something taken for granted,
that " His body was a human body, and His mind
a human mind, ... He was really and
absolutely man " ; and it is strange, after this,
1 The Quaker, Vol. I., pp. 16, 17.
* The Quaker, vol. I., p. 68 ; also extract quoted
in the text, p. 62. We may note that to a certain extent
Hicks could quote in support of his allegorising method
the example of the Fourth Gospel, which finds a
spiritual meaning in certain of the miracles of Jesus,
such as the feeding of the five thousand.

tbe Jnwarb Cbrist 97
to find him using the " prepared body " passage
from Hebrews, as Isaac Penington had used it.
But his principal object, he states, is to bring
out the Deity of Christ, and it is to this that
almost the whole of the Essay is devoted.
After treating of the pre-existence of Christ as
the Eternal Word, he comes to the Incarnation.
" When the Son or Word of the Father assumed
our nature, and was born a child into the world,
he who before had been God only became God
and Man." The two " natures," he states,
were combined in Him in an inconceivable
union ; but he apparently regarded them as
placed side by side, just as the creed of Chalcedon
had left them. For, while he speaks of limi
tations in the human knowledge of our Lord, he
also describes Him as partaking (while in the
flesh) of Divine omniscience.1 In other words,
he attributes to our Lord a double consciousness
— a confusion of thought for which the doctrine
of the Creed has left an open door, but of which
there is no trace in the Gospels. In the pages
where he deals with the pre-existent Christ, it is
remarkable to find only one brief sentence
1 p. 285. The evidence (which is insufficient) he finds
in our Lord's " personal knowledge of the secret
thoughts of men."

98 Ube Ibistoric anb
referring to that which had been the central con
viction of the early Friends, that His Divine Light
was given to all men. " He was also," says
Gurney, " the spiritual quickener and enlightener
of mankind." In a previous Essay, in a few
halting phrases, he had avowed the belief
that " a divine influence is given to all men,
to be their cure"* ; but with these exceptions
the " Universal and Saving Light " of Christ
is entirely passed over in the Essays. In one
of them, indeed, he seems plainly to deny it —
where he speaks of those who are sitting
" in darkness and under the shadow of
death " as " destitute of all capacity for an
inheritance with the saints in light."2
In this matter, however, it would appear
that Gurney was not quite consistent with
himself. In his Observations on the Distinguish
ing Views and Practices of the Society of Friends
(Seventh edition, 1834), he fully accepts the
view of the early Friends, that " Christ Himself,
manifested by His Spirit in the heart, is that
' true light which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world.' "» He insists, just as
1 Essays, p. 217.
2 Essays, p. 447.
a Observations, pp. 5-6, 21, 26ff. Also Letter to
Isaac Crewdson (1835).

tbe Snwarb Cbrist 99
Barclay did, that this Light is wholly Divine,
and is no part of man's nature (which he regards
as wholly corrupted by the Fall), and that it is
" procured " for us through the mediation and
sacrifice for Christ. He freely acknowledges
that " the outward knowledge of Christ is not
absolutely indispensable to salvation, and that
other persons who are completely destitute of
that knowledge may also be saved from sin, and
from the penalties which are attached to it,
through the secret operations of Divine grace."
Here he parts company with Crewdson and the
Plymouth Brethren, as he does also in his strong
insistence on the necessity of the light of the
Holy Spirit for the right understanding of
Scripture, and of its direct and perceptible
influence and guidance, not only in preaching
but in all the affairs of life.1
While at times he identifies the universal
Light of God's Spirit with the pre-incarnate
" Word " of God, and speaks of the Holy Spirit
or Comforter in the hearts of believers as one
with the risen and ascended Christ (as Paul
frequently did), at other times he seems inclined
(probably through the influence of the orthodox
1 Observations, pp. 76 ff. Also Declaration of his
Faith (1846).

ioo "Cbe -ynwarb Cbrist
doctrine of the Trinity) to distinguish between
Christ and the Spirit. And he considers it a
serious error — dangerous to the souls of men —
to identify Christ with the light He sheds, so
reducing Him to a " principle.'1 Addressing
in a letter the followers of Elias Hicks at
Baltimore, he says :
Under the imagination that we have the whole Christ,
as a thing or substance, in ourselves, we first disregard
and then deny the divine incarnate Saviour of whom
the Scriptures testify ; and on the plea of an inward and
spiritual relation we renounce the one great sacrifice
for sin as the means of our reconciliation with God, and
the ground of our hope of salvation.
This passage illustrates the grounds of J. J.
Gurney's dread of mysticism.

1 Brief Remarks on Impartiality in the Ipt
of Scripture (1836).

Headley Brothers, Printers, Bishopsgate, E.C. ; :md Ashford, Kent.