I was moved in the Lord's power to thresh their chaffy, light minds, part three

I returned to Fox’s Journal after my visit to the Haddonfield Friends Meeting. What an age his was! Everywhere he travels in England, people are holding meetings (often in fields as well as indoors), disputing about religious ideas, and getting all riled up about religion in general. In fact, it reminds me of the kind of thing we read about today in Islamic countries, wherein crowds of people seem ready to drop everything and participate in religious demonstrations on a moment’s notice.

Fox is struck blind every so often, a condition he passes over with amazing nonchalance – he seems to regard it as one of the occupational hazards of a wandering prophet. He is given messages to reform the three great professions: medicine, the law, and divinity. He sees the light of God in all people. He is called to bring the adherents of all sects and religions to the truth.




He continues to be a thorn in the side of absolutely everyone. He goes to court to admonish the judges to be just, he goes into public houses and berates the owners about serving people more liquor than is good for them, he testifies against “wakes, feasts, May-games, sports, plays, and shows,” whenever he encounters them. He goes to fairs and market-days and cries out against cheating merchants. If he runs into anyone playing music or putting on a show, watch out – George is ready to condemn, loudly. He even walks into schools to scold the school-masters and school-mistresses, which must have been entertaining for the students.

He is particularly incensed by established churches (he calls them steeple-houses, because he believes that they are not true churches in the New Testament sense), and makes a habit of entering services and disrupting them. Usually this happens when he hears a bell tolling for service and the Lord gives him a command, typically: "Thou must go cry against yonder great idol, and against the worshippers therein."

He receives a revelation that men should not remove their hats for anyone, and this tenet results in tremendous “blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments” among his followers – it seems people in his day riot not at the drop of a hat but rather at the failure to drop one’s hat. It reminds me that hats can be a symbol of submission for men as well as women -- and that the refusal to submit can unleash violence that seems all out of proportion to the offense.

I read about one of Fox’s more famous visions. He and a few other Friends were walking through the country when he spied three church steeples, a sight that always seemed to galvanize him. In this case, he says, the sight of the steeples “struck at my life.” He is commanded by God to remove his shoes (it is winter) and walk through the streets of the town, crying “Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!” While performing this action, he has visions of rivers of blood running through the streets. Eventually he walks back to where he had left his shoes, puts them on, and continues on his way.

Fox wondered why God had commanded him to perform this unusual ministry, and eventually he learns that in the time of the emperor Diocletian a thousand Christians had been martyred in the city. It’s unclear to me why God would want him to commemorate the event 1300 years later. Additionally, it seems the legend about the martyred Christians is pretty well discounted by most historians. What Fox may have remembered, at least subconsciously, is that the last person executed for heresy in England, Edward Wightman, was burned at the stake in Lichfield in 1612, only a generation earlier.

Wightman had the unusual distinction of being burned at the stake for heresy not once, but twice, which would make him a kind of super-martyr. He was a Baptist minister who presented his beliefs to King James (yes, the king of the King James Version) in a petition, and was found guilty of heresy. When the flames first began to burn him at the stake, he shouted out something that people interpreted to mean that he had recanted, and he was let loose. But he continued to preach Baptist doctrine, and so was tied to a stake again and burned, this time till death, a few months later.

Although Wightman was the last heretic burned at the stake in England, one of Fox’s followers, James Nayler, died as a result of the punishment he suffered for his beliefs. Fox describes Nayler’s trouble as having “run into imaginations” while imprisoned for his Quaker beliefs – a polite way of saying that he went mad. Mad or not, the man was charismatic enough to persuade others to go along with him. These friends accompanied Nayler on a Triumphal Entry into the city of Bristol, declaring him to be Christ returned in the flesh.

Parliament voted to punish Nayler by having him “pilloried for two hours, to be whipped by the hangman through the streets from Westminster to the Old Exchange in the city, to be pilloried again after two days for two hours more, to have his tongue bored through with a red-hot iron, and to be branded in the forehead with the letter B, to be again flogged through the streets of Bristol, and then to be committed to prison with solitary confinement and hard labor during the pleasure of Parliament.” Not surprisingly, Nayler died shortly after the sentence was carried out.

Only one part of the story is more amazing than the incredibly cruel punishment devised by Parliament – before he died, Nayler was able to compose a letter of exceeding charity, which contains these words: “There is a spirit which I feel, which delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong; but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty.” Pretty good for a madman.

The Quakers continued to suffer tremendously during that sad, wild, turbulent time. It’s no wonder the New World looked pretty good to them.

I found a great sentence in Fox’s journal: “The Baptists began to vaunt with their logic and syllogisms; but I was moved in the Lord's power to thresh their chaffy, light minds.” If I were a Baptist, I would start a blog titled “Musings of a chaffy, light mind.”

Throughout his long life, Fox continued to soldier on in the service of his unusual and particular revelations. He tried to argue with the “Presbyterians, Independents, Seekers, Baptists, Episcopal men, Socinians, Brownists, Lutherans, Calvinists, Arminians, Fifth-monarchy men, Familists, Muggletonians, and Ranters.” (Muggletonians?)

Fox has an interesting description of being tempted to become an atheistic materialist, if I’m interpreting his description correctly: “One morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me, and a temptation beset me; and I sat still. It was said, ‘All things come by nature’; and the elements and stars came over me, so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it. But as I sat still and said nothing, the people of the house perceived nothing. And as I sat still under it and let it alone, a living hope and a true voice arose in me, which said, "There is a living God who made all things." I find this a nice anecdote illustrating the constant interplay between faith and doubt that characterizes the lives of most people, whether they are ordinary nondescript Christians or fiery prophets of a new sect.

I’m glad I read Fox’s Journal, and glad also that the Friends meeting I attended seemed very far removed from the events described therein. In retrospect, it occurs to me that what I might do in remembrance of this episode of church visiting is pray for Mickey ’67, the boy who scratched his name into the pew I sat in that morning. He might be just a little younger than me, assuming he was in grade school in the late sixties. He might be anywhere in the world right now, or may have moved on to join the choir invisible. Although it would likely pain George Fox, he may have become a light, chaffy Baptist after leaving the Friends school, or have decided that that all things come by nature. But I’m happy to have sat in the spot where he sat so long ago, scratching his name into the wood of the old pews so that I can, in turn, scratch my thoughts into this post.