An Original

Many sons have done virtuously in this day; but, dear George, thou excellest them all.

--William Penn

George Fox was a hard man for any century to live with. In 17th century England, already a melee of warring religions and political factions, he founded a rudely revolutionary new movement, which became the Society of Friends. A weaver's son from Leicestershire, Quaker Fox preached "God's free gospel" loudly and with a countryman's directness. He attacked other religions indiscriminately, and the fierce pacifism of his followers was, politically speaking, highly suspicious.

He and his followers sought martyrdom with a will, and the angry, perplexed authorities filled their jails with zealous Quakers.

By the end of the century, however, religious passions and preaching zeal had cooled. The Quakers, no longer persecuted as before, had begun to seem useful and highly stable citizens. In 1694, only three years after Fox's death, the Friends who edited and published the Journal of his life's work were busily snipping out some of the angrier and more polemic passages, for fear they might offend some one. Their abridgment became the standard version.

For more than ten years, British Quaker John L. Nickalls has been at work on a new popular edition of the Journal. Its purpose: to present "Fox's own story in his own words and stylft." The new Journal of George Fox (Cambridge University; $4.50), now available in the U.S., has also used bits of Fox's other diaries, to fill in periods of his life where the old journal was deficient. It is the best popular edition of one of Christendom's great spiritual autobiographies.

Bloody City. Fox taught that the Inner Light of God's grace was in every man, there for the seeking. He felt himself called by God, with power to preach and to heal, "to bring people off from all the world's religions, which are vain, that they might know the pure religion, and might visit the fatherless, the widows and the strangers, and keep themselves from the spots of the world."--He and his followers saw themselves as latter-day Prophets, trying to bring their people back to the live faith and concrete charitable sacrifice of primitive Christianity. He scorned churches, which he called "steeplehouses," and he wanted no organized, salaried ministry, but he knew his Bible backward & forward.

Fox spent most of his life riding and preaching through Britain, wherever and however the "word of the Lord" moved him. In his Journal, he writes of a trip to Lichfield. Not far from the town, he records, "I was commanded of the Lord to pull off my shoes of a sudden; and I stood still, and the word of the Lord was like a fire in me; and being winter, I untied my shoes and put them off; and when I had done I was commanded to give them to the shepherds and was to charge them to let no one have them except they paid for them . . .

"So I went about a mile till I came into the town, and as soon as I came within the town the word of the Lord came unto me again to cry, 'Woe unto the bloody city of Lichfield!' So I went up and down the streets crying . . . [and] when I had declared what was upon me and cleared myself, I came out of the town in peace about a mile to the shepherds . . . and took my shoes. . ." Books, Fists & Sticks. Even for that forthright day, Fox's methods of religious controversy were hardly tactful. His favorite locale for a sermon was a "steeple-house," or the churchyard outside, where he would try to outpreach the minister who was already holding a service. Before one minister had finished preaching, Fox shouted at him in the pulpit. "And so I was moved of the Lord God to say unto him, 'Come down, thou deceiver and hireling, for dost thou bid people come freely and take of the water of life freely, and yet thou takest three hundred pounds off them for preaching the Scriptures to them.

Mayest thou not blush for shame? . . .' And so the priest, like a man amazed, packed away." Tactics like this provoked retaliation, and Friend Fox absorbed enough beatings for 25 men. He writes of one such ruckus with irate local parishioners: "And when I began to speak, they fell upon me, and the clerk up with his Bible as I was speaking and hit me in the face that my face gushed out with blood, and it run off me in the steeplehouse. And then they cried, 'Take him out of the church,' and they punched me and thrust me out and beat me sore with books, fists and sticks . . . And the priest [Fox called all clergymen "priests"] beheld a great part of this his people's doings." Fox was jailed eight times himself.

Many of his followers died in prison. But, although the authorities could not understand the Quakers' odd behavior, e.g., their refusal to take oaths or to doff hats before any authority, they were impressed in the end by the Friends' piety, their policy of nonviolence and the honesty of their preaching and works. Oliver Cromwell himself ordered Fox released from prison after an interview. Writes Fox: "[He] said these words with tears in his eyes, 'Come again to my house, for if thou and I were but an hour in a day together we should be nearer one to the other.' " In 1671, Fox sailed to America and toured the Quaker settlements there.-- He found the Indians a more respectful audience than he was generally accustomed to in England ("They were very attentive and sober and loving and sat all the meet ing, grave and soberly beyond many").

For the rest of his life, barring two trips to Holland, he remained in England, preaching his uncompromising Word. Some outsiders were never quite able to sympa thize with his fervor. Thomas Babington Macaulay later called him "too much dis ordered for liberty, and not sufficiently dis ordered for Bedlam." But for most Christians, as with Quakers, he earned a place in history as a great and good man. He was "an original," as his friend Penn put it, "being no man's copy."

-- James 1:27: "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted,from the world." -- As a result of his American trip, he engaged in a lively controversy with Rhode Island's Roger Williams, an independent Baptist. In answer to Williams' pamphlet, George Fox Digg'd out of His Burrows, Fox wrote one of his own, A New England Fire-Brand Quenched.

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