This is partly a review of the content of William Penn’s book, one of the classics of early Quaker writings, which he wrote in 1669 after having been a prisoner in the Tower of London.  In it he exhorts the spirit of Primitive Christianity, a religious perspective holding that the early beliefs and practices of the followers of Jesus were either lost or adulterated after his death, and therefore it was necessary to restore them to their original form.  The original is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the importance of self-denial in a Christian life, the second gathering a series of references to men through the ages who have written of the importance of self-denial: “The first testimony comes from those called Heathens; the second from professed Christians; and the last, from retired, aged and dying men; being their last and serious reflections, to which no ostentation or worldly interests could induce them.”  

This is also partly a comment on the two versions we have in the library.  Copy 1 is Penn’s original; copy 2 is a revised and edited version.  As Selleck, the editor of the revised and edited version, says in his Introduction, “Long sentences have been broken into smaller ones.  The syntax has been uncoiled, pronoun references clarified and needless repetitions removed.  Also, many obsolete words have been changed and simpler words have replaced many of three and four syllables.”  As well, the second part of the original has been omitted from the revised and edited version “because,” as Selleck says, “it holds little interest for the general reader,” and because it “would not add much weight to Penn’s argument.”  This version, which contains Queries for the Reader and an Appendix entitled “William Penn’s Devotional Reading,” may serve as a simplified introduction to William Penn’s thought, but read Copy 1 if you want not only his complete thoughts, but his own manner of expressing them.

Penn’s Preface begins with “The great business of man’s life, is to answer the end for which he lives; and that is to glorify God and save his own soul.”  The revised and edited version leaves out “is to answer the end for which he lives.”  I suppose it could be considered redundant, but there is a difference between redundancy and rhetorical emphasis.  Later on in the Preface, Penn writes, “Come, Reader, hearken to me awhile; I seek thy salvation; that is my plot; thou wilt forgive me.”  The revised and edited version leaves this out.  Why?  Because it is somehow superfluous?  Because it doesn’t speak directly to the argument Penn presents?  Perhaps it doesn’t, but it is Penn speaking directly to the reader, explaining why he has written this book.

          In the original, Penn writes, “The cross of Christ is a figurative speech, borrowed from the outward tree, or wooden cross, on which Christ submitted to the will of God, suffering death at the hands of evil men.”  The revised and edited version gives us this: “The cross of Christ is a figure of speech borrowed from the wooden cross on which Christ submitted to the will of God.”  Is it really necessary to replace “figurative speech” with “figure of speech”?  And leaving out “from the outward tree” leaves out Penn’s emphasis on the distinction between outer and inner, between the literal and the metaphorical. “Suffering death at the hands of evil men” is also omitted.  Would those eight words have made the new version somehow unwieldy?

          In the original, Penn asks and answers: “Well: but then where does this cross appear, and where must it be taken up?  I answer, within: that is, in the heart and soul; for where the sin is, the cross must be.”  The revised and edited version gives us this for Penn’s answer: “Within. For, where the sin is, the cross must be.”  This leaves out “I answer” before “within. ” Sure, “I answer” might be considered superfluous, but it is rhetorically emphatical.  As are the words “in the heart and soul,” which the edited version also omits.

          Why do I point out these revisions and omissions?  Because I’m an idealist and a purist at heart.  I want to read the complete, unedited, unrevised original, not an incomplete, edited, revised version, for the same reason that I want to read Shakespeare in the complete, unedited, unrevised original versions of his plays.  If I can’t cope with Shakespeare’s language, or Penn’s language, then the problem lies with me, not with Shakespeare and Penn.  But yes, when all is said and done, I do understand the reason for simplified versions of the original — hopefully, they are stepping stones to the originals.  We have both the original and the edited, revised version in our library.  Try them both out.

Review by Matthew Manera

If you want to understand the roots of Quakerism in 17^th century England — the political and religious culture from which it arose—a good place to start is with Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. Radical Ideas During the English Revolution.  Hill focuses on the years 1645-1653, during which “there was a great overturning, questioning, revaluing, of everything in England.” These were the years of the two civil wars, and of two revolutions: the one which succeeded, which “established the sacred rights of property, […] gave political power to the propertied, and removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property—the protestant ethic”; and one that never happened, “though from time to time it threatened, […] which might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.”

          Many of the issues he addresses from this time have parallels in our own time.  There is much talk these days, for example, of the disappearance of the middle class. In mid-17^th century England, there were the few very rich landowners and the very many poor who were subject to these men.  Hill writes of what he calls “masterless men […] the rogues, vagabonds, and beggars roaming the countryside, sometimes in search of employment, too often mere unemployable rejects of a society in economic transformation.” One could relate this also to the Great Depression.

          It was, to a great extent, the consequence of this social inequality that gave rise to “a nation of prophets,” as Hill describes the several dissenting religious sects that appeared at this time, including Grindeltonians, Anabaptists, Levellers, Diggers, Familists, Ranters, Seekers, and, yes, Quakers.  Besides the Quakers, who were the only one of these dissenting sects to survive, the Diggers, or True Levellers, as they called themselves, were the most influential, especially in a political sense.  The Diggers were so named because of a particular event on Sunday April 1, 1649, when a group of poor men collected on St. George’s hill and began to dig the waste land there to plant and cultivate vegetables.  One third of England was barren waste, which lords of manors would not permit the poor to cultivate.  Gerrard Winstanley, their leader, was, perhaps, the first real communist in Europe.  He argued that “the earth should be made a common treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons.” In 1652, he published The Law of Freedom in a Platform, a draft constitution for a communist commonwealth (which is now in our library).  Winstanley was also a champion of education for all: education was to continue until a man was “acquainted with all arts and languages.” It was to be universal and equal: there were to be no specialized scholars living “merely upon the labours of other men.” Children should be trained “in trades and some bodily employment, as well as in learning languages” or history.  Girls would learn music and to read, sew, knit, and spin.  Experiment and invention were to be encouraged and rewarded.

          The Seekers, another of the more influential dissenting sects, many of whom became Quakers, were led by William Erbery, who believed that men should “sit still, in submission and silence, waiting for the Lord to come and reveal himself to them.”         

Hill devotes an entire chapter to the Quaker Samuel Fisher, who, like Winstanley, believed that there were two possible approaches to the Bible: to “use its stories as myths, to which each could give his own sense, a sense that need not consider the original meaning of the text; or deny the infallibility of the Bible, or submit it to close textual criticism.” Fisher’s The Rustics Alarm to the Rabbies of 1660 is considered the first example of such close textual criticism, and it remained a Quaker textbook for more than a century (I am trying to find a copy of this book, but so far, without success).

          In a chapter entitled “Life Against Death,” Hill delves into the basics of the Protestant Ethic, in which there was “an emphasis on the religious duty of working hard in one’s calling, of avoiding the sins of idleness, waste of time, over-indulgence in the pleasures of the flesh.” Hill claims that “protestant preachers in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries undertook a cultural revolution, an exercise in indoctrination, in brain-washing, on a hitherto unprecedented scale.  The mode of thought and feeling and repression which they wished to impose was totally unnatural.”

          In his conclusion, Hill talks of the importance of printing in 17^th century England: “We do not need persuading, today, that liberty of printing ought to be given a trial.  That hard-fought battle has been won.  We take the victory for granted, and are sometimes skeptical of the results now that printing has become big capitalist business.  But to appreciate what it meant, to recover the intoxicating excitement — not only of being able to print what one thought, but of being able to say what one thought — we have to return to those marvellous decades when it seemed as though the world might be turned upside down.”

          The world in 17^th century England was, indeed, turned upside down by popular access to printing.  If we take a look around at our own time, with the ubiquity of social media, for example, and with the political, social, and religious turmoil it creates, we could say with equal conviction that our world, too, is being turned upside down.

A Reminder of Recent Additions to the Library

The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem by Marcus J. Borg (232.96 BOR)

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit (303.4 SOL)

The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment by Aldous Huxley (201 HUX)

The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England by Jonathan Healey (941.06 HEA)

Law of Freedom in a Platform, or True Magistracy Restored and the True Levellers Standard Advanced by Gerrard Winstanley (335.02 WIN)

Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy by John Gurney (320.53 GUR)

John O’Donohue was an Irish poet, author, Catholic priest, and philosopher, and was an ardent devotee of Celtic spirituality.  He had a PhD in philosophical theology from the University of Tübingen in Germany, focusing on the work of the German philosopher Hegel.  To Bless the Space Between Us was his last published book before he died at the age of 52 in 2008.

          To Bless the Space Between Us is a book of blessings for all situations and occasions, and uses language that, though he comes from a decidedly Catholic background, is not specific to Christianity, nor does he use the word God, stating that it “is too huge to allow any other word to breathe beside it.” He allows each of us to come to the blessings from our own spiritual traditions.  He organizes the blessings into seven categories: Beginnings, Desires, Thresholds, Homecomings, States of Heart, Callings, and Beyond Endings, each section preceded by a short introduction.

          O’Donohue points out that in our contemporary Western culture, we have lost the presence and value of ritual — “We have fallen out of belonging,” he writes.  “Consequently, when we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, we have no rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown.” A blessing, he says, “is not a sentiment or a question; it is a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart.”

          The last section of the book, after that on Beyond Endings, is entitled To Retrieve the Lost Art of Blessing.  Here, he talks of “the shoreline of the invisible” and how an invisible light accompanies a new infant into the world, and at the other end of life “how the shadows of old age are lit more and more from the invisible world.” He encourages us to be mindful of how short our time is on this mortal plane of existence and to learn how precious each day is.

          Though Thresholds is one of the seven categories of blessings, O’Donohue explains that they are the most important parts of our lives: “Looking back along a life’s journey, you come to see how each of the central phases of your life began at a decisive threshold where you left one way of being and entered another.” And later in this section, “When we look back, we can identify the key thresholds where the vital happenings of our lives occurred.  These were usually the times when we were confronted with decisions about the paths we wanted to travel.”

He returns to a theme he set out at the beginning of the book: “While we seem to have progressed to become experts in so many things — multiplying and acquiring stuff we neither need nor truly want — we have unlearned the grace of presence and belonging.” This is why we need blessings in our lives — blessings we give and blessings we receive.  “A blessing,” he writes, “is a circle of light drawn around a person to protect, heal, and strengthen.”  

Every morning and evening, I read the blessings that speak most to me.  There are blessings to greet the new day, and blessings to greet the night.  There are blessings for longing, for old age, for courage, for suffering, for beauty, for equilibrium, for the unknown self.  There are eighty-six blessings in all.

I have not gone out of my way to specifically recommend any of the books I have reviewed thus far.  I recommend this one.  It’s one you’ll want to go out and buy for yourself.

This book is in two parts: the first is an Introduction and a series of essays by Reynolds on John Woolman; the second consists of excerpts from Woolman’s writings.  It is, therefore, an excellent introduction to John Woolman if you are coming to him for the first time.

          Reynolds sets the stage quite well, putting the life of Woolman (1720-1772) into an historical and religious context.  As a Quaker, Woolman focused his energies on the plight of Negro slaves and on the abuse of Indians [the most commonly used designation of Indigenous peoples in Woolman’s time].  He writes that he “appeared inferior to many amongst the Indians” and “a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life, and the spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them.” Reynolds points out, however, that “by a curious convention, the Society’s [Religious Society of Friends] ‘peace testimony’ was considered, in practice, to apply to the Indian, but not to the Negro.”

As for Woolman’s life, Reynolds tells of his trade as a tailor and of future business ventures that made him morally uncomfortable because they made him too affluent.  “My mind,” writes Woolman, “through the power of Truth, was in a good degree weaned from the desire of outward greatness, and I was learning to be content with real conveniences that were not costly; so that a way of life free from much entanglements appeared best for me, though the income was small.” Speaking of the consequences of wealth being accumulated by a few at the expense of the many, Woolman, in Reynold’s words, “protested, in the best traditions of prophecy, against injury to future generations in order to satisfy the immediate desire of a few for more than their share of wealth.” “Do we feel,” writes Woolman, “an affectionate regard to posterity, and are we employed to promote their happiness?  Do our minds, in things outward, look beyond our own dissolution? And are we contriving for the prosperity of our children after us?  Let us then, like wise builders, lay the foundation deep, and by our constant uniform regard to an inward piety and virtue let them see that we really value it.”

In the wider scope of American life, Woolman’s understanding and practice of Quakerism offered a complete alternative to politics as it was then practised, for it relied not on the power of the few, but on the inward leadings of all.  Reynolds, writing this book on Woolman in 1948, takes the time to relate Woolman’s concerns with those of his [Reynold’s] own time.  In addressing party politics, Reynold’s writes, “The party may come into being to achieve a good object; but, once established, the party, claiming loyalty from its members, can soon become a rival to the very object for which it is supposed to stand.  Loyalty to the organization subtly replaces loyalty to a principle, and we need not go very far to find politicians defending what they have previously condemned because their own party is in power.” What was true for Woolman in the 18^th century, and true for Reynolds in 1948, remains true to this day.

Reynolds makes another correspondence between Woolman’s time and his own when addressing human ingenuity. Woolman writes, “To provide things relative to our outward living, in the way of true wisdom, is good; and the gift of improving in things useful is a good gift. […] Many have had this gift, and from age to age there have been improvements of this kind made in the world.  But some, not keeping to the pure gift, have, in the creaturely cunning and self-exaltation, sought out many inventions […] so the effects of it have been and are evil.” Reynolds, relating this to his own time, writes, “My own first reading of this passage, about a month after the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, was something that I shall never forget.  It was as though Woolman had reached out of his century and stood beside me, pointing to the inevitable climax of materialism, of the idolatrous worship given to machines, of the neglect of spiritual values and the degradation of human personality.” We could forward this to our own time and say much the same thing.

          Woolman sought integrity in all aspects of his life, from his business affairs, to dress (his clothes were of undyed cloth), to refusing to use silver vessels for food and drink, to religious practice (the simplicity of silent worship and inner leading as opposed to ritualized services and externally imposed doctrines), to refusing to use stage-coaches in his time in England (where he died of smallpox) because it was an abuse of the natural life of horses.

          “Pure wisdom,” a term which Woolman often used, referred to the way by which spiritual light should be sought, and to the true nature of that light.  He believed there was “an absolute standard of ethics against which the changing ‘morals’ of humanity can be measured,” and it was one by which he measured the customs of his age.  That being said, Woolman points out that Quakers are “too conscious of their own imperfections to claim that they invariably hear, infallibly understand, or faithfully follow on all occasions the guidance in which they believe.” It is not “the light,” then, which is fallible, but Quakers themselves.  Woolman did not use the results of an action as a criterion, but the “pure wisdom,” the standards of conduct, that were behind the action.  He was a man who not only talked the talk, but walked the walk.  As Reynolds says, “he was not merely a pacifist, but a peace-maker — not just a person who objected to wars when they came, but one who really lived ‘in the virtue of that life and power’ from which conflict could not possibly arise.” He was a man of charity, of dignity and humility.

          Finally, “In the difficulties attending us in this life,” writes Woolman, “nothing is more precious than the mind of Truth inwardly manifested; and it is my earnest desire that in this weighty matter we may be so truly humbled as to be favoured with a clear understanding of the mind of Truth and follow it.”

By Paul Kingsnorth (383.064 KIN)

          Kingsnorth—novelist, poet, essayist—addresses what he calls the age of the Machine, where state power merges with tech power, potentially resulting in the unmaking of humanity.  Though we “have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, […] we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning and roots.” Kingsnorth argues that our culture—a story that a people tells itself—is not dying, but already dead, and the culprit is civilization—the growth of cities that have overwhelmed the culture of the countryside.  

          Kingsnorth opposes science and religion, saying that “science, right from the beginning of the modern enterprise, was allotted the role that the Church had previously claimed for itself: the primary guide to truth, and enlightener of humanity.” And it is science, he claims, that has built the Machine that is rebuilding the world and humanity.  The modern Machine city is “global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenized, and empty at its heart.” We are now in the age of Artificial Intelligence [AI] and “apps for everything, with CCTV cameras on every street corner, our opinions manufactured by interest groups, our communications tracked and monitored, wondering what is true or who we can believe, and feeling, day by day, like we have less agency, less control, less humanity than ever before.” Jaron Lanier says the big danger posed by AI is that humanity will “die by insanity” as a result of the blurring of the boundaries between the real and the computer-generated.

The driver behind all this is want, and the Machine destroys all the limits of want.  What is needed to combat this want is not political revolution followed by a grand new social structure, but spiritual vigilance, and it is up to each of us to first “put our own inner house in order.”

          As this Machine, which we have created, reaches maturity, two things are happening, according to Kingsnorth: “Firstly, an unprecedented technological network of power and control is being constructed worldwide, which is walking us into a tightly controlled future in which both humans and the wider natural world will be bent to this network’s needs. And secondly, in this bending, we are losing the essence of what it means to be human.”

          The Machine has four values, which Kingsnorth calls the Four Ss: Science, the Self, Sex, the Screen.  A consequence of the intersection of these four values, as Robert Bly says, is that “we forgot how to produce adults. […] People don’t bother to grow up.” Adults, rather than maturing towards wisdom, “regress toward adolescence […] [and adolescents] who have no desire to become adults.” Resistance to the four Ss is encapsulated by Kingsnorth in the Four Ps: people, place, prayer, and the past.

          Where powerful nations colonize weaker ones, the Machine colonizes human beings by creating dependency and by abolishing the human idea of home; where those powerful nations seem “hollowed-out” and “prey for the Machine, surely it is because they have no soul.”

          To put all this in perspective, Kingsnorth refers to Klaus Schwab and his summary of Four Revolutions: “The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production.  The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production.  Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution […] characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

Progress is supposedly what the Machine gives us, but what, Kingsnorth asks, does Progress want? “The end of history, the end of transcendence, the death of God, permanent revolution, colonization, the uprooting of everything, liberation from everything, to move beyond nature, to replace us.”

Earlier, Kingsnorth referred to Science replacing Religion.  Today, he says, it is the religion of the Machine that offers us salvation: “You will be like gods, knowing good and evil.” The religion of the future will be “the self-built theology of a people who worship the strongest thing in the world,” and it “will end where it all began: in an attempt to self-divinize.” The crisis of the modern world, then, is not one of “technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war.”

So, what to do?  Kingsnorth argues for an anti-Machine politics: “A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomized individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us.”

How to do this? “The Machine cannot be fought head-on, but it can, in certain circumstances, be circumvented.  You can find your escape hatch.  Like the hill tribes and barbarians, you can live outside civilization’s walls.” These cultures are what Malcolm Yapp calls jellyfish tribes, “localized, potentially dispersed cultures [that] can be almost impossible to conquer.” He calls the location of these cultures, shatter zones, and they can exist “within our homes and even within our hearts,” as well as in the hills.

Another form of resistance is askesis: self-discipline or self-denial, which is at the root of the Christian spiritual tradition.  Restraining the appetites, fasting from food, sex and other worldly passions, limiting needs and restraining desires: this the foundation stone of all spiritual practice.  And this, according to Kingsnorth, is our only way to preserve our humanity in the face of Machine progress.

Review by Matthew Manera

Religious Schism in Early Nineteenth Century America

By Robert W. Doherty (289.6 DOH)

            This book traces the sociological or societal, as well as the religious, issues, particularly in the Philadelphia area of 19^th century America, that led to the so-called Hicksite Separation (named after Elias Hicks) of 1827.  Doherty points out that the early 19^th century Quakers in and around Philadelphia headed towards this separation because they “lacked any institutional means for resolving conflict.” There were problems with methods of appointment and with jurisdiction, and with the fact that all decisions were supposed to be unanimous.  As for their beliefs, difficulty arose because of the conflict between their commitment to the ideals of peace, equality, and simplicity, and the participation in the affairs of the world—how could Quakers focus on the Inner Light at the same time as taking part in the external affairs of the world? Another source of conflict within the Society was how to deal with slavery.  Hicks and his supporters condemned all aspects of slavery, while what would come to be called the Orthodox supporters were not so unqualified in their judgment. By 1827, the “official” Hicksite-Orthodox Separation, the questions that confronted the Society of Friends were: “who should be a member of the Society, how should the Society be organized, how does a Friend seek salvation, and to what extent should a Friend accept the ways of the world?” “The Orthodox wanted to make their peace with the secular world,” while the Hicksites were more drawn to quietism.

            One of the principal divisions in approach for the Orthodox and the Hicksites was that of sect and church.  The Hicksites were more sectarian, meaning that they favoured withdrawal from the world and from the formal structure of the conventional Christian churches; the Orthodox were more drawn to those formal structures and doctrines.  The Orthodox tended to be wealthier and engaged in high prestige occupations, most of them living in the city; the Hicksites, on the other hand, were more deliberately alienated from any focus on wealth and status, and were more rural.  Doherty lists the following sources of such alienation: “1) suspicion of the city; 2) commitment to social values which were threatened by Orthodoxy; 3) resentment of Orthodox social climbing; 4) psychological shock resulting from worldly failure; 5) commitment to egalitarianism and/or religious freedom, both of which were felt to be challenged by Orthodoxy.”

            Even though agriculture was a focus of both the Orthodox and the Hicksites, “Orthodox Quakers were more likely to be engaged in commercial agriculture.” Elias Hicks appealed to those outside the city, using rural images in his sermons; “he appealed to rural people as one of their own—a devout and kindly tiller of the soil.” “The appeal of Orthodoxy outside the city of Philadelphia,” on the other hand, “seems […] to have been greatest among those Friends who had ties with the outer world. “Such ties might be occupational (commercial farming), residential (living in West Chester or Chester), or institutional (Westtown School).”

            Orthodoxy “was in the air” of early 19^th century America, but was especially influenced, for American Quakers, by the Orthodox sentiment in English Quakerism.  The very fact of the Hicksites’ focus on quietism as opposed to engaging with the secular world at large, was also a factor in the formal organization of Orthodox Quaker churches.  The Hicksites were conservatives when it came to preserving the traditions of simplicity and equality from the days of George Fox, but liberal when it came to understanding and interpreting doctrine and the scriptures — also deriving from the days of George Fox. “Liberals felt that all men had the right to believe and worship as they wished.  All men should be guaranteed an opportunity to seek religious truth for themselves.  In the mind of the liberals, Elias Hicks had a right to believe and say whatever his spirit led him to believe and say.” The Hicksites focused on behaviour; the Orthodox on belief.

            To understand the background and consequences of the Hicksite Separation is to understand the divide between programmed and unprogrammed meetings, and to see how our Vancouver Island Monthly Meeting can trace its roots as an unprogrammed Meeting back to Elias Hicks and his supporters.   

Selected with and Introduction by Kerry Walters (289.6 JON)

          At his birth in Maine in 1863, Rufus Jones’s Aunt Peace said of him, “This child will one day bear the message of the Gospel to distant lands and to peoples across the sea.” And so, he did.  By the time he was four years old, he said that he “had formed the habit of using corporate silence in a heightening and effective way.” In his undergraduate years at Haverford College, he studied religion, philosophy, and history, and wrote his senior thesis on mysticism.  In 1917, he was one of the founding members of the American Friends Service Committee, a relief organization that embodied the Quaker tenet of non-violence in times of war.  For Jones, “the whole significance of the Quaker movement was its revolt from theories and notions and its appeal instead to experience.” Jones considered himself, and was considered by others, a mystic; he referred to himself as a “practical” or “conative” mystic, in the Christian tradition — “the original mystical experience feels like a thrust from beyond.” Indeed, his personal experience, along with scriptural authority, convinced him the of the reality and presence of the inner Light, which he called “the Beyond within” or “the More,” which allowed for a “mutual and reciprocal correspondence” between God and humans.  And so, he talked often of “this Over-world of Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love,” a world beyond the material one we are bound up in.

          Jones writes of Gandhi’s “soul-force” and the Indian mystical tradition, including the Upanishads, and the well-known “That are thou,” which refers to the identification of “the inmost being of [one’s] own self with the inmost Reality in the universe.” He writes also, in this regard, of Emerson’s Over-soul.  The soul, for Jones, “accumulates and interprets facts and processes of experience, not experience as it is felt.” Still, the essential fact of religion for Jones is “love, and life is impossible apart from relationships.” Furthermore, we must not expect to find God apart from spiritual relationships. Somewhat like the Hindu concept of Brahman and Atman, the Self and the self, Jones says that our relationship with God is our limited self with God’s infinite Self.  God is both transcendent and immanent.  And this is where Jones’s understanding of worship comes in: “worship seems to me to be direct, vital, joyous, personal experience and practice of the presence of God (italics his).” “We cannot explain our normal selves,” Jones continues, “or account for the best things we know—or even for our condemnation of our poorer, lower self — without an appeal to and acknowledgment of a Divine Guest and Companion who is the real presence of our central being.” Indeed, the Quakers in the 17^th century, as Jones reminds us, were the first organized body of Christians to build a faith on the principle that “something of God is in every man.”

          But how to understand the concept of God? Quakers believed, and believe, that “God is essentially Spirit.  He is Life and Thought and Love and Goodness in unceasing revelation and action.” And all this is a fact of experience — “something seen and felt and known” — not simply something derived from traditional authority.  We do not, then, need “to go ‘somewhere’ to find God.  We only need to be something.”

          For Jones, everyone is a potential mystic.  He argues that, as children, we all had the capacity for surprise and wonder, referring to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” “To see the eternal in the midst of time,” writes Jones, “to feel and to enjoy the infinite here in the finite, is one of the greatest blessings life has to offer.” The mystical experience means that the human spirit and the divine spirit have met and “are in mutual and reciprocal correspondence.” Therefore, “both life and religion are rooted in mystical experience, mystical process,” and Christianity is, for him, “at its very heart a mystical religion.” That being said, Jones distinguishes between “negation mysticism” and “affirmation mysticism,” the former making vision the end of life, the latter making it the beginning.

Imagination is a crucial ingredient here — “Getting your imagination captured is almost the whole of life. […] The way to become the architect of your fate, the captain of your soul, is to have your imagination captured.” All this talk of the individual, however, should not blind us to the fact that the primary fact of human life is the group that makes the individual possible.  It is an organic way of life, “where each lives for all and where the interpretation of the Life of the Whole is the business and at the same time the joy of each unit-member.” The corollary to this is that “the kingdom of God is something men [sic] do—not a place to which they go.” This also means that this kingdom is here and now, not in some realm of the afterlife.

Talking of prayer, Jones writes that it must “rise above [its conception] as an easy means to a desired end.” The point of prayer is to turn to God “as the completeness and reality of all we want to be, the other Self whom we have always sought.” This means, also, that we must want only what everybody can share, that we must seek blessings which have a universal application.

Jones also addresses one of the primary Quaker testimonies, that of simplicity, relating it to sincerity, genuineness, and being honest with oneself.

He goes on to distinguish between unity and uniformity, pointing out that uniformity, depending on a mechanistic rather than a spiritual organization “levels down instead of up.” Unity, on the other hand, has to do with a growing organism.

Finally, Jones points out that Quakers have been primarily doers—“they believe strongly in the laboratory method.  They try their experiment and then proceed to interpret it.  The words, the talk, come after the deeds.”