A TESTAMENT OF DEVOTION 1945, by Harper & Brothers
====
TABLE OF CONTENTS
====
Acknowledgments
0] A Biographical Memoir
1] The Light Within Page 29
2] Holy Obedience page 51
3] The Blessed Comunity Page 77
4] The Eternal Now and Social Concern page 89
5] The Simplification of Life page 112
=====
Acknowledgments
It is with the generous permission of the Friends Book Committee of 304 Arch Street, Philadelphia, that the lecture HOLY OBEDIENCE has been made available for inclusion here. The editors of THE FRIEND of the same address have given their consent for the reprinting of essays originally printed thcre. The friends of Thomas Kelly and especially E. Merrill Root, Rufus M. Jones, Mrs. A. L. Gillett, and John Cadbury have been most generous in supplying letters and material that fur¬nished the substance for the biographical memoir. T. Canby Jones, T. Lloyd Cadbury and Albert L. Baily, Jr., have assisted with the reading of the proof. And finally, the publishers have taken more than a profes¬sional interest in the preparation of this little book for publication. I should like to express my thanks to each of those who have given such valuable assistance.
D.V.S.
A Biographical Memoir
An adequate life, like Spinoza's definition of an adequate idea, might be described as a life which has grasped intuitively the whole nature of things, and has seen and felt and refocused itself to this whole.
An inadequate life is one that lacks this adjustment to the whole nature of things—hence its twisted perspective, its partiality, its confusion.
The story of Thomas Kelly's life is the story of a passionate and determined quest for adequacy. In the three years of his life that preceded his sudden death in January 1941, this search culminated in a rare degree of adequacy. The adequate life that he had known, he described with unusual simplicity and grace in the collection of his writings that are gathered in this slender volume.
Thomas Raymond Kelly was born on June 4, 1893 on a farm in southwestern Ohio near Chillicothe. His parents were ardent enough Quakers to have reopened an old Quaker meeting-house and to have revived a meeting for worship during their young married Life. Thomas Kelly's father died when he was four, and in order to support him and his sister Mary, his mother worked the farm and delivered butter and eggs in the village for the next six years.
Then she moved to Wilmington, Ohio, in order that the children might have the advantage of a good school and later of a Quaker College. She learned stenography and bookkeeping and started work in the office of the Irwin Auger Bit Company at five dollars a week to support her little family.
At Wilmington College Thomas Kelly was incidentally absorbed in work to contribute to his own support and in activities that helped to feed the religious hunger in his life, but centrally he was seized there by a major loyalty.
It was a loyalty to the physical sciences and especially to chemistry. if one was to know the whole of life, here was a science that had a precise method, that dared to accept what that method turned up in spite of its rejection of previous opinion, and whose magnificent achievements won by the fearless use of such a method were evidence of its greatness.
As the laboratory assistant, he virtually lived in the chemistry laboratory in his senior year 1912-13 at Wilmington College. He came on to Haverford College for a year of further study, as was often done by graduates of the Western Quaker Colleges, and entered the senior class in 1913 continuing to do his major work in chemistry. At Haverford he came under the spell of Rufus Jones. In his classroom he sensed the lure of philosophy and of a search for truth in which his religious hunger and his passion for science might both be given their due. It was a glimpse ahead, but not yet realized for himself.
The avid hunger for life in this eager, intense, impetuous Quaker boy flared out on the first day of his arrival at Haverford from Ohio. Rufus Jones recalls his visit on that day, "When he was at Haverford as a student twenty-eight years ago, he came to my house deeply moved by his first day's stirring events. He sat down in front of me, his face lighted up with radiance and he said suddenly, 'I am just going to make my life a miracle!'"
The attachment to the sciences went on as he taught some science at Pickering College, a Quaker preparatory school in Canada during the two years from 1914-16 which he spent there.
But hunger for life, the adequate life, made him open to the fascination of the kind of absolute commitment that was associated in the religious mind of that period with volunteering for service as a missionary. Canadian Friends had taken a particular interest in the Quaker Mission in Japan and Thomas Kelly decided to give himself to religious work in the Far East and entered Hartford Theological Seminary in the autumn of 1916 to prepare for it.
America's entry into the war stirred him to volunteer his services as a Quaker, first in canteen duty with the Y.M.C.A. and then in work with German prisoners of war in England where he spent from June 1917 to February 1918.
The happy and moving experiences with the German prisoners drew him to a concern for the German people that was never to desert him.
He took his Bachelor of Divinity degree at the Seminary in 1919. One of his colleagues there has forgotten any details of Thomas Kelly's years at the Seminary except that he was the gaiest, heartiest one of them all and that when there was any fun going, he could usually be found at the center of it.
At that period the Macy household, a Congregational clergyman's family, was an institution at the Hartford Theological Seminary. The father was himself a graduate of the Seminary, the son was a student there, and the daughters enjoyed high favor among the Seminary students. It was in his Seminary years that Thomas Kelly met Lael Macy. With an offer to return to his old college at Wilmington, Ohio, as a teacher of the Bible, he married her on the next day after his graduation in 1919.
The war and the years of study had modified the mission goal, but the interest in Japan and the Far East continued. He spent two years at Wilmington College but he was restless to be on.
In spite of the price that it would exact from him and from his loyal wife at that stage of his career, it was decided that he should prepare himself to teach philosophy and he was resolved that it must be a broad and a comprehensive enough philosophy to fathom Eastern as well as Western culture. He returned to Hartford Theological Seminary and spent three years with Professor A. L. Gillett giving himself to the study of philosophy. In June 1924 he secured his Ph.D. degree with a thesis on the place of value judgments in Lotze's philosophy
During these post-war years, the Quakers had been doing an extensive work in feeding German children and had established centers in a number of German cities.
By 1924 the feeding work was being closed up and turned over to the local German social agencies, but it seemed wise to maintain the Quaker centers in Berlin and Vienna and to transform them into international centers where the Quaker spirit and way of life could be shared and from which Friends could perform any service that might open for them in the years ahead.
The transition was a delicate one and required Quaker personnel of considerable spiritual maturity and wisdom. Thomas and Lael Kelly were chosen for this service in 1924 and spent fifteen months in Berlin giving themselves without reservation to the German Quakers and to the cultivation of this new type of center.
Wilbur K. Thomas, the executive secretary of the American Friends Service Committee in those years, writes of this period of service in Germany, "The Center was in need of a strong, spiritual leader. Thomas R. Kelly was the man. His deep interest in spiritual problems, his sympathy with all who were troubled in spirit, his ability to interpret the religious message as emphasized by Friends, coupled with his executive ability, represented a contribution that cannot be emphasized too strongly."
In September 1925, Thomas and Lael Kelly returned from Germany to Richmond, Indiana, where Thomas Kelly had been called to teach philosophy at Eariham College.
At the age of thirty-two he entered upon his teaching with a sense of his mission to place philosophy and the encouragement of rigorous reflective thinking in the high respect which it deserves in the education offered by a liberal arts college. His earlier passion for science had reappeared in his devotion to the philosophical method. There was to be no cutting of corners for any accepted views. Truth was to be discovered and acknowledged as such.
His most intimate friend at Eariham College, the poet, E. Merrill Root, writes of this period, "When I first knew him at Eariham, he was in rebellion against what seemed to him the churchliness or institutionalism of the self-consciously religious; he was a bit brash and brusque, I felt, and a bit too confident of the logical and scientific approach to truth . . . He always desired, and more ambitiously in his earlier years, to be a great scholar and to be associated with some college or university that lived by the austere and inexorable standards of excellence in truth which he set for himself. He wished, also and always, to be a living witness of truth;
and whenever individuals, or meetings, or colleges, failed to incarnate his passionate desire for truth become flesh, he suffered. He was deeply sensitive and human and wrestled with his disappointments and despairs. He was not wholly happy in his last years at Eariham, because he desired a larger college or university where he could find students of more intense preparation and abilities."
There was a natural attractiveness and lovableness about Thomas Kelly that drew students and colleagues to him. His rich humor, all remember. "He laughed with the rich hearty abandon of wind and sun UOfl the open prairie. I have never heard richer, heartier laughter than his. He delighted in earths incongruities, all the more perhaps because he saw eternal things and the values that transcend the earth . . . even the publicans and sinners among the students respected and loved him; be said to all, with Walt Whitman, 'Not till the sun refuses you do I refuse you.'"
A daughter, Lois, was born early in 1928 and the Kelly family built themselves a new home which they gaily shared with their student friends. But by 1930, the burning urge to be on with the quest, to broaden horizons, to extend opportunities led to a decision to study philosophy at what was still regarded as the most distinguished center in the United States, at Harvard University.
At great personal sacrifice and once again with the loyal encouragement of Lael Kelly, they gave up their new home, borrowed money and went to Cambridge, Massachusetts for the year. In 1931, he had an opportunity to fill a year's vacancy at Wellesley College while the professor of phi¬losophy was on sabbatical leave. This meant oppor¬tunity for a further year of study at Harvard and he accepted it eagerly.
He felt that his scholarship was getting the stimulus it had long lacked. At Wellesley in 1931-32 he not only taught the traditional courses and managed a seminar in Contemporary Realism, but supplemented the family income by preaching in a Congregational Church each Sunday at Fall River.
At Harvard the great event of the year was a course in directed reading under Professor A. N. Whitehead. it was in this reading that he conceived his first interest in the French philosopher, Emile Meyerson, upon whom he later wrote his only published book. He had taken a course in Cosmologies Ancient and Modern under Professor Whitehead the previous year and the turn of Professor Whitehead's thought grew on him and intrigued him.
In June 1932, he wrote Professor A. L. Gillett, "I have begun to look in the direction of Whitehead for a richer analysis of the datum and find him tremendous." As Professor Whitehead talked, Thomas Kelly felt, as others have done, as though he were present at the day of creation and saw and shared in the whole drama, for there was no mistaking the fact that this great metaphysician possessed "a feeling of intimacy with the inside of the cosmos" to borrow a phrase of Justice Holmes. Professor Whitehead's child-fresh font of unusual and apt words that he minted to illuminate some experience also gripped Thomas Kelly and gave him new courage to allow himself great freedom in his own style of expression—a trait that is peculiarly striking in the devotional essays included in this volume.
Secretly there was the sharpest kind of hope that the two years at Harvard might bring with them an opening for teaching philosophy in some university in the East. But the spring of 1932 with its crushing economic depression wore on and the opportunity did not come.
An offer to return to Earlham College had been generously held open until late spring, for Earlham College wanted Thomas Kelly to return. But to return seemed like renouncing the future and retreating into the past, and the decision to do it almost crushed Thomas Kelly. In June 1932, he wrote Professor Gillett of his letter of consent to return to Earlham College, "I cannot put into words what that letter cost me, but there is no use talking about it for there seems to be no other way." In August he was on top again and could write to the same friend that "the calibre of a man is found in his ability to meet disappointment successfully, enriched rather than narrowed by it."
Once back at Earlham he gave himself to his teaching and to the spiritual and intellectual nurturing of a little group of students that used to gather at his home. John Cadbury and John Carter were two whose lives he influenced that year and they were not alone. He wrote to John Cadbury who had gone to Cornell University in 1933, "I wish we were nearer together in space and could have again an evening before the fire reading, discussing and meditating. The year has been going along in average mediocrity. There is no especial excellence, no espe¬cial defect in it. It's just it. And that's damnable. For the world is popping with novelty, adventure in ideas. And we aren't getting them here. We are safe and sane."
This last note represented the shadow of these second Earlham years. Many in this same period found in his teaching a source of great intellectual excitement. "He was a great teacher here, always eager, ardent, alive in the classroom. I remember still one of his students said in 1934, 'Professor Kelly is going to grow all the time.' That was the sense he gave his students."
But within him, there was the hunger for scholarly achievement and scholarly recognition that drove him on without relenting. The summer of 1932 he worked on his book on Meyerson in the New York Public Library and the Library at Columbia University. In 1933 he spent the entire summer in Widener Library while his family lived in Maine. In 1934 he was invited by John Hughes to join the staff of the summer school at Pendle Hill (a Quaker Center for Graduate Religious and Social Study at Wallingford, Pennsylvania) and gave a course of lectures which he called The Quest for Reality. "What a great month it was," he wrote to a friend, "It was the first time I felt 'released' . . . I only wish I could spend the rest of the summer re-writing the stuff and seeing if it could get into print."
But directly after the close of the summer school he was at Widener Library again working on the Meyerson manuscript. At Pendle Hill, the deeply religious vein in him that his intimates at Earlham knew and were greatly refreshed by, could pour itself out unrestrained and use his scholarship as a vehicle. But once out of this atmosphere, it was rig¬orous scholarship alone, he protested, that was the goal of his heart's desire. In a letter to Professor A. L. Gillett, he is almost savage in his intellectualist declarations,
"One thing is evident: I am hopelessly committed to the life of a scholar. I'm not able to be concerned primarily in practical problems of help¬fulness through organizations and classes but find the current is irresistible in its flow toward the pole of pure scholarship and research. . . . Lael tends to think I am selfishly acquisitive in my attitude, but I can't be anything but this kind of person, and I might as well surrender to it."
He wrote in the same tone to Professor Clarence I. Lewis, his dearest personal friend in the department of philosophy at Harvard,
"I merely want to write and work as a typical scholar interested in the basic problems of research in metaphysics and epistemology. . . . While the emphasis I have laid is upon comprehensive world background in philosophy, I rather expect writing will move in the opposite direction, toward closer and more detailed studies."
In the spring of 19 he finished the manuscript on Meyerson and at the same time made a decision that promised to change the whole course of his life.
From the days of his missionary concern for Japan, Thomas Kelly had had a steady interest for the culture of the Far East. At Earlham College, he had sought to interest his student friends in the writings and customs of the East. In the course of that spring an opportunity came to go to the University of Hawaii to teach philosophy and to assimilate what he could of the atmosphere of China and Japan as it was reflected in this curious way-station between Orient and Occident.
After a long struggle to decide, he accepted it. It seemed a step into the future again. He wrote Professor Lewis of his reasons for the decision. "For a number of years I have had a desire to be acquainted with the philosophical thought of the whole world, not merely with the thought of the Western world.
To live solely within one's own cultural traditions (in this case, the outgrowths of Greek culture) not actively familiar with the powerful thought of India, China and the rest impresses me as a provincialism not warranted by the spirit of philosophy itself. This point of view was in my mind sometime before I came to Harvard five years ago. And I laid out a tenta¬tive and hoped for course of life-development, which had three steps or phases.
- The first phase was to get an unimpeachable drill in the most rigorous philoso¬phy department of the West.
- The second was to get to the Orient, in some way or other, for a period of two, three or four years (One can hardly comprehend the quest of the Buddha sitting under a maple sugar tree in a mid-west corn field).
- The third was to return to this country to teach and write with this world-background."
Once established at the University of Hawaii in the autumn of 1935, he saw Earlham becoming somewhat restored in stature.
On first acquaintance, he found the faculty there not as cultured or as cultivated as at Earlham. "If Earlham was over-benevolent in its conceptions of a 'guarded' education, this institution is as far in the other direction." But closer contact with several of his colleagues, with his more able students, and especially with the Dean and the President whose vision for the institution he managed to catch, led him to temper his judgment before the year was out. The opportunity to associate with Chinese and Japanese scholars and the teaching of a course in Indian philosophy and a second in Chinese philosophy stirred up great enthusiasm in him. In a letter to Professor Rufus Jones, he says, "At a distance it might seem that the year here has been spent in a very restricted little field. I am reminded of the remark of a young fellow in Berlin who said to me, 'I never live an additional week in Berlin but what Bang! goes another horizon.' The horizons I have wanted to have broken, have been breaking and showing new and wonderful vistas."
A son, Richard Kelly had been born in Hawaii in February 16. In March of that year Thomas Kelly was invited to join the philosophy department at Haverford College, to replace D. Elton Trueblood who had been called to be chaplain and Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Stanford University. The offer was attractive. Thomas Kelly did not conceal his high opinion of Haverford College as he wrote Professor A. L. Gillett that 'They go in for training young men of exceptionally promising ability and intellect . . . Their standards are high, blisteringly high."
In spite of its cutting short his plan of Eastern studies, he accepted. For all of Hawaii's glorying in its climate, it had brought him nothing but miserable health. This was not new to him, for in the last years at Eariham he had paid the toll of his strenuous application. In the winter of I933-4 he suffered severe attacks of kidney stones, and in January 1935 he was stricken with a siege of severe nervous exhaustion. During the whole late winter and spring of 1935, he got out of bed only to go to his classes and returned at once to rest again. Hawaii was to have restored him, but instead he developed an ugly sinus condition that necessitated an operation and he wrote to Professor A. L. Gillett about "being engaged in supporting the doctor. He has already well-nigh X-rayed me into the relief lines and heaven only knows what it will be in the long run."
The Kelly family arrived in Haverford early in September 1936. They swiftly found their place in the Quaker community. Thomas Kelly's gifts of ministry made themselves felt in Haverford Meeting. His sense of humor, however, did not desert him in coming among Eastern Quakers who called him from far and near to speak to their forums, commencements and classes. He wrote to a friend at this period,
"An increasing number of speaking engagements come along, most of them highly unremunerative. Quakers with their unpaid ministry are well grounded in their Biblical persuasion that the Gospel [16] is free."
Nor was he uncritical of the annual gathering of Quakers that takes place in Philadelphia each spring,
"Being a relative newcomer, I have no very good background for judging the Yearly Meeting at Arch Street. In the midst of a lot of historical lumber, I felt some life. But only a few have the vivid sense of the freshness and the newness of the Quaker discovery and emphasis. Was it not Gerald Heard who described Friends as reminding him of delicate chased silver. The explosive ruggedness of Luther and Fox is not found."
Thomas Kelly enjoyed his courses at Haverford College. This was especially true of his Greek philosophy and of a course in Oriental Philosophy which he inaugurated to carry on the interest that had taken him to Hawaii.
At the time of his death he had interested one of the foundations in purchasing for the Haverford College Library extensive sets of reference books in Indian, Chinese and Japanese philosophy and culture.
A course in the history and philosophy of Quakerism which he inherited from Rufus Jones gave him an occasion to immerse himself in Quaker history to his great delight. As a teacher at Haverford, he appealed to a small group of students whose enthusiasm for him and dedication to him knew few bounds. In the spring of 1938, he wrote to his faithful friend at Hartford,
"I am more happy here at Haverford than anybody has a right to be, in this vale of tears and trouble(!) It is just about as ideal as one could ever wish for—yet with very human shortcomings."
In the first two years at Haverford, Little Richard Kelly was passing out of the baby stage. Lois Kelly, a beautiful girl of nine, was the idol of her father and reciprocated his affection. After the silent Quaker meeting for worship one day she told her mother that she had spent the meeting hour deciding whom she loved best, as she looked up at the gallery (where the elders of the meeting sit facing the meeting). After some weighing of the matter, she decided that she loved her daddy first, God second, Rufus Jones third, and J. Henry Bartlett fourth!
Thomas Kelly had done nothing with the manuscript on Explanation and Reality in the Philosophy of Emile Meyerson which because of its specialized character could never be published except under a heavy subsidy. This token of his intense period of scholarly application he felt determined to publish in spite of the expense involved which he could ill afford. It appeared in the late summer of 'yj. It was well reviewed in the Journal of Philosophy and appreciated by the few competent to judge it. This book in some ways marked the culmination of seven tireless years of application to improve himself in scholarly attainment.
He had not been satisfied merely to receive the stimulus of the department of philosophy at Harvard. He wanted also to have the stamp of their approval upon a work of his scholarship, perhaps ultimately to receive a Harvard degree.
In the late autumn of 1937 after the publication of this book, a new life direction took place in Thomas Kelly. No one knows exactly what happened, but a strained period in his life was over. He moved toward adequacy. A fissure in him seemed to close, cliffs caved in and filled up a chasm, and what was divided grew together within him. Science, scholarship, method, remained good, but in a new setting. Now he could say with Isaac Pennington, 'Reason is not sin but a deviating from that from which reason came is sin."
He went to the Germantown Friends' Meeting at Coulter Street to deliver three lectures in January 1938. He told me that the lectures wrote themselves. At Germantown, people were deeply moved and said,
"This is authentic.' His writings and spoken messages began to be marked by a note of experimental authority. "To you in this room who are seekers, to you, young and old who have toiled all night and caught nothing, but who want to launch out into the deeps and let down your nets for a draught, I want to speak as simply, as tenderly, as clearly as 1 can. For God can be found. There is a last rock for your souls, a resting place of absolute peace and joy and power and radiance and security. There is a Divine Center into which your life can slip, a new and absolute orientation in God, a Center where you live with Him and out of which you see all of life, through new and radiant vision, tinged with new sorrows and pangs, new joys unspeakable and full of glory." It was the same voice, the same pen, the same rich imagery that always crowded his writing, and on the whole a remarkably similar set of religious ideas. But now he seemed to be ex¬pounding less as one possessed of"knowledge about" and more as one who had had unmistakable 'acquaintance with."
In April 1938, he wrote to Rufus Jones,
"The reality of Presence has been very great at times recently. One knows at first hand what the old inquiry meant, 'Has Truth been advancing among you?'"
In 1935 Clarence Pickett and Rufus Jones on behalf of the American Friends Service Committee had tried to get Thomas Kelly to go back to Germany after ten years' absence and spend a summer visiting German Friends. His illness and his call to Hawaii made that impossible
but now, in the summer of 1938, the call came again and he accepted. During this summer in Germany the ripening process went on apace as he lived in intimate fellowship with German Quakers and with others of all social classes. It was a religious journey, and like the earlier Friends, he went about from place to place and lived in Friends' homes talking out their problems with them, sitting in silence with them, and sharing his witness with them. He wrote a friend of the fellowship that summer where he knew and was known in that which is eternal,
"I think, for example, of a day laborer in Stuttgart whom I visited recently. He knows the Presence so well. And we talked for a half an hour and stood together in silence and fully understood each other. He can't even speak correct German, but oh what a precious soul . . . I have had several long talks with the wife of a German, who has horny hands from desperately hard work. She loves the oppressed and the poor and the simple folk in a way that reminds me of St. Francis of Assisi. She knows the depths of the Divine Presence, the peace and creative power that you know, and through no grace of my own, I know also. Such consecration of life is amazing."
He was later to write on this inward fellowship which was the social pole of his message in the last years of his life,
"When we are drowned in the overwhelming seas of the love of God, we find ourselves in a new and particular relation to a few of our fellows."
He gave the Richard Cary Lecture at the German Yearly Meeting in 1938 presenting essentially the material which was included in his essay on The Eternal Now and Social Concern. It spoke to the condition of German Friends and they responded to him as they have scarcely done to any other American visitor. He left behind in Germany a memory that is still green.
To him, the German experience seemed to clarify still further what had come a few months before. He wrote to his mother at the close of that summer,
"I am not at all as I was when I came to Germany, as you will find when you see me."
In long visits that we had immediately upon his return in September 1938, he kept repeating,
"It is wonderful. I have been literally melted down by the love of God."
He told several of his student friends later of a specific experience that he had had on his knees in the great cathedral at Cologne where he seemed to feel God laying the whole congealed suffering of humanity upon his heart—a burden too terrible to be borne—but yet with His help bearable.
In a letter to Rufus Jones written on September 26th, 1938, he is eloquent on the experiences of the summer.
"Two things have been very much on my mind about which I wanted to talk with thee .
One thing was: I have had this summer, and still have, such a sweeping experience of 'refreshment of the spirit' so amazing, so sweet, and so prolonged as to go clear down to the roots of my being.
The first verse of the Psalm I read in Meeting on First-day 'My soul was in a ferment and I was pricked in the reins of my heart' (Psalm 73:21) was intensely personal as thee probably recognized and I have longed to talk to thee about it. No, that is not quite the way to say it: rather I have longed to talk about Him who deals so tenderly and lovingly to undeserving hearts.
For the inner fellowship, the Gebundenheit, the Verbundenheit of souls who know and who live by His Presence is very deep. It is the stuff out of which the Kingdom is made, is it not? . . . The first days here in America were days of very difficult readjustment, for I was very deeply immersed in the German world. But now I feel I must get reconnected."
귀속의식 (Verbundenheit) - 귀속의식은 직업을 가지고 있는 사람들은 자기가 전체사회 가운데서 어떠한 계급적 및 계층적 위치에 놓여 있는가를 자각하는 의식이다. 이와 같은 귀속의식은 일반적으로 각 직업이 놓여진 객관적 위치를 반영하고 있다. 위키백과
The previous spring he had gone out to Albert Baily's farm with a group of seniors from Westtown School for a weekend retreat with them. They had had a moving time together and now one of these students, T. Canby Jones, was a freshman at Haverford College, and wished to continue the fellowship. He and several of his friends began coming over to Thomas Kelly's home one evening each week to talk and read together of books of mutual interest.
They lived on a mixed diet of St. Augustine's Confessions and Gibran's The Prophet for the first few weeks and had an easy time of silence together after the readings. During the next two years they read a number of books of devotional literature together. Pere Grou, Meister Eckhart, Brother Lawrence, Letters by a Modern Mystic;The Little Flowers of St. Francis, and then, quite naturally, the New Testament and the Psalms.
The group grew until it often had six or seven students. At times no one would appear. But Thomas Kelly was always on hand. He found in this close spiritual fellowship that developed, one of the greatest comforts of his life.
One of the students describes the group,
"Tom, of course, was always telling funny stories even about the deepest thoughts. We met when we felt the need, not definitely once a week, but usually so. Tom often spoke of dry periods, but he as often described with a radiant face the degrees of ecstasy one achieves when he is wholly committed to God. In the Spring of 1939, Tom expressed his concern for message-bearing. He told us many times he wanted us to be a band of itinerant preachers and expressed the desire that groups like ours be started everywhere: spiritual dynamos for the revitalization of meetings and the church. The idea grew that this gathering of such cells, more than speaking should be our task.
In short, our group was a little religious order. Grounded in seeking God and the meaning of life, rejoicing in the love for each other, and thankful for the life that resulted from that corporate search."
It is a tribute to the vitality of this group that they have continued to meet after Thomas Kelly's death and have added several other seekers to their number.
As the experience of this inward life matured, Thomas Kelly found himself using language that would have repelled him during his years of rebellion against evangelical religion.
"Have I discovered God as a sweet Presence and a stirring life-renovating Power within me? Do I walk by His Guidance feeding every day, like the knights of the Grail on the body and the blood of Christ?"
An Eariham colleague wrote of his visit there in the autumn of 1940,
"He almost startled me, and he shocked some of us who were still walking in the ways of logic and science and the flesh, by the high areas of being he had penetrated. He had returned to old symbols like the blood of Christ, that were shocking to a few of his old colleagues who had not grown and lived as he had. But he brought new meaning to all symbols, and he was to me, and to some others a prophet whose tongue had been touched by coals of fire."
As his experience ripened, there also came a growing reemphasis upon the centrality of devotion, a devotion that far exceeds the mere possession of inward states of exaltation:
"Let us be quite clear that mystical exaltations are not essential to religious dedication . . . Many a man professes to be without a shred of mystical elevation, yet is fundamentally a heaven-dedicated soul.
It would be a tragic mistake to suppose that religion is only for a small group, who have certain vivid but transient inner experiences, and to preach those experiences so that those who are relatively insensitive to them should feel excluded, denied access to the Eternal love, deprived of a basic necessity for religious living.
The crux of religious living lies in the will, not in transient and variable states. Utter dedication of will to God is open to all . . . Where the will to will God's will is present, there is a child of God. When there are graciously given to us such glimpses of glory as aid us in softening own-will, then we may be humbly grateful. But glad willing away of self that the will of God, so far as it can be discerned, may become what we will—that is the basic condition.'
exaltation - 1.a feeling or state of extreme happiness. 2.the action of elevating someone in rank or power.
There was no withdrawal from life during these years.
Thomas Kelly found in the American Friends Service Committee a corporate means of expression with which he felt deep unity. His concern was central in the establishment of the Quaker Center at Shanghai and he guided a little committee that met often to scrutinize the Eastern scene. He also became chairman of the Fellowship Council and as such served for two years on the Board of Directors of the Service Committee.
The literary harvest of this period was not long in corning. Most of it was printed in The Friend, a Quaker religious and literary journal published bi-weekly in Philadelphia.
- The Eternal Now and Social Concern appeared in March 1938; the Richard Cary "The Gathered Meeting, The Friend, December 12, 1940, P. 205.
- Lecture, Das Ewige in seiner Gegenwart and Zeitliche Fihrung, containing similar material, was published in German in August 1938, the counsel on Simplicity appeared in a symposium on that subject in March 1939;
- the Blessed Community in September 1939. Three striking essays on Quakerism, not included in this volume, appeared in the same journal between 1938 and 1940: Quakers and Symbolism, The Quaker Discovery, and The Gathered Meeting.
- In late March 1939, Thomas Kelly delivered the annual William Penn Lecture, entitled Holy Obedience, to the Yearly Meeting of Quakers. This lecture was read in religious circles throughout the United States and brought requests for more devotional material of this authentic character.
Nine days before his death, he wrote me a letter which he sent to Portugal by dipper. In it he described the last piece of writing he was to do.
"Spent last week (vacation) writing in bare hope of publication, on practical procedure and conduct of the self in living by, and oriented toward, the Light within, both' in private devotion and in public reaction to the world of men and events, seeing them in and through the Light . . Read one at Pendle Hill last Sunday."
These three chapters of rare grace and suggestiveness form the opening chapters of this little collection.
He died very suddenly of a heart attack on January 17, 1941 at the age of forty-seven years.
His friend, E. Merrill Root, wrote to Lael Kelly from Eariham College,
"I cannot tell you adequately, and yet I think you know, how much I loved Tom. He was my great friend and comrade here; there was no one else who entered the inner circle of the heart, or shared the heights of the soul. He was the perfect friend, whether we shared the gay sunlight of humor, or ascended the peaks of highest vision together. I had especially marvelled to see how he grew always in insight and power, and rejoiced at the light he brought me and all men. He was a great strength to me. The thought of him was always a beatitude, a great light, a wind of courage."
A neighbor in Maine who had watched with admiration Thomas Kelly's skill with carpenters' tools, and who looked forward to his evening visits, wrote simply,
"I will find it very difficult to realize that he will not wander over with his lantern next summer and tarry with us for a while to bless and cheer us."
Gerald Heard, who had never met Thomas Kelly but who had been moved by his devotional writing, wrote to a mutual friend at the news of Thomas Kelly's death,
"I was filled with a kind of joy when I read of Thomas Kelly. It was formerly the custom of the Winston Salem Community of Moravians in North Carolina to announce the passing of a member by the playing of three chorales by the church band from the top of the church tower. So I feel I want to sing when 1 hear of such men emerging. I know it is an outward loss to us—though even directly we iTlay gain more than we lose by their joining the more active side of the communion of saints—but I keep on feeling what it must be for a man as good as he to be able to push aside this fussy veil of the body and look unblinking at the Light, never again, maybe to be distracted, unintentional, unaware, always concentrated."
These devotional essays are gathered here without any of the cutting or clipping or the critical revision which Thomas Kelly would certainly have given them had he lived. They are all written on the same theme and often develop an identical aspect, but always with some fresh illumination. Few can resist feeling the power of the current that is in this stream. They are in very truth a testament of devotion.
Haverford, Pennsylvania
April 10, 1941.
DOUGLAS V. STEERE
