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CHAPTER 1 "To Wait Upon The Lord"
In Oliver Cromwell's England during the Puritan
Revolution, in the years 1652-56, a religious movement began which was different
from any that had preceded it. Small groups of men and women gathered in town
and country homes and sat together in silence "to wait upon the
Lord." In their countenances and bearing there was awe and reverence, as
if they were gathered, not in a simple living room, but in a holy tem le.
Expectancy pervaded the group like that felt by those who await the coming of
a great person or the occurrence of an important event, yet it was obvious from
the expression of their faces that.attention was directed not without
but within. -Some heads were bowed in wordless prayer, others uplifted
as if gazing at supernal light. At times, unpredictably, the silence was broken
by a voice pleading for submission to the divine Will or by words of supplication
to God.
In these first Quaker meetings new life was stirring; new, yet as old as
mankind, releasing power which was again to challenge conventional forms of
life and thought. Beginning in the northwest of
England on the fells and in the dales of Westmorland and Lancashire, the
movement spread to London and the south. To hundreds of towns and villages the
Quaker message came with a double impact. By some it was embraced with
unbounded fervor as the way to God and His Kingdom; by others it was dreaded
and feared as an evil capable of overthrowing all established order and
belief. Those "who embraced the Truth for the love of it"
found themselves possessed of a spiritual vitality and 'holy which sent
them to all accessible lands to tell others of their great discovery and to
endure, with inward serenity and peace, years of relentless and cruel
persecution.
2
This
new outburst of spiritual power, which sometimes caused its possessors
to tremble with fervor,
was labeled "Quaker" by its opponents, though its adherents called
themselves "people of
God" or "children of the Light" (I Thess. 5:5, Eph. 5:8),
or "Friends"
(John 15:15) and eventually the Society of Friends. At first there was no
desire to organize a new sect,
but only to tell others of what they themselves had found. This they called "the
Truth" and truth is beyond and above all sects and opinions. This Truth
was not so much a new doctrine as a new life. It gave a feeling of heightened power and insight, an
uplift of the soul to a higher existence, which in some mysterious way was
generated in the group waiting in silence upon the Lord.
Though
there had never before been anything just like a Quaker meeting for worship,
there was nothing new about the feeling of strength resulting from time
spent in the divine Presence. The pihets óf lsrael and the
writers of Psalms were well aware of it. "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their
strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles" (Isa. 40:31). "I
waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me and heard my cry. He brought
me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a
rock" (Ps. 40:1, 2). "Wait on the Lord . . . and he shall
strengthen thine heart" (Ps. 27:14). The book of Psalms is a
collection of hymns which give expression to the feelings and aspirations of
worshipers waiting in the
Presence of the Lord in the temple at Jerusalem." It was only
there, according to the book of Deuteronomy, that God could be worshiped. When
the Jews migrated to other parts of the world, synagogue worship was
substituted for temple worship. In the synagogue God was talked about and
prayers were addressed to Him. The ancient scrolls were read telling of what God
had once said through his prophets, but there was no longer the same intimate sense of His living
Presence on the Mercy Seat. Protestant worship, as compared with
Catholic worship or Quaker worship, is more like that of the synagogue than
that of the temple.
Emergence
of life and power in the worshiping group, giving rise to a sense of
what the Psalmist calls being "lifted up," is a phenomenon
particularly characteristic of early Christianity. In
3
Christianity the
exaltation was first experienced at Pentecost, possibly in the temple. The
Disciples, being all of them Jews, naturally assumed that the Presence of God
was there. The first
Christian century affords many records of the descent of the Spirit on
worshiping groups meeting in Christian homes. On an occasion described
in the Acts of the Apostles, "the
place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled
with the Holy Spirit" (4:31).° This descent of the Spirit to create a living unity
between God and man, and man and man, was the most important, the
unique feature in early Christian history. Without this, Christianity might
never have become a world religion. This Spirit which the early Friends, like
the early Christians, sometimes thought of as the living Christ,
brought life and power to the group as a soul gives life and power to a
body, to use Paul's favorite figure. Sometimes Paul used another image and
spoke of the little gathering of worshipers in the home as growing "into a
holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling
place of God in the Spirit" (Eph.2:21, 22).
The
saying in Matthew, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I
in the midst of them" (18:20), might never have become part of the Gospel
canon had it not described a central fact of early Christian experience
When Christian worship lost its spontaneity, and became - organized and
mechanized, with human leadership more apparent than divine leadership, this living
presence in the midst was no longer felt so strongly, although by a
priestly miracle it could still be realized on the altar.
Catholic
worship is
a form of temple worship in the sense that Divinity is felt to be
present at a particular time and place. At the elevation of the Host, when the
miracle of transubstantiation is completed and the bread and wine transformed
into the body and blood of Christ, there is a brief period of silent waiting,
the only conduct appropriate in the very presence of the Divine. For the same
reason the Reserved Sacrament is worshiped in silence.
All quotations from the New Testament are taken from the Revised
Standard Version, copyrighted, 1946, by the International Council of
Religious Education.
4 Catholic worship resembles Quaker worship in this fact that Divinity is felt to be present.
Such
a group mysticism as Quakerism is different from the solitary seeking cultivated by many of the great
Catholic con-templatives. Medieval Christian mystics for the most part
followed Plotinus in thinking of the approach to God as "the Right of the
alone to the Alone." Lonely seekers for God were more at home in a
monastic cell than in the toil and struggle of family or business life. Their aspirations are directed
toward 'God alone, rather than toward man. The mysticism of the Quakers is directed both toward
God and toward the group.
The vertical relation to God and the horizontal relation to man are like two
co-ordinates used to plot a curve; without both the position of the curve could
not be determined.
The
Catholic Church retained the ancient Christian doctrine of the Church as the Body of
Christ. This meant that Christ's saving grave was inherent in the church and could be disseminated through the sacraments. The Church felt that
power was committed to it to save sinners. Because this power was abused and
commercialized, Protestants arose and denied it to- the Church, holding that
salvation was a transaction between man and God alone.
There
was much in early Protestantism which upheld a religion based on the Spirit
within, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the early vitality had
somewhat ebbed-.,God, according to Protestantism, had withdrawn from His world,
leaving the Holy Book to explain His plan of salvation and the Holy Spirit to
interpret the Book.
The
Christian Church again tended to become dry and formal. Its leaders were more
interested in politics than in religion. The time was ripe for rediscovery of the divine
Presence in the midst of the worshiping group and the advent of a
religion which satisfied man's longing to go beyond words about God, to God
Himself.
The
heart and soul of Quakerism as it first appeared in England is not so clearly revealed in
the vast sum of pamphlets and books written to convince the unconvinced or to
defend Quaker principles against attacks by opponents,2 as in what
the Quakers wrote for one another, particularly their letters and
autobiographies. These express a spontaneous upspringing of feeling and thought out of the living
heart of the movement—flashes of insight rather, than of argument.
The collection of documents issued under the title First Publishers of
Truth, to which reference will frequently be made,
gives a graphic account by eye witnesses of the way in which the Truth was
first proclaimed in England in the various communities where regular Friends
meetings became established.
At the time when the early participants in the movement were beginning to pass from the scene, the Yearly Meeting, the central executive body of the Society of Friends, asked each Quaker meeting to send up to London a report of the way in which Truth first came to that community. Meetings were slow to respond some reporting as much as thirty years later, in 1720.
These reports remained
unused and almost forgotten until 1907, when they were printed in all
their quaint simplicity and sometimes crude but forceful expression. In the
following quotations the spelling is modernized.
Thomas
Stacy, Thomas Stubbs and several more. . . first published the Truth in Upper
Side . . . and some soon after convinced met together, when but five or six in
number, to wait upon God
in silence and the Lord blessed us with his presence and gave us
the spirit of discerning.' -
By
this time we were pretty many gathered in this place (Cornwall) to sit down in
silence and wait upon the Lord and we had many good and comfortable seasons and
meetings at this time where we felt the alone Teacher nigh us administering to
our spiritual wants.4
And
John Wilkinson, staying some days with us, advised to settle a meeting, though
there was none to speak words, to wait upon the Lord, which was done and for a
time kept in Christopher Story's house in an upper room until it was too
little.5
As
Friends thus were diligent
in the inward exercise of true silence, the Lord was pleased in
his own time to fill the hearts of many as with new wine, insomuch that several Friends could not
contain but spoke forth a few words that their spirits might be eased.
Great was the tenderness and brokenness of heart in those days for the Lord
was witnessed to be near at hand by his living presence from whence refreshment
comes.
-
6
They [William Caton and John Stubbs, preaching in Kent] sought to settle
and establish meetings and to bring them that were convinced to assemble and
sit together to wait upon the Lord in silence, in the measure of that
Light of Life in themselves which they turned them unto to the end that they,
might come gradually to feel, possess and enjoy the living substance of what
they had long professed.7
These
passages, written by persons who had witnessed that which they were
writing about, describe in the simplest possible terms the essence of the
Quaker exercise of religion. This was the source from which
came all activity, whether in preaching the Truth or engaging in social
service. The small group which met in silence to "wait upon the Lord"
was the dynamo which generated light and power in
the Quaker movement. Like a dynamo, this generator drew on Power beyond
itself.
When these meetings became large
and more dependent on preaching and human leadership, the generator
degenerated, the light was dimmed and the power weakened. "Friends grew as the Garden
of the Lord," writes one eyewitness," but this very growth re•-suited
in a new dangers
Large meetings have an important and indispensable function of their own, but they
are not so likely to "grow into a temple of the living God" as are smaller,
more
intimate gatherings.
Writers of Friends Journals often
describe meetings in which they participated in a way to refiect the fervor and power was often
realized in them. For example, Richard Davies has this to say of a meeting in
1657:
Though it was silent from words, yet the Word of the Lord God was
among us; it was as a hammer and a fire; it was sharper than any two-edged sword;
it pierced through our inwarparts; it melted and 'brought us into tears that
there was scarcely a dry eye among us. The Lord's blessed power overshadowed
our meeting and I could have said that God alone was Master of that assembly.'
We
find the following account by Thomas Story of a meeting held in a ship's cabin:
And being together in the great cabin, the good presence of the Lord
commanded deep and inward silence
before Hipand the Comforter of the Just broke in upon us by His irresistible
power, and
[7] greatly tendered us together in His heavenly love, whereby we were melted into many tears. Glorious was this appearance to the humbling of us all, and admiration (astonishment) of some there who did not understand it.10
The
following passage describes a meeting in a Boston jail held by the prisoners
with two Friends, Robinson and Stephenson, who were to be executed on the
following day:
During this time though the hearts of the ignorant were hardened against
us to shut us up in a dark, solitary place, we sat together, waiting upon the
Lord.... and this was a time of love for as the world hated us and despitefully
used us, so the Lord was pleased in a wonderful manner to manifest, his
supporting love and kindness to us in our innocent suffering. And especially
the two worthies who had now nearly finished their course. .. . many sweet and
heavenly sayings they gave us, being themselves filled with comfort."'
In
the First Publishers of Truth the names of two hundred and five men and
women are recorded "who first raised the witness of God" in
some particular place. Among those who became Friends, whose names are
mentioned in this book, fifty-six different callings are represented. Twelve
are former justices of the peace and nine had been ordained ministers.
"Many shepherds and husbandmen came out of the north," says a writer
from London. Among them
George Fox emerged as the organizing genius of the movement. He was the
greatest "public Friend," ..a title given to those who went about
preaching to any who would listen in market place, farmhouse, tavern, on dale
or moor, often in a church
after the sermon. Sometimes
they interrupted the minister and were violently dealt with by the
congregation. When they succeeded in convincing hearers, they
sent them to a silent meeting in the neighborhood, or, if none existed, they
brought them together to form such a meeting. Convincement was only the
first stage. Conversion, or change of character, often required a long,
slow struggle, worked out in the silence of the meeting for worship. By inward discipline the human will
was gradually humbled and brought into submission to the will of God.
Meetings held by public Friends occasionally consisted of thousands of
hearers. They were called "threshing meetings" because the
[8] speaker endeavored to separate the wheat in his audience from the chaff. Sometimes this exercise was described as ploughing, which meant that the hard ground was broken up that the divine Seed within might grow. Howgill and Burrough, two of the greatest of the public Friends, write to Margaret Fell, mistress of Swarthmore Hall:
George
[Fox] was that day in private with Friends; and we two were in the general
meeting place among the rude world, threshing and plowing.12
"Thresh
out the corn," writes Fox to Howgill and Burrough, "that the Wind may
scatter the Chaff, that the corn may be gathered into the Barn."13 The "Barn" was the
meeting for worship to which the threshing meeting served as an invitation. The public work of these Friends was important
as the first stage in the history of many Friends meetings. The meeting
for worship was less spectacular, but it contained the real life and power of
the movement. A public
Friend would retire exhausted by his ministry to a silent meeting to become
recharged for further service.
Howgill
and Burrough describe their work in London in these terms:
We have thus
ordered it since we came, we get Friends on the First days to meet
together in several places out of the rude multitude and we two go to the great
meeting place which will hold a thousand. people, which is always nearly
filled., to thresh among the world; and we stay till twelve
or one o'clock, and then pass away, the one to one place and the other to
another place, where Friends are met in private; and stay till four or five
o'clock.14
George Fox, at the age of
twenty-eight, after four years of searching, five years of preaching and two
imprisonments, came to the northwest of England where he convinced large
numbers and initiated Quakerism as a movement. His visit to Preston Patrick in
Westmorland is described in these words by an eye witness:
John Audland would have had George [Fox] to have gone Into the place or
pew where usually he and the preacher did sit, but he refused [9->] and took
a back seat near the door, and John Camm sat down by him, where he sat silent
waiting upon God about half an hour, in which time of silence Francis Howgill seemed uneasy
and pulled out his Bible, and opened it and stood up several times,
sitting down again and closing his book, a dread and fear being upon him yet he
dared not begin to preach. After the said silence nd waiting, George
stood up in the mighty power of God and in the demonstration thereof was his
mouth opened to- preach Christ Jesus, the Light of Life and.
the way to God, and Saviour of all that believe and obey him, which was
delivered in 'that power `and Authority that most of auditory
which were several hundreds, were effectually reached to the heart, and
convinced of the truth that very day, for it was the day of God's power.
A notable day, indeed, never to be forgotten by me, Thomas Camm, who,
with some other brethren, by the Quarterly Meeting is appointed to collect the
matters herein mentioned, I being then present at that meeting, a school boy
but about 12 years of age, yet, I bless the Lord for his mercy, then
religiously inclined, and do still remember that blessed and glorious day, in
which my soul, by that living Testimony then borne in the demonstration of
God's power was effectually,,, opened reached and convinced with many more, who
are seals of that powerful ministry that attended this faithful servant of the
Lord Jesus Christ, and by which we were convinced and turned from darkness to Tight
and from Satan's power to the power of God.15
This
congregation was ripe for Fox's message. They were an unorganized, fluid group of Seekers,
persons who had departed from all established forms to seek for something
better. Sometimes these
Seeker congregations had already discovered the value of waiting on the Lord
in silence. For them the step into Quakerism was a short one, as is
shown by the experience of the group at Wigton:
About the year 1658, a few people were gathered together from the public
worship of the nation and oftentimes sat together in silence. Some of the
persons that were so separated were William Pearson and his wife, James
Adamson, Senior, John Seanhouse, in whose hearts the Lord raised good desires
after himself.
About which time, it pleased the Lord to send his faithful
servants, George Fox, William Dewsbury, James Lancaster and Robert Withers, who
came to the house of William Pearson's (of Tinwhate, near [10->] Wigton), whose heart the Lord had
opened to receive these messengers of God into his house where they had a
meeting with these separated people, who were by them turned to Christ their
teacher and lived and died in the faith.'6
A similar group met at Ross:
In the beginning of the twelfth month, in the year 1655, Thomas Goodayer, a
yeoman inhabiting in Yorkshire, and George Scaff came afoot to Ross on a week
day to James Merrick's house, a tanner, where they were first received; where,
after a little stay, they went to the steeple house, where a great many people
were met together (they having notice of the above friends coming), many of whom were desirous and
in expectation to hear Truth declared, who had for some time before
separated themselves from the public worship of the world, who did see the end
of the priests' teachings, who did often before meet together by themselves and
would many times sit in silence, and no particular person appointed to speak or
preach among them, but each of them did speak by way of exhortation as had freedom,
so that the Lordjpwer was mightily at
work in their hears and -great openings there were among 'them.'17
These were Quakers before the rise of the Society
of Friends.
The same phenomenon appeared in New England.18 A number of Quaker
autobiographies indicate that the writers had reached what was essentially the
Quaker position independently
The extreme simplicity of this act of waiting upon the Lord
reduces worship to its essential universal elements, stripped of all
accidental additions.
This was the logical fruition of a historical evolution. From the days of
Henry VIII the Bible was becoming increasingly known in England. By the time of
the revolution under Cromwell it was so widely committed to memory that long
passages could be quoted as authority by almost any religiously minded person. When, because of this
familiarity with the New Testament, the Christianity of the time could be
compared with the Christianity of the first century, a number of radical
differences were noted. It was obvious that much had been added in the
course of Christian history which was not there in the beginning. It was
assumed, moreover, that at the outset Christianity existed in its purest form. The Puritans set out to
"purify" the inherited religion of extraneous elements [11] which
had been added in the course of its history, but there was a wide difference of
opinion as to how far such purification could or should be carried.
The first Puritans subtracted the Pope, the Mass, images and five of the seven
sacraments, thus creating the Church of England.
Presbyterianism, which was the second wave of
Puritanism, originating in Calvin, subtracted the rule of bishops and
substituted the authority of presb ers or elders. For this they found soun.
prec • ent in 'e New Testament. Then came the more radical Independents or Congregationalists,
who subtracted the centralized form of church government which had
not existed in New Testament times and substituted a decentralized and more
democratic procedure. The Baptists were still more radical. They
subtracted infant baptism and made church membership dependent on conversion and the gift of the
Spirit as described in the New Testament. Finally arose the Quakers.
They subtracted all ritual,
all programmed arrangement in worship and the professional ministry, allowing
for no outward expression except the prophetic voice which had been heard
in the New Testament Church at the
beginning. They endowed no
'officials with religious or administrative duties. Worship and
administration were considered the responsibility of the local group or meeting
as a whole. Elders and overseers, it is true, existed in the primitive
church and the Quakers eventually made use of both. They exercised an advisory function, not over the meeting, but under it as the instruments of its will.
This
account of the progressive "purification" of the historic church in
England is too brief to be accurate, but it suggests in general terms the main
direction of the current
of change which eventually produced Quakerism. This was a movement from
a conservative religious right toward a radical religious left,
whose stages can be labeled Catholicism, Anglicanism, Presbytelianism,
Congregationalism, the Baptists and the Quakers. This movement in all
its stages produced fundamental changes which extended from religion into politics, science, literature
and every phase of life.
Quakerism
was, however, one step
removed, from the most extreme form of seventeenth-century religious
radicalism. Furthest to the left was the tendency called
"Ranterism" or "antinomianism." [12] Today's label would be
"anarchism." A
movement like Quakerism, depending in its worship on pure inwardness, would
inevitably tend to become anarchistic in the absence of all outward rules and
restraints. But the meeting for worship, free as it was from outward
form, was by no means the whole structure of Quakerism. The steps by which the Society of Friends avoided anarchism
constitute the most critical process in its early history.
Quaker
journals,
or autobiographies, of the initial period show that
some converts went through all the stages in moving from the Catholic right and
proceeding through Presbyterianism, Independency, the Baptist or some
Anabaptist sect and finally finding rest in Quakerism.
One
example will suffice. John Gratton (1641-1712) records the stages in his Journal:
I cried unto the Lord that he would tell me what he would have me do,
and that he would shew me, who were his people that worshipped him aright.19
I was not satisfied with their doctrine of election and reprobation
which put me into deep trouble.2°
When the people sang Psalms in the steeple-house I durst not sing the
same lines or sayings of David, it would have been a lie in my mouth.21
The Presbyterian priests, whom I had so much esteemed and admired, made
their farewell sermons and left
us (at the command of the government at the Restoration). . . . They
ought not to be silent at man's command if the Lord had sent and commanded them
to preach. . . . So I left them.22
The Episcopalian Priests came in their white surplices and read
common-prayers. . . . I saw they had the form without the power... their
worship to be in ceremony and outward things without life. 23
I went to Chesterfield to seek out and meet those people called Independents
for I liked the name, seeing nothing at all in man as man to depend on, but they depended only upon the
death and sufferings of Christ in his own body and did not come to see him nor
his appearance in themselves to be their life, so they were dead pro‑[13]fessors
and dry trees not bringing forth fruit, for I read the Scripture and saw
"if any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his."
I found a people called Anabaptists. . . . I thought they came nearest
the Scriptures of any I had yet tried. . . . After they came out of the water . . . I saw no
appearance of the spirit of newness of life or power.. . their baptism being
only with water which can only wash away the filth of the flesh.25
After trying out a
strange sect called Muggletonians, he writes:
After some time I heard of a [Friends] meeting at Exton at one widow
Farney's house. I went to it and found divers Friends were come many miles; and
when I came I was confirmed that they were in that truth whereof I had been
convinced, though they were so much derided by the world.
There was little said in that meeting but I sat still in it, and was
bowed in spirit before the Lord, and felt him with me and with Friends, and saw
that they had their minds retired, and waited to feel his presence and power to
operate in their hearts and that they were spiritual worshipers who worship God
in Spirit and in truth and I was sensible that they felt and tasted of the
Lord's goodness as at that time I did, and though few words were spoken, yet I
was well satisfied with the meeting. And there arose a sweet melody that went
through the meeting and the presence of the Lord was in the midst of us and
more true comfort, refreshment and satisfaction did I meet with from the Lord
in that meeting than ever I had in any meeting in all my life before.
This ended John Gratton's long
search. He had come to his religious position independently, except for the
Scriptures. He, knew exactly what
he was looking for before he found it. He was first drawn to the Quakers by
hearing that they were holding
their meetings openly, in spite of the Conventicle Act which forbade all
religious worship except that of the Established Church of England, while other
sects were meeting in secret.
These people were despised, persecuted and suffered deeply beyond
others, for others could flee from sufferings and conform a little sometimes;
but these abode and stood though the winds blew, and the rains fell and the
floods beat upon them.27
[14] The Quakers, when he found them, had little more
to teach him regarding the inward Christ whom he had himself already
found. But there was a
vital difference between the lonely listener to the divine voice within
and the member of a gathered meeting into which there flowed through many
separate channels the converging currents of spiritual life. The story
of John Grat-ton runs parallel to that of many others who joined the new
movement. For them Quakerism added something new. whereas Puritanism had
resulted largely from a process of subtraction. This new element was a
doctrine about an experience of the one root out of which all
else grew.
The energizing Center of the whole movement
was the Inward 'Light, the Inward Christ, that of God in every man, the
Power of God, the Witness of God, the Seed of the Kingdom, the pure Wisdom
which is from above (James 3:17)
The Society of Friends escaped
anarchism because its members realized that this Light was a supraindividual
Light, which created peace and unity amon all persons who
responded to it or "answered it in one another," to use an expression
which often appears in George Fox's letters. It was this doctrine of the Light as the
unifying principle which made Quakerism something more than just
another protesting sect which carried the Protestant principle of individuality
and private judgment further than its predecessors had done. The presence of
the Light of Christ enabled
the meeting to become the Body of Christ—a principle in essence closer
to Catholic than to Protestant doctrine.
CHAPTER 2 The Light Within as Experienced
When a so-called
"public Friend" stood up to convince hi hearers of the Truth, his
objective was to persuade them to wail upon the Lord, to experience directly I
and immediately the life and power of God brought to bear upon their souls.
This was the objective of the Friends meeting for worship to which he directed
his hearers. The speaker pointed out the emptiness of outward forms, rituals,
creeds, hymns, sacred books and sermons when they were not immediate and
sincere embodiments of an inward spirit. These forms, when prescribed in
advance and independent of the inward spirit, become a second-hand religion,
that is, a religion based on the experience of others. An example of t1i
.e
öFpreathing which created" the Society of Friends is found in Margaret Fell's
account of her convincement by George Fox who came to the church which she was
attending:
The
next day being a lecture, or a fast-day, he [Fox] went to Ulver-stone
steeple-house, but came not in till people were gathered; I and my children had
been a long time there before. And when they were singing before the sermon, he
came in; and when they had don singing, he stood up upon a seat or form, and
desired that he migh have liberty to speak; and he that was in the pulpit said he might. An the
first words that he spoke were as followeth: "He is not a Jew that i one
outward; neither is that circumcision which is outward; but he is: Jew that is
one inward; and that is circumcision which is of the heart. And so he went on,
and said, how that Christ was the Light of th world, and lighteth every man
that cometh into the world;
and tha by this light they might be gathered to God, &c. I stood up in m'
pew and wondered at his doctrine; for I had never heard such before And then he
went on, and opened the Scriptures, and said, "th Scriptures were the
prophets' words, and Christ's and the apostle:
15
