Excerpt from Religious Views of the Society of Friends
What, then, was the Truth which in 1650 George Fox was declaring? It was that which Jesus signified in his declaration to the woman of Samaria, by the brink of Jacob’s well: God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The young preacher called his hearers to a spiritual knowledge of God, and to a real life of religion. He denounced, there fore, the outward, and summoned to the inward. He tes tified against form, in order that substance might be pos sessed and enjoyed. William Penn says of the early Friends: They were directed to the light of Jesus Christ Within them, as the seed and leaven of the Kingdom of God; near all, because in all, and God’s talent to all. A faithful and true witness and just monitor in every bosom. The gift and grace of God to life and salvation, that ap pears to all, though few regard it.
Such a conception of. Truth is simple, but it is far reaching. Thrown into the crucible with this powerful sol vent, much that was thought and still is thought essential in the systems of religion is consumed. For if religion is simple, and not complex; if it is a practical work, and not a formula of doctrine, or program of ritual; if we may neglect pope and presbyter, and turn away from cloister and cathedral, to hear the voice of God within our own souls, a great structure, dogmatic, ecclesiastical, ceremonial, reared by the hand of man, partly in_ pride, yet much more in pious sincerity, must decay and disappear.
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