Extract from The Diary of Edward Pease
The introduction to this Victorian Diary contains the following explanation of Quakerism that is surprisingly modern. This is how it begins:
To me it appears that, in general, professors of Christianity have no realisation of the religion they profess. The religion in vogue in most Christian Churches is one that fills the soul with doubts and superstitions, false fears, false hopes, and, reduced to its naked meaning/ is so terrible that no one who really believed it and realised its meaning could spend a happy hour upon this earth. To me it seems that this kind of Christianity is losing its hold on England. To truly believe what intelligence and heart cannot respond to is an impossibility. I must have a religion, if I have any, that does not contradict what I know are the deepest, purest, and best sentiments of justice, mercy and love I find within me, and which I reverently believe are part of the Divine Spirit. I find that rather than search for the truth, or fearlessly examine the humanly devised and painted picture ofChristianity, the back is turned and the soul commanded to accept what it can only pretend to believe. This pretence is often misnamed ” faith.”
Quakerism at least divests religion from all outward and material phenomena, from all anthropomorphising of the Deity, and brings forth something more than a theory, which philosophers or ecclesiastics may gainsay, but cannot disprove, and which commends itself to the open soul as to the open mind. First, then, Quakerism does not unequivocally demand that the Christian must believe that God is a Being in the likeness of man, a gigantic Creator sitting in the skies, who once upon a time in space called into existence infinite numbers of celestial bodies just to light this infinitely little world, and then proceeded with this world s making and history as told in the Bible at His dictation and out of His ” mouth.”
It is not imperative on the Quaker to believe that God has a ” mouth ” or spoke with a ” voice,” or that He showed His ” body ” to Moses, or that He planned and fixed our individual destinies. The Quaker can, without any loosening of his faith, refuse to say ” I believe the Bible to be the Word of God,” though he could never say ” The Bible does not contain the Word of God.”* He may believe it to be written with poor human hands and by fallible men, but he will believe that his own share of the Divine Spirit within him can testify as to what is declared by the Spirit of God in the Scriptures, and that in Divine ordering the Scriptures were written for our guidance and edification, and that they contain evidence of inspiration. Quakers, however, do not limit inspiration to the writers of the Bible. I think they would claim all good words, thoughts and deeds as inspired.
