Voice of the Lord: A Biography of George Fox (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Voice of the Lord: A Biography of George Fox. By Harry Emerson WUdes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1965. 473 pages. $7.50. Out of the love and patience of wide reading, Harry Emerson Wildes has made a vivid tapestry of the life of the founder of Quakerism. He writes with a lively style, devoid of specifically modern or Quaker idioms or systematic exposition . He has an eye for romantic detail and local color, for the Roman and Saxon background of Fox's Drayton, and especially for his travels in the American colonies, including the woodlands that were to become New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Though Mr. Wildes may stress some events in proportion to their drama rather than to their weight in the growth of Quakerism, the story is not limited to Fox himself. Yet the personality of Fox emerges strongly, with refreshing awareness of the shaking impact of his searching judgment of every man he met, of his selfconfidence and "calm self-assurance" (p. 26) and his trust in his own revelations. "Outwardly his manners were atrocious, but he radiated friendliness. He would not compromise with sin nor condone it . . . but he never despaired of saving the sinner" (p. 77). The perfectionism of Fox, which Wildes rightly stresses, still needs a deeper study. "In almost pathologic fear of being soiled by sinners, he evaded company, especially evil companions" (p. 52). His fear throughout his life of undertaking acts or choices involving guilt must be tied with Fox's relationship to his puritan parents. To them he must have seemed less "a bumptious boy" (p. 151) than a moody purist like the many puritan separatists of that day. We must thus beware of being misled by Fox's retrospective Journal into assuming that "fully conscious of his sinlessness ... he needed no conversion" (p. 51). I think myself that Fox's acceptance before God of "the natures of dogs, swine, vipers, of Sodom and Egypt, Cain, Esau, etc. . . . within" himself—though not as his destiny, thanks to "the infinite ocean of light and love" above this darkness (Fox, Journal, ed. John Nickalls, p. 19)—was a more crucial experience than even his discovery of Christ within to speak to his condition (ibid, p. 11). "The Lord God was a jealous God, incredibly, impossibly difficult to please" (p. 65) only to men who had not known the power of his Light, even though insoluble crises like the national chaos of 1659 prevent any assumption that "after his initial openings, Fox was never undecided, never at a loss, about a course of action" (p. 52). By equating Fox's revelations, as "fundamentalism" (p. 427), with "a Word final and unalterable" (p. 43), Wildes may be misled into too intellectual a view of Fox's Light. Quakerism was not "cerebral," nor a "message more to the brain than to the heart" (p. 221), nor did Fox stress the Bible itself as "principles and current laws . . . laid down immutably" (p. 425), so that "to entertain a wrong opinion, one hostile to Scripture, betrayed an evil heart" (p. 44). Thus Wildes also may oversimplify the identity between "being moved by the Lord" and obeying Fox's commands. Wildes never seems to me to understand the mainspring of early Quakerism, nor to grasp the meaning of Fox's message of the Light within all men for the thousands of his hearers and the hundreds of new 116 Book Reviews117 meetings which Wildes casually mentions. Even to equate it with "mysticism" (p. 224) or the religion of the Lenape Indians (p. 343) does not help enough. The trouble may arise from using what is, for a modern Pennsylvanian, an unhappy choice of sources; Wildes' bibliography includes twenty-one modern lives of Fox, besides ninety other books and a hundred articles, but no writing by early Quakers themselves apart from Fox's Journal, Besse, and Barclay. Too great reliance on the Journal has overemphasized Fox's own role, and has incidentally minimized Fox's Yorkshire mission of 1651 (with the resulting revival the following year), the Cumberland mission of 1654, and the mass meetings in Bristol of 1654-55, together with Fox's steps for organizing Monthly...