John Greenleaf Whittier the Quaker, and: James Nayler: A Fresh Approach (review)

Book Reviews John Greenleaf Whittier the Quaker. By C Marshall Taylor. Supplement No. 25 to the Journal of the Friends' Historical Society. London: Friends' Historical Society. 1954. 37 pages. 2s. 6d. (Obtainable at the Friends Book Store, 302 Arch Street, Philadelphia 6, Pennsylvania. $.65.) James Nayler: A Fresh Approach. By Geoffrey F. Nuttall. Supplement No. 26. to the Journal of the Friends' Historical Society. London: Friends' Historical Society. 1954. 20 pages. Is. 6d. (Obtainable at the Friends Book Store, 302 Arch Street, Philadelphia 6, Pennsylvania. $.35.) It has long been the happy practice of the Friends' Historical Society, our English counterpart, to publish separately, as supplements to its Journal, the more notable addresses delivered before its membership. Of the two most recently so published one is by an American Friend, a VicePresident of Friends Historical Association, an amateur (in the original and best sense of the word) in Quaker history; the other is by a professional church historian, not a Friend, but steeped as few Friends are in the literature of early Quakerism. For years G Marshall Taylor has been devotedly collecting and studying Whittieriana. One cannot live, as he has done, in close and constant association with a poet's books, letters, and manuscripts without acquiring special knowledge, special insights into his personality, his mind, his faith. Marshall Taylor has, quite naturally, had a particular interest in Whittier as a Friend and spokesman of Quakerism. In this address, delivered in London in September, 1952, he has set down his observations (with those oí other writers) on such subjects as the Quaker atmosphere of Whittier's home, his relations with English Friends (notably William Forster, Joseph Sturge, and John Bright), his attitudes towards Quakerism in both the organizational and the spiritual sense. To Whittier the agitator, the crusader against human slavery, he gives due attention, but he would have us recognize equally the poet's lifelong opposition to what he calls "credal slavery"—the slavery of the mind to "text and legend." The essence of Whittier's religion he finds in the affirmation that "Reason's voice and God's/Nature's and Duty's, never are at odds." Whereas to Rufus Jones Whittier's basic faith was the mystical belief that "God is the one absolute reality," to Marshall Taylor it was "a reasonable faith," almost, one is tempted to suggest, a Hicksite faith. He cites good evidence—some of it from hitherto unpublished materials in his own collection—to support his observations. There is a strange fascination about the career of James Nayler. Many writers have tried to "explain" him, account for his bizarre and scandalous conduct outside the Bristol gates on a certain dark rainy 116 Book Reviews117 morning in October, 1656, and his even more wondrous behavior thereafter —behavior which, fully appreciated only in our rime, has given him a secure place in the calendar of Quaker saints. To offer "a fresh approach" after three hundred years to the Nayler problem—this is no slight claim. Yet as one reads Geoffrey Nuttall's Presidential Address, delivered in October, 1953, one feels that he has amply justified the claim. Looking closely into the milieu in which Nayler moved, he has discovered a group deeply tinctured with the peculiar doctrines of Familism, especially the notions that Christ was "a Type, and but a Type," and that it was possible for a man "totally to be inhabited by Christ." This revelation throws a flood of light on Nayler's aberration, his tragic deviation from the Apostolic Christianity which the early Friends preached and lived. It gives new meaning and new drama to the Fox-Nayler conflict, the first crucial turning -point in Quaker history after Fox's Pendle Hill vision. Having set Nayler's "fall" in a new and revealing context, Dr. Nuttall turns to its sequel, shows how Nayler's developing theology reflected the lesson of his own agony and his spiritual recovery. "He had now come to grips with something which other Friends tended to overlook: the reality of evil and of sin, the continuing of temptation in the Christian's life. . . ." In Nayler's later writings, Nuttall suggests, Friends can find a salutary offset to the...