Through Flaming Sword: A Spiritual Biography of George Fox, and: George Fox and the Quakers (review)

54Bulletin of Friends Historical Association Ontario represented something new and different, culturally speaking, in the British Empire of post-Revolutionary times. When British emigrants arrived in Ontario directly from Britain in the early nineteenth century, they found some areas already settled by groups and dominated by farming patterns which had been shaped by life in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. The settlement of whole counties of Ontario was, in fact, marked with this Pennsylvania influence. Reaman deals with these influences in Chapter IV, "Contributions to Canadian Agriculture," and Chapter V, "Contributions to Canadian Cultural Life." He is at his best in describing the Pennsylvania elements in Ontarian agriculture — the bank barn, the Conestoga horse, crop-rotation — which made Ontarian agriculture different from British agriculture. Chapter V is concerned with religion. Here Reaman deals with Quaker patterns, normative and aberrant (including the "Children of Peace," a picture of whose curious foursquare temple is included among the illustrations). He attributes the gradual decline of Ontarian Quakerism to intermarriage with non-Quakers and more especially to conversion to Methodism — a parallel case to what happened to many of the Friends settlements in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The principal value of Reaman's book is his study of the transplantation of eighteenth-century Pennsylvanian farming culture patterns to nineteenth -century Ontario. His descriptions of pioneer life in Ontario in the early nineteenth century are noteworthy. As such the book is a contribution to the history of the Westward Movement. But while the author attempts to see the Pennsylvania migration as a unity, unfortunately he insists on the term "ethnic group" for the migrating Pennsylvanians, in which he includes both Quakers and "Germans." He even persists in thinking of the "Huguenots " as a self-conscious sub-group as part of his American-Canadian migration. For Quakers the book will not have the value that it will for those interested in the migrations of German-speaking Pennsylvanians. It will not supersede Arthur G. Dorland's History of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Canada (1927), which seems to have been Reaman's chief source for his Quaker materials. The chapter on the migration itself (Chapter III) has detailed information on individual pioneer families, county by county, which will interest Quaker genealogists. Several appendices also give genealogical information on the pioneer settlers. The University of PennsylvaniaDon Yoder Through Flaming Sword: A Spiritual Biography of George Fox. By Arthur O. Roberts. Portland, Oregon: Barclay Press. 1959. 113 pages. $3.00. George Fox and the Quakers. By Henry van Etten. Translated from the French by E. Kelvin Osborn. New York: Harper and Brothers. 1959. 191 pages. $1.35. Henry van Etten's little book is a delightful and succinct survey of Book Reviews55 Quaker history. Arthur Roberts lays much-needed stress on George Fox's challenge to perfection and to a gathered church. Thus each book fills an important niche in Quaker literature. In his first six chapters Roberts creditably traces Fox's ministry and entire career. In the highly important seventh chapter he traces the "holiness legacy of George Fox" and Fox's concept of the church through Quaker history. Christ's call to perfection and freedom from sin in this life was central to Fox's message. Roberts presents Fox's most convincing argument for it thus: "In blunt language Fox charged that the doctrine that 'people must be in sin while they be upon earth' nullifies the sacrifice of Christ; it is to 'make Christ's dying in vain and the one offering of no value, which hath perfected forever all them that are sanctified, and his blood of none effect, which cleanseth from all sin!' " From this Roberts makes a powerful plea for holiness-pacifism: a peace testimony based on the conviction that it is impossible for those whom Christ has delivered and purified to kill their brothers. Only a step from this is the author's emphatic support of Fox's view that the church can only be a gathered, holy people whom Christ has drawn to himself by his living immediate presence. In this connection Roberts ably defends the voluntarily supported pastoral system as not inconsistent with the support of public Friends in the early...