American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  Had it been solely a contest over belief, one sect of Christians would not have burned those of another sect of fellow believers in Christ at the stake. But it was a war in which political rule and religious belief were fused into a single driving passion to dominate the nation. It was a battle for authority of ecclesiastical dominance. Which church doctrine and affiliation was supreme? Which church supported the king? Which supported Parliament? All opposing views, governmental and spiritual, must be rooted out and its adherents forced to submit… or pay with their lives. It was truly a Christian jihad. Yet it differed from its Arab counterpart that had dominated the religious struggle in the Middle East for a millennium in this: The English jihad of the seventeenth century was not waged against unbelieving infidels, but against its own fellow Christians of opposing parties and sects. They called themselves Royalists and Parliamentarians. The Royalists who supported the king were primarily made up of Catholics and traditional Anglicans. The Parliamentarians were made up mostly of Puritans, both Anglican and Presbyterian, as well as those from the new Protestant, or “Dissenting,” sects.

  Unquestionably those at the forefront of the battle truly believed in the right and truth of their cause. But in taking that belief to the further supposition that they must conquer and subdue by force those, as they saw it, of false and untrue belief, they left altogether the teaching of their Master. Something is dreadfully and eternally wrong when those who may perhaps to some degree possess truth are intent upon forcing and compelling fellow believers to their side, by whatever means possible, including killing them if they do not submit… all for the sake of Christian principle. This terrible evil of Christian rising up against Christian lay at the core of English politics in the seventeenth century, and it was a great evil. It was therefore a ruthless contest fueled by a lust for power, which used the tokens of Christian doctrine as weapons to do evil rather than as principles to bring light into a world darkened by sin.

  The Reformation and its aftermath left England a confusing jumble of conflicting interests and church allegiances. The conflict was not only between Catholic and Protestant. The powerful Church of England was being split apart by Puritans, which eventually split into a half dozen or more offshoots. Out of the resulting tumultuous contest for supremacy, influence, and political control, grew what is called the English “civil war” between the years 1643 and 1689. Out of that environment of conflict, uncertainty, and religious strife, emerged a Christian people distinct in outlook from all the rest—the people who formed what they called The Society of Friends, but who came to be known simply as Quakers.

  A Vision of Light

  1647-1670

  A boy named George Fox was born in England in 1624, son of a weaver of the slowly rising working class, neither wealthy nor destitute. The Fox family were religious Puritans grown out of the Calvinist tree of the continental Reformation. Young George was a thoughtful boy, serious about spiritual things, and the desire grew within him to live his beliefs more personally. His discontent with his apprenticeship at shoemaking accompanied a discontent with the Puritanical world of his upbringing. Nothing he heard in the church of his parents satisfied the longing in his heart for a more vibrant and practical Christian faith. The Puritans may have spoken of purifying the church, but to young George Fox it remained strict, dead, lifeless, and legalistic.

  Where was a Christianity that practiced and preached and lived by the daily living reality of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Or did such a church exist at all?

  When he was nineteen, only a year after the outbreak of civil war between the king and Parliament, Fox left his home and apprenticeship and began traveling about England. His aim was to visit and question priests and ministers of various churches and from many congregations, hoping to find worthy individuals to guide him in his spiritual search. He traveled up and down England, often in great turmoil of mind, visiting churches and meetings and priests, anywhere he heard there was to be a gathering of Christian people.

  After three years, Fox came to the conclusion that no church possessed the answers, at least he found them from none of the priests of the High Church of England or preachers of Puritanism or Separatism with whom he had spoken. All he found was the same emphasis on ritual, church structure, inequality in the church boxes and benches, and legalistic adherence to what he considered dead formulas and doctrines and political alliances. Nowhere did he find men speaking of faith and obedience and practical living, only which side of the civil war they supported. Were they on the king’s side or Parliament’s side? The church in England, in all of its manifestations, had become so political at its core that nowhere could he find the principles of Scripture, only doctrines twisted to conform to one political outlook or another.

  Nor did he find sympathy with his search. Instead, he was criticized for thinking there might be more to be found outside the church walls, a more that was not political at all, but deeply and personally spiritual. Something was missing.

  Over and over again he watched as throngs of people poured into the churches of England from Sunday to Sunday—all its churches—and came out again. But were they any better off? Was their worship making them better people, better Christians? Were they becoming more loving and gracious and tolerant as a result of it? Were the teachings of their pastors and priests changing their lives? Did the people attend church because they loved God, or because church attendance was required by English law?

  Throughout England, supposedly the most civilized and progressive country on earth, those claiming to be Christians were at war with one another… and killing one another. Sunday after Sunday, throngs continued to crowd England’s churches, and pray for victory over their enemies… their Christian enemies.

  For a time he began to despair of finding the truth. He made his way in great torment of spirit. He realized at length that he had to leave the pastors and priests altogether. He must depend on God alone to show him the light he sought.

  And at last answers began to come:

  The Church he had been seeking was not to be found in any of England’s churches. The truth he hungered for did not reside in the Parliament or the monarchy, in King Charles I or in Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan commander of the Parliamentary army. The practical reality of gospel Christianity was an individual reality, not affiliation with an organizational entity, be it political or religious. In no one church, in no government, in no king, in no parliament was God to be found.

  God dwelt in men and women, not in buildings or structures or priesthoods, not in organizations or hierarchies, not in robes or liturgies or kings or parliaments. God dwelt within human hearts! Within individual human hearts… within his heart.

  Suddenly young George Fox realized that the answer had been right in front of him all along. He could go to God alone, in the depths of his own heart, and commune with him, and speak with him and pray to him and worship him, and receive answers and truth and light from him. He needed no king, no priest, no church, no parliament to stand between himself and God. Jesus had revealed God and he needed no other.

  The Christian Church of Jesus was no organizational structure at all—it was made up of individual men and women, all equal, all sharing in the same priesthood of believers.

  He wrote of his great discovery in his Journal. “As I had forsaken all the priests,” he said, “so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition,’ and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy.”1

  During the three years while he traveled and prayed and fasted and grew from nineteen to twenty-two, a slow change took place in young George Fox. His uncertainties were gradually transformed into boldness. He began to feel rising up within himself a confid
ence to speak concerning the truths that were being revealed to him.

  Rather than merely asking questions of those he met, he stirred up those with whom he spoke. He challenged his listeners to examine the foundations of their Christian beliefs to see if more and different truth might be present than they realized.

  He continued to travel and speak wherever opportunity presented itself, on street corners and in public squares, occasionally even boldly interrupting church services. His message was a simple one: True Christianity is not to be found in church at all. It is found within the human heart. Each one must turn to God within himself, waiting upon him in the silence of his or her own heart, where God will reveal truth.

  Gradually George Fox began to call this individually revealed truth the Inner Light.

  George Fox sought to live practically the new realities he was discovering. He stopped removing his hat to nobles and priests. If all men and women were equal before God, why should he exalt one above another because of birth and station? In his speech, for the same reason, he discontinued using the more formal you in dialog with the clergy and with aristocrats, in favor of the thee and thou that he used with commoners. He took to simpler, plain dress so as not to seem to exalt himself over those with less than he. And in his times of prayer, he sometimes sat for long periods in silence, waiting for God’s Spirit to speak. The forms and rituals of England’s churches became repellant to him, as distancing rather than aiding people toward an intimate experience with God in the quietness of their own hearts. Such actions quickly began to make the religious and political authorities angry. The fact that he spoke his mind made them angrier still.

  George Fox continued to travel about, even though the country was in upheaval. He was energetic and persuasive and forceful, both of appearance and personality. In 1647, though still but twenty-three years of age, he began to attract a following. He also stirred up controversy. Those of the organized church, Puritans and traditionalists, took his convictions as an affront, saying that he denied truths that had been taught by the church for years.

  In 1649, two years after the revelation of light had come to George Fox, King Charles I was tried for treason before the lower house of Parliament and executed in London. Oliver Cromwell, in virtual control of England, then took the unprecedented step of declaring an end to the English monarchy. The crown was abolished altogether. Cromwell, who claimed to believe in the equality of all men, had suddenly made himself the most equal of all. Now he ruled England in place of the king.

  That same year, Fox was imprisoned in Nottingham for interrupting a sermon with an impassioned appeal to the congregation to be guided by the Holy Spirit alone. A year after that he was imprisoned in Derby as a blasphemer. It was there, after Fox told him to “tremble before the word of God,” that Justice Gervase Bennett called Fox and his followers “Quakers.”

  But Fox continued to find a wide response to his unusual perspectives. Within a very few years, his following had become a movement. Meetings began to be held in the northeast of England, and soon others with him took to preaching Fox’s principles up and down England wherever the situation suited it, in barns and homes or at market crosses in the center of towns. Fox himself became more mystical and inward in his spiritual orientation and began writing books and pamphlets to set down the principles of his beliefs. As his following grew, his writings increased his notoriety, and the controversy of his ideas still more.

  The most well-known convert to George Fox’s new brand of Christian faith, and the one which would have the most sweeping consequences across the Atlantic on the American continent, came in one of the most respected of all England’s families, that of Admiral Sir William Penn. The conversion of the admiral’s twenty-one-year-old son caused all of London to take note of this rising new sect that had now reached into the highest levels of English society.

  Like Fox, William Penn the younger also began to write pamphlets that detailed his beliefs and brought the movement still more into the public eye. In The Sandy Foundation Shaken, his attack on what many considered the orthodox views of Christianity, in particular the trinity, were so strong that, even as the son of a nobleman, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for nine months.

  Penn’s writings from the Tower of London were forceful and unpolished. Still relatively new to his Quaker beliefs, Penn used strong language to attack what he considered the loose and unchristian lives of much of England’s clergy, not necessarily the best way to make friends. But he matured and softened in the years that followed, and continued to expand the themes begun in prison. These writings later coalesced into what became the most important of his books, No Cross, No Crown. In it he explained Quaker doctrines and practices—particularly their refusal to remove their hats in respect to the nobility, why they dressed simply, and why they addressed even those higher on the social scale with the informal thee and thou rather than the more formal term of respect you to which they were accustomed. His book provided a thorough exposition of Quaker perspective on the Christian faith. It was truly the first comprehensive book published of Quaker belief, and laid a foundation for Quakerism for generations to come. George Fox’s Journal was in circulation by this time. And in No Cross, No Crown, Penn illuminated Quakerism as an intellectually and doctrinally sound Protestant movement that was here to stay.

  While George Fox was a firebrand, William Penn was of gentler temperament, a healer and uniter and conciliator. In spite of ongoing persecutions and more imprisonments, his soft-spoken adherence to his faith, and his education and the reputation of his family, gradually over the years won him the respect and admiration of most of England’s nobility. It became obvious to all that he lived by the principles of his beliefs. No one had complaint against William Penn, and he bore his sufferings with dignity and grace. He became so highly respected, even as a member of a sect that was viewed as radical, that he spoke before Parliament on behalf of religious toleration, not only for Quakers but for all those of minority beliefs. Though the results were not immediate, his influence contributed to the Act of Toleration of 1689, which significantly reduced, though did not entirely eliminate, the religious persecution of earlier times.

  William Penn gave Quakerism a gentler face. He spoke with reason, calm, simplicity, and intelligence. He did not stir things up with fiery pronouncements of judgment like Fox, but prevailed upon reason and common sense and goodwill. He tried to bring people together in the midst of spiritual differences. His skill translated this unifying spirit of toleration to the colonial governments he helped establish. William Penn, therefore, was instrumental in launching Quakerism forward into succeeding generations. Though he was twenty years younger, William Penn truly was a cofounder with George Fox of the Quakerism that began to leave England’s shores in the 1660s and 1670s, bound for new worlds where they could put down the roots of their new faith.

  When his father died in 1670, William Penn found himself, at twenty-six years of age, the inheritor of what amounted to a fortune—£1,500 in annual income, and, more importantly, a claim upon the king of England for £16,000 which his father had loaned to Charles II during the war against the Dutch. It would be his shrewd request to the crown to repay this loan with land in America that would bring William Penn immortality as one of the most notable founding sons of the rising English colony across the Atlantic.

  The persecutions borne by their people caused many Quakers to look toward the New World as a possible avenue whereby they might escape persecutions and live in peace. All through England they were being imprisoned, impoverished by fines, and their property confiscated. But where could such a place be found? Fox and Penn had spoken together about America but there was no free land available.

  English King Charles II, on the throne after Oliver Cromwell’s death, had granted to his brother James, Duke of York all the land in America between the Connecticut River and Delaware Bay. In 1664, the duke transferred ownership of these lands to Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley, Ba
ron of Stratton as a reward for their defense of the Channel Island Jersey on behalf of his brother, the king. This vast tract of land, loosely defined, had been known as New Amsterdam when under Dutch control. It was now given the name Nova Caesarea, or New Jersey. The new owners, Berkeley and Carteret immediately began making provisions to offer parcels to immigrants by a quit-rent system similar to that which had brought the earliest settlers to Virginia.

  Two Quaker men, John Fenwicke and Edward Byllynge, instantly saw in the offer the opportunity to create a community free of oaths of allegiance to king, with no compulsory church and tithes and taxes, and no persecution. They jumped at Berkeley’s offer and purchased his entire portion for the astonishingly small sum of one thousand pounds. Byllynge brought in William Penn as clerk and trustee for his share and gave Penn major administrative control in the future of the province. Penn’s genius and foresight in democratic thinking immediately displayed itself. Under his leadership, an organization was formed to make colonization possible in the new province where Quakers would be free to practice the principles of equality, peace, and simplicity undisturbed. The company drew up a charter of government for the region called the Concessions and Agreements, and divided up the land into smaller parcels available for sale.

  Suddenly the Quaker dream of available land in the New World was possible.

  The Concessions and Agreements of the New Jersey colony, dated March 3, 1676, a monument to William Penn’s statesmanship and foresight, and a true landmark in democracy, provided that every adult male should be eligible to vote without class or religious restriction, that they should elect representatives annually by ballot to an assembly with full power to make, change, and repeal laws, that trial by jury was to be unrestricted, and that complete freedom of conscience and absolute religious toleration were to be observed and enforced.