E BASIS OF FRIENDS WORSHIP AND OTHER INWARD PRACTICES

Some people believe that whereas God's nature is divine, man's nature is
depraved. God is good, but men are evil. God, according to this view,
exists in heaven, remote from us. We exist in sin, remote from Him, in
hell or next door to it. Human beings are completely separated from the
Divine Being. The only possible connection between men and God is that
brought about by the mediation of the church and its authorized
officials. Friends have never held this view.

Friends, beginning with George Fox, realized that something of God
dwells _within_ each and every human being, and that, therefore, He is
reachable by us through direct contact, and we are within His reach,
subject to His immediate influence. This is the well-known basis of
Friends worship.

Since God is within us, Friends turn inward to find Him. This is not a
matter of choice or inclination; it is a matter of necessity. Turning
inward, we turn away from all externals. Friends practice inwardness.
Rufus Jones writes, "The religion of the Quaker is primarily concerned
with the culture and development of the inward life and with direct
correspondence with God."

Some number of Friends in the early days of the movement not only sought
God but found him, though it would perhaps be better to say were found
by him. It was because they found God that they had such living worship,
such vital meetings. It was because they truly worshiped and had vital
meetings that they progressively discovered God and came increasingly
within his power. The one led to the other. Without the one we cannot
have the other.

That there is that of God in every man was, as already implied, more
than a belief or a concept with the early Friends. It was an
experience. It was a recovery of the living Deity. As he made and
continued to make this recovery in himself, George Fox went about his
apostolic work and laid the foundation of what came to be the Society of
Friends. What did Fox aim for? How did he regard his ministry? Let him
answer in his own words. "I exhorted the people to come off from all
these things (from churches, temples, priests, tithes, argumentation,
external ceremonies and dead traditions), and directed them to the
spirit and grace of God in themselves, and to the light of Jesus in
their own hearts, that they might come to know Christ, their free
Teacher."

Pointing as they do to the basis of Friends worship, th