xpanding through
the ages under the guidance of the ever-present Spirit; and they esteemed
but lightly the established Churches which seemed to them formed not
after the pattern in the mount but after very earthly and political
models. Challenging, as they did, the formulated doctrines of the
Reformation, the type of Church which was being substituted for the Roman
Catholic Church, and the entire body of ceremonial and sacramental
practices which were being put in place of the ancient sacraments of the
Church, these "prophets" found themselves compelled to discover the
foundations {337} for a new type of Church altogether, and to feel their
way down to a new and fundamental basis of religious authority. That
would be a momentous task for any age, or for any spiritual leaders, and
we must not demand the impossible of these sixteenth century
pathbreakers. What they did do consistently and well was to proclaim the
spiritual character of God as revealed in Christ, the native capacity of
the human soul for God, the intimate and inherent relationship of the
divine and human, the progressive revelation of God in history, the
priority of the inward Word, the august ethical aspect which must attach
to any religion adequate for the growing race, and the folly of losing
the heart and spirit of Christianity in contentions over external,
temporal, and pictorial features of it.

They themselves were not founders of sects or churches. Their sole
mission was the propagation of a message, of a body of truth and of
spiritual ideals. They were from the nature of the case destined to be
voices crying in a wilderness-world, and they were obliged to trust their
precious cause to the contagion of their word and life and truth. The
Quakers of the seventeenth century are obviously one of the great
historical results of this slowly maturing spiritual movement, and they
first gave the unorganized and inarticulate movement a concrete body and
organism to express itself through. The modern student, who goes to the
original expositions of Quakerism to find what the leaders of this
movement conceived their message and their mission to be, quickly
discovers that they were not radical innovators setting forth novel and
strange ideas, but that they were on the contrary the bearers, the
interpreters, the living embodiment of ideas which have now become
familiar to the reader of these chapters.

No one has given us a clearer statement of George Fo