Capacity," etc.[15] He says: "It is not
Opinion, or Speculation, or Notions of what is true; or Assent to or
Subscription of Articles or Propositions, tho' never so soundly worded,
that makes a Man a true Believer or a true Christian." "Phrases of
Schoolmen," "notions of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost," "conceptions of
man's meer Wit," "superfining interpretations of Scripture texts," he
declares to be very chaffy substitutes for a consciousness of Christ's
Life and Light within, conformity of mind and practice to the will of
God, and the actual formation of Christ in the inner self.[16] The
further Reformation, upon the necessity of which he insists, is one that
will take Christianity not only beyond and beneath outward ceremonies,
but beyond and beneath all formulations of creed and doctrine, and that
will ground and establish it in the experience and attitude and verifying
power of the person's life.[17] This is precisely what all these teachers
of spiritual religion have all the time been demanding.

The Quaker view of the moral and dynamic character of saving faith, the
view that justification is a vital process and not merely a forensic
scheme, is, in heart and essence, indistinguishable from the central
teaching of these spiritual predecessors of the Quakers. No Quaker has
presented this view in a more compact, and at the same time adequate way
than has Barclay in one of his {345} important early Tracts: "The manner
and way whereby Christ's righteousness and obedience, death and
sufferings, become profitable unto us and are made ours, is by receiving
Him, and becoming one with Him in our hearts, embracing and entertaining
that holy Seed, which as it is embraced and entertained, becometh a holy
birth in us~.~.~. by which the body of sin and death is done away, and we
cleansed, and washed, and purged from our sins, _not imaginarily_, but
really; and we are really and truly made righteous.~.~.~. Christ Himself
revealed in us, indwelling in us. His life and spirit covering us--that
is the ground of our justification."[18]

The root principle of Quakerism is belief in a divine Light, or Seed of
God, in the soul of man. All of the multitudinous Quaker books and
tracts bear unvarying testimony to that, and all their contemporary
accounts make that faith, that principle, their _organizing idea_. What
they all say is that there is a Light in man which shines into his
darkness, reveals his condition to him, makes him a