George Fox

George Fox (born 1624), the founder of the Quaker movement, was the son of a Leicestershire weaver and was apprenticed to a shoemaker and wool dealer. His "Journal," first published in 1694 after his death, ranks among the great religious autobiographies of the world.

He believed in the following principles (taken from Gordon Browne's "Introducing Quakers"):

• that God is directly accessible to all persons without the need of a intermediary priest or ritual;
  
  
• that there is in all persons an in-dwelling Seed or Christ or Light (he used all those metaphores) which is of God and which, if they will but heed it, will guide them and shape their lives in accordance with the will of God;
  
  
• that true religion cannot be learned from books or set prayers, words, or rituals, which Fox called "empty forms," but comes only from direct experience of God, known through the Seed or Christ, or Light within;
  
  
• that the Scriptures can be understood only as one enters into the Spirit which gave them forth;
  
  
• that there is an ocean of darkness and death - of sin and misery - over the world but also an ocean of light and love, which flows over the ocean of darkness, revealing the infinite love of God;
  
  
• that the power and love of God are over all, erasing the artificial division between the secular and religious so that all of life, when lived in the Spirit, becomes sacramental. The traditional outward sacraments, again characturized as empty forms, are to be discarded in favor of the spirit reality they symbolize.

This page created by Philip M. Garboden