George Fox

George Fox (born July 1624, Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicestershire, England—died January 13, 1691, London) was an English preacher and missionary and founder of the Society of Friends (or Quakers). His personal religious experience made him hostile to church conventions and established his reliance on what he saw as “inner light,” or God-given inspiration over scriptural authority or creeds. He recorded the birth of the Quaker movement in his Journal.

Early life and activities

Fox was the son of a weaver in the English village of Drayton-in-the-Clay (now Fenny Drayton), Leicestershire. Probably apprenticed for a while to a cobbler, he may also have tended sheep, but there is little evidence of any adult business occupation or of much formal education. He always seemed to have a modest amount of money. He read extensively and wrote legibly. At the age of 18 he left home in search of satisfying religious counsel or experience and later reported in his Journal various personal religious experiences or direct revelations, which he called “openings,” that corrected, in his estimation, the traditional concepts of faith and practice in English religious life.

His religious background was apparently Puritan rather than strict Anglican, but he himself reacted even further than the Puritans from the formalism and traditionalism of the established church. He placed the God-given inner light (inspiration) above creeds and Scripture and regarded personal experience as the true source of authority. In his Journal he wrote,

These things I did not see by the help of man, nor by the letter, though they are written in the letter, but I saw them in the light of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by his immediate Spirit and powers, as did the holy men of God, by whom the Holy Scriptures were written.

His negative attitude to ecclesiastical customs was matched by a similar attitude toward some political and economic conventions (e.g., oaths, titles, and military service).

He began preaching to individuals or groups as he traveled on foot, first in the Midland counties of England, then in the northern counties, where groups of Seekers (a 17th-century Puritan sect) welcomed him and his message. Local congregations were established, gathered both by Fox and by many other itinerant men and women preachers, who were called Publishers of Truth. Thus came into being in the last years of the British Commonwealth (1649–60) the Society of Friends, as it was much later called, though its members were early nicknamed Quakers.

Fox had most success in winning adherents and fellow workers in the Lake District counties of Westmorland and Lancashire and later in Yorkshire, London, and other areas. He and his associates suffered public hostility and official constraint. They offended religious leaders both religiously and politically by their contradiction of the ministers in the churches (based on Fox’s view that ministers “bred at Oxford or Cambridge” were not qualified to be spiritual leaders in the churches) and by their refusal to honour officials, to take oaths, or to pay tithes. Fox and his associates were often arrested and imprisoned. Fox, in fact, suffered eight imprisonments between 1649 and 1673.

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The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 led to special legislation against the Quakers and a widespread action against them. To meet this and other needs, George Fox encouraged local Quaker groups to organize into regular monthly and quarterly business meetings, which, with some central national meetings, became a permanent pattern of their church government. The continuing pressure was only intermittently relieved until the Toleration Act of 1689, shortly before Fox’s death, gave relief to the Quakers.

Missionary work in England and elsewhere

In 1669 Fox made a missionary visit to Ireland, and on his return he married one of his early converts, Margaret Fell, the widow of Judge Thomas Fell of Swarthmore Hall, Ulverston, Lancashire, where Fox spent parts of the following years. In the years 1671 to 1673 he traveled to the British colonies in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland, strengthening and organizing the existing Quaker communities, especially in Maryland and Rhode Island. Shorter journeys in 1677 and 1684 took him to the Netherlands and a few other parts of northern Europe. About 1675 he dictated a running summary of his life that, with supplementary material, was posthumously edited and published as his Journal. For most of the last 15 years of his life he lived as a boarder or visitor among friends in or about London, attending consultations and committees on practical questions, preaching at meetings for worship, and engaging in a wide correspondence with individual Friends or with congregations to whom he was known.

Throughout his life, Fox shared the contemporary practice of writing controversial pamphlets, scores of which were published. They dealt with social as well as theological questions but lacked stylistic attraction. Although he was quite familiar with the English Bible, he sometimes displayed a taste for subjects like history and grammar, in which he had little competence. He borrowed information occasionally from his learned friends.

Fox evidently was, as Thomas Carlyle says, a man of enormous self-confidence, one who attracted rather than repelled. A magnetic personality, he was widely respected and admired by such men as William Penn, who left in writing an appreciation of Fox that is still the best summary of his character. Fox’s own Journal is naturally not entirely objective, but with its many details it forms the fullest account of the rise of Quakerism as well as of Fox himself. It is partly due to Fox’s own sense of the historic importance of the Quaker movement that much other early written material was recorded and preserved.