Quaker discernment. Or Is my Measure my Rule?

Egbert van Heemskerck II

      "The Papists say, Believe as the Church believes:  So likewise G. Fox; but I say, Nay, I am not to believe a thing barely because the Church believes it, but because it’s manifested in me, else I am to wait till God reveals it."

     [William Mucklow], The spirit of the hat: or, the government of the Quakers among themselves, as it hath been exercised of late years by George Fox, and other leading men, in their Monday, or Second-dayes Meeting at Devonshire-house, brought to light (London:  F. Smith, 1673), 12.
     The objection is to the departure from the radical individualism of early Quakerism, i.e. the reversion to a principle other than that of "the true Light, which lighteth every man [(i.e. individual)] that comes into the World" (20).  And so it is to a kind of hypocrisy:  "How do they build up that which they once pulled down; and do that themselves which they have condemned in others?"  "some of you [Quakers] were Judged, Condemned, and Executed, for no other Cause than the Hat [(i.e. the insistence upon the right to leave it on before men of rank)], and now they [(i.e. Fox and others)] Judge, Condemn, and Excommunicate [us] for the same [(i.e. the insistence upon the right to leave it on before God in prayer)], . . . Not that I am against this practice when required of the Lord, but against the [merely] customary use thereof" (32), as imposed, "against . . . my Conscience" (16), by "the Body the Touchstone" (18) rather than solely the Light within.  "as others before them set up the Scriptures above the Spirit, in having that to be the Tryal, Touch-stone, Standard of Doctrine Worship, and of all Spirits; so do they greatly err in setting up the Body above the Spirit, in having the Spirit tried by the Body; the one saieth, The Scripture is the Rule; but in truth, their Meanings they make the Rule:  The other saieth, The Spirit (and not the Scripture) is the Rule; but the Dictates of the Body they make the Rule.  For if I walk according to my Measure, and my Measure is my Rule, and it differs from the judgment of the Body; by their Rule I am to deny my Motion, because it answers not the mind of the Body; for they lay down this as an infallible Rule, That the Body will have a true sense, feeling, and understanding of Motions, Visions, Revelations Doctrines, &c. and therefore safest to make Her my Touch-stone in all things relating to God" (21).  And so "The same Arguments which the Pope, &c. makes use of to support himself, the Body useth; and severe judgment is denounced against him that shall speak a word against the Authority of the Body, as it is against him that shall speak against the Power and Authority of Rome" (22).  "My Friend observe; What difference is there in these things between George Fox and the Papists?  The one faith, No Liberty out of the Church; the other, No Liberty out of the Power.  Saith the Papist, What Liberty to the Sectary?  No, What Liberty to the Heretick?  No:  And George Fox saith, What Liberty to the Presbyter?  No; What Liberty to the Independent?  No; What Liberty to the Baptist?  No:  Liberty (saith he) is in the Truth" (12).  "Many of the most eminent have had potent Impulses, to give forth solid, and sound Arguments for Liberty of Conscience [in this matter], and have pleaded strongly for the same, yet George Fox was heard to say in a selected great Assembly thus, Though many Friends have writ for Liberty of Conscience, I never lik’d the word, it is not a good word.  No Liberty to the Presbyterians, no Liberty to the Papists, no Liberty to the Independents, no Liberty to the Baptists, &c.  Liberty is to be only in the Truth, and, saith he, no Liberty out of the Power" (41).
     No, "the Unity that the Lord approves of, is for every one to act according to his measure and growth in the Truth" (11).

     "Thus, whilst the earliest Quakers characterized disobedience to the Light as the archetypal sin (and obedience as the sole path to salvation) their successors envisaged a similar obligation to the community itself. Again, this reinforced the notion that Quakers viewed the movement as a Church not only in a mystical sense (that is, as Christ’s body) but an institutional sense, and, therefore, that the emerging organizational machinery of the movement had the authority to demand compliance" (Madeleine Pennington, Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 34, italics mine).