9 July: Boreham on George Fox

A Suit of Leather
It is interesting to recall that it was on July 9 about three centuries ago that one of the most arresting and picturesque figures in our British annals said farewell to his parents, left his home, and inaugurated his extraordinary career. George Fox, a shoemaker who, with his hammer, beat centuries into shape, always regarded the ninth of July as the most memorable date in his eventful life, "Perhaps," says Carlyle, in his "Sartor Resartus," "perhaps the most remarkable incident in modern history is not the Diet of Worms, still less the battle of Austerlitz, the battle of Waterloo, or any other battle, but an incident passed carelessly over by most historians and treated with some degree of ridicule by others. That crucial and creative incident is the action of George Fox in making for himself a suit of leather." Fox was in his early twenties when Charles I was led to the scaffold. He realised that new ideas were stirring; the world was being reconditioned; he resolved to take a hand in moulding its destinies.

It is the supreme glory of George Fox that, no great thinker, he set brilliant brains thinking; no great theologian, he inspired the ablest ecclesiastics with new ideas; no great philosopher, he blazed a trail along which the mightiest metaphysicians followed; and, no great orator, he moved a thousand golden tongues to eloquent and impassioned utterance. Men like Cromwell found it difficult to understand his quaint speech and apparently eccentric behaviour, but they liked him, felt the force of his tremendous sincerity, were guided by his sound commonsense, and, on taking farewell of him, begged him to return.

One Of History's Strange Adventures
Although George Fox is usually regarded as the founder of the Quakers, he had no more idea than had John Wesley or the Countess of Huntingdon of starting a new sect. He realised that, in a critical hour, English thought was a welter of confusion. All men were groping in the dark. They were like so many builders setting out to erect houses with no clear plans to guide them. As young Fox tacked away at his shoes, his sense of the nation's need became an intolerable obsession with him. It was not that he had something to say that his countrymen needed to hear; it was that both he and his fellow-citizens desperately required some word of guidance that nobody seemed able to speak. Men saw George Fox sitting among his tanned hides, his pastehorns, his rosin, and his well-worn tools; but they did not realise that the little shoe shop was a temple of immensity, as sacred as any shrine from which dynamic influences would radiate to every corner of the earth. Yet, great as was the shoe shop, the greatest day in its history was the day on which he left it.

"Why," he asked himself, on that ninth of July, "why should I be imprisoned here among my straps, my tatters, and my tag rags? What binds me to my bench? The need of money? For shame! Will all the shoe wages under the moon ferry me to that far Land of Light for which I sigh? I will to the woods! A hollow tree will lodge me; wild berries feed me; and, for clothes, can I not stitch for myself a perennial suit of leather?" And thus, like a navigator pushing out into unknown seas in search of unknown lands, George Fox left everything that was dear to him in order that he might search untrammelled for that Land of Light on which his heart was so set. And, in Carlyle's judgment, nothing greater ever happened.

A Pioneer Of Social Reform
Like a new Socrates, Fox went everywhere asking questions. His leather breeches, Macaulay says, were the talk of every countryside. On village greens, in taverns and in chimney corners, it was rumoured that the Man in Leather Breeches was coming. Yet, Carlyle and Macaulay notwithstanding, the leather breeches that Fox wore were of far less moment than the hollow tree in which he lived. For it was whilst hiding in that hollow tree that he caught the first clear glimpse of that far Land of Light, for which his spirit had ached so long. There is a striking analogy between Fox's experience in the hollow tree and Cardinal Newman's experience on the orange boat in the Straits of Bonifacio two centuries later. Of radically different temperaments and under startlingly different circumstances, both Fox and Newman were longing for light; and both found it. We all know how, during that week in which the orange boat lay becalmed, Newman wrote his "Lead, Kindly Light." Fox's record though in prose, is very similar. "When," he says, "all my hopes in all men were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, I was shown why all earthly help had failed. It was that I might give all the glory to my Lord, seeing that it is He, and He alone, Who enlightens."

From that moment, Fox became one of the most virile and commanding figures in the public life of Europe and of America. Large of frame, with long straight locks and keen flashing eyes, his leather-clad limbs were familiar to the people of every country that he visited. He was a prophet; but a prophet who kept his feet on solid ground. He was a mystic; but, of all mystics, he was the most severely practical. Prof. William James declares that the work of Fox can never be overpraised. George Fox flashed the radiance that had streamed into his own soul into every crack and cranny and crevice of human activity. "He opposed injustice wherever he met, it," says Dr. Rufus M. Jones; "he stood for woman's equality with man; he hated all sham and humbug; he loved men of every kind and class." His enemies sneeringly dubbed him "the universal reformer," and why not? For George Fox held, above all else, that, to every aspect of human adventure, and to every heart-beat of human emotion, the light that he had found in the hollow tree must be ruthlessly applied.

F W Boreham

Image: George Fox