Swartbmore Xecture 1930

THE SWARTHMORE LECTURES
Cr. 8 vo, Cloth, it. 6 d. net each. 1908.—QUAKERISM : A RELIGION OF LIFE.
By Rufcs M. Jones, M.A., D.Litt. (Out of print.) 1909 —SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE IN THE EXPERIENCE OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.
By William C. Bhaithwaite, B.A., LL.B. *1910.—THE COMMUNION OF LIFE.
By Db. Joan M. Fey. Second Edition.
1911.—HUMAN PROGRESS AND THE INWARD LIGHT. By Thomas Hodokin, D.C.L. (Out of print.)
1912.—THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY. By T. R. Gloveh, M .A.
1913.—SOCIAL SERVICE : ITS PLACE IN THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.
By Joshua Rowntbee. (Out of print.)
1914.—THE HISTORIC AND THE INWARD CHRIST. By Edward Grubh, M.A.
*1915.—THE QUEST FOR TRUTH.
By Sii.vanus P. Thompson, F.R .S. Third Edition. 1918.—THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT AND THE PRESENT OPPORTUNITY.
By Henry T. Hodokin, M .A., M.B.
1917.—THE DAY OF OUR VISITATION.
By William Littlkboy.
1918.—THE NEW SOCIAL OUTLOOK.
By Lucy Fryer Morland, B.A.
1919.—SILENT WORSHIP : THE WAY OF WONDER. By I,. Violet (Hodokin) Holdsworth.
*1920.-QUAKERISM AND THE FUTURE OF THE
CHURCH. Bv Herbert G. Wood, M.A. *1920.—THE NATURE AND AUTHORITY OF CONSCIENCE.
By Rufus M. Jones, M.A., D.Litt.
*1921.—THE LONG PILGRIMAGE : HUMAN PROGRESS IN THE LIGHT OF THE CHRISTIAN HOPE. By T. Edmund Harvey, M.A.
*1922.—RELIGION AND PUBLIC LIFE. By Carl Heath. *1923.—PERSONAL RELIGION AND THE SERVICE OF
HUMANITY. By Helen M. Sturoe. *1924.—THE INNER LIGHT AND MODERN THOUGHT.
By Gerald K. Hibbert, M.A., B.D. Second Imp. *1925.—THE QUAKER MINISTRY.
By John W. Graham, M.A.
*1928—THE THINGS THAT ARE BEFORE US.
By A. Nkave Brayshaw, B.A., LL.B. •1927.—CHRIST AND THE WORLD'S UNREST
By H. T Silcock, M.A.
*1928.—THE LIGHT OF CHRIST.
By John S. Hoyland, M .A.
*1929.—SCIENCE AND THE UNSEEN WORLD.
By Arthur Stanley Eddinoton, F.R.S. Sixth
Impression.
* These are also available in Paper, Is. 6d. net
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN, LTD., Museum Street, W.C.I.

Swartbmore Xecture, 1930
DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION
A Study in Quakerism
BY
G. VON SCHULZE GAEVERNITZ
Professor of Political Science in the University of Freiburg and in the Deutsche Hocbschule fur Politik, Berlin
LONDON GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. MUSEUM STREET



DEDICATED TO MY FRIEND AND SON-IN-LAW DR. EDMUND H. STINNES IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE WONDERFUL DAYS WHICH I SPENT WITH HIM AND HIS WIFE AT ASCONA AND CRAINSDORF SUMMER I93O
THE AUTHOR



preface
The Swarthmore Lectureship was established by the Woodbrooke Extension Committee, at a meeting held December 7th, 1907 : the minute of the Committee providing for " an annual lecture on some subject relating to the message and work of the Society of Friends." The name " Swarthmore " was chosen in memory of the home of Margaret Fox, which was always open to the earnest seeker after Truth, and from which loving words of sympathy and substantial material help were sent to fellow-workers.
The Lectureship has a two-fold purpose : first, to interpret further to the members of the Society of Friends their Message and Mission; and, secondly, to bring before the public the spirit, the aims and the fundamental principles of the Friends.
7

preface
The Lectures have been delivered on the evening preceding the assembly of the Friends' Yearly Meeting in each year. The present Lecture was delivered at Friends House, London, on the evening preceding the Yearly Meeting, 1930.
A complete list of previous Lectures, as published in book form, will be found at the beginning of this volume.

Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Reform of the Reformation - n
II The Historic Mission of the Quakers 30
III Social Democracy as a Western Ideal 45
IV The Mission of Quakerism in the
Present Day - - - - - 83



DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION
A Study in Quakerism
Chapter I
THE REFORM OF THE REFORMATION
Has Religion anything to do with Democracy ? The great majority of our contemporaries are prompt to deny this question. On the continent of Europe there is even felt a contradiction between both powers : democrats are usually secularists, devout people are frequently reactionaries. Nevertheless the names of Lincoln and Gladstone forbid such a conclusion.
The same question applies to Quakerism.
Has Quakerism anything to do with Democracy.? Has it any bearing upon Politics at all ? Many Quakers both of to-day and yesterday, indeed, the so called " Quietists " of Quaker history have answered this question in the negative. Yet the names of George Fox and William Penn in the seventeenth century, of John Bellers and John Woolman in the eighteenth, of William Allen and John Bright in the nineteenth, and of President Hoover in our own day, are enough to remind us that Quakerism has in truth much to do with Politics,
II

WBSSSSmms,
ihbhhb
12 Swartbmore SLecture.
and that too, with Politics of a particular tendency. I go further and would maintain that Quakerism is the home in which centuries ago modern Democracy and modern Socialism, its younger brother, were alike cradled. By viodern Democracy I mean the democracy of universal human right based upon the worth of " whatsoever bears the form and feature of man " in contrast to medieval or ancient democracy, which was founded upon membership of the guild or full citizenship in the city community. And by modern Socialism I mean the Socialism of Western Europe, which in order to safeguard this human right and human value seeks to organise the economic life of the community systematically from the centre, and is to be contrasted with the primitive " Socialism " of the Incas and with that of the Soviets—-in essence no less primitive—for which the individual counts for so little.
But in this historical achievement the Quaker movement was but the heir of its immediate predecessor, the Early Anabaptists, who gathered in Holland after being driven by persecution out of Germany. Therefore, in assuming the name of Quaker a German is reverting to the best part of his own ancestral heritage. But it was left to the English and American " Friends " to give it the stamp of a sound currency, in political and economic life, a currency that has now world-wide validity.
The contemporaries of the early Friends were fully conscious of this historical connexion. I found in the British Museum a seventeenth century booklet entitled " The English Quaker the German

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enthusiast revived." 1 The Quakers were accused of seeking to build up a " New Miinster " on English ground.
While the democratic movement is correlated with that wave of religious exaltation which divides medieval from modern times, it would be a complete mistake to assign the credit or the blame for Democracy to the official Reformation. Neither Luther nor Calvin were Democrats, not even in the sense of forerunners. Both, on the contrary, were opposed to the fundamental democratic claim, and this is true as well in the spiritual as in the economic and political spheres.
It is true that Luther as a young man by leaving the free exposition of Scripture to the individual laid claim within these Biblical limits to freedom of conscience. But he himself not only personally retained in their essentials the old dogmatic formulae of the Church, but by his catechism imposed on his followers new formulae in addition, and did not shrink from defending them by outward authority. In his later years Luther excommunicated " heretics." But the authority which he called to his aid was no longer that of a worldwide church. Luther's support was the power of the German princes, who in breaking with the cosmopolitan power of the Empire stood out as the forerunners of the rising tide of Absolutism.
In economic matters Luther's standpoint was traditional. With the rise of early Capitalism there was gaining ground a new class stratification.
1 "Johannes Becholdus redivivus or the English Quaker the German Enthusiast revived," 1659.

i4 Swartbmore Xecture.
Luther opposed this and defended the social order which his own time had inherited from the middle ages. So that when the German peasants expanded the religious revolution to overthrow the social and political order, Luther counselled patience and obedience. This constitutes the inner break and cleavage in the German Reformation. Ever since that time the authoritative leaders of Protestant Germany, with few exceptions, have been conservative both in politics and in economics, and this conservatism affords a marked contrast to the Anglo-American world. The background of German history is a defeated revolution, that of the Anglo-American history a victorious one ; this difference cuts very deep and its after-effects have lasted right down to the present time.
But the anti-democratic attitude of Luther is founded more deeply than in politics or economics. Luther believed in the bondage of the human will, impotent for good and enslaved to evil, and accordingly he termed his treatise " De Servo Arbitrio " his " rightest " work. The " World," a " Devil's tavern," stands condemned ; life is a chain of perpetual defeats ; evil government is to be borne in patience as a scourge from God. This is the source of the view that allows to the political and economic domain an independent legitimacy. (Eigengesetz- lichkeit.) The religious man is to avoid the snares of this region because he has renounced the task of penetrating it with his own standards. In the background rests that exaggerated emphasis on the Transcendence of God. The devout man is

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merely a foreign settler in the world, a view which is in fact the heritage from the monastic life.
There is something impressive in the way in which Calvin and after him Anglo-American Puritanism pushed the doctrine of Luther to its logical culmination in the dogma of Predestination, the " horrible edict." In the general break-up of the traditional types of fellowship and association, the Calvinist stands alone face to face with his God in icy elevation above a world upon which the Elect has to put the stamp of his mastership in maiorem dei gloriam!
Calvin in his church-state granted even less freedom of conscience than Luther, and indeed emulated the Roman Catholic inquisition. To a man like John Cotton, freedom of conscience was Godless scepticism. We see the after effects of such a position still at work to-day in the penal legislation directed in certain States of U.S.A. against the Darwinian theory.
In matters economic Calvinism opened up the way for the capitalistic revolution. Thus Calvin— and the fact is significant of the economic changes of his epoch—abandoned the prohibition of interest on loans by his explanation that in many instances a loan is more profitable for the debtor than for the creditor. So Calvin and his followers in New England became in effect protagonists in the cause of Capitalism, and paved the way for the cleavage between classes and even for slavery. In Boston of old days, slave traffic was a flourishing trade.
As regards politics, Calvinists were to be sure

Swartbmore Xecture.
revolutionary in opposing the inherited monarch ical power. Calvinist preachers were already in seventeenth century Boston invoking rebellion with the words : " Resistance to Tyrants is obedience to God." But their goal was anything but a democratic republic ; it was rather an aristocratic predominance, first of the Elect, and later when the religious fundamentals became secularised, of the " Gentlemen," the captains of industry, the money- magnates. This lineage has become a truism by the brilliant work of historic research done by men like Professor Max Weber and Professor R. H. Tawney.
It was owing to this aristocratic strain of Calvinism that the " fathers " of the American constitution were filled with such deep distrust of democracy. They were prompted to strive after a " representative republic " with reciprocal veto by President and Senate and with well adjusted regulations to protect it against the decisions of a democratic majority.
Modern theology has revived Calvinism in Germany, where Karl Barth and his disciples are expounding God as " the wholly other," Jesus as Him who was " to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness." The whole of human existence, its heights and its depths alike, stands " condemned." A St. Francis and a Caesar Borgia, Bach's St. Matthew's Passion and a street brawl are equally far removed from God. The outcome of this doctrine in terms of politics and economics is the renunciation by religion of any endeavour to permeate the world by its spirit, bankruptcy in

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17
face of a self-glorious capitalism, the temper of decline (Untergangsstimmung) such as Spengler indicates. This German Neo-Calvinism is easily intelligible as an after effect of the world war and the disillusionment in which it ended. It rightly protests against a cheap pretence of harmony. This doctrine calls to mind the demons as the sinister and relentless masters of the world, whom Hegelians as well as Christian Scientists are only too prompt to ignore instead of acknowledging them as mighty adversaries.
In contrast to the official reformation Democracy descends from the tradition of Plato, Jesus, St. John, St. Francis, from the Baptists, Mennon- ites and Quakers—with Kant, Goethe and Hegel in the same line of succession. Fundamental to the democratic movement is a transformation of the idea of God. Professor Carl Schmidt is right when he says, " all the conceptions employed in the modern theory of the State are theological conceptions that have been secularised." Luther's transcendent God is the omnipotent director and provider, and his representative upon earth is the monarch, " by the grace of God," who is not bound by the Law and intervenes at will as God intervenes by miracle. The equally transcendent God of Calvin is the supreme engineer, working according to laws, whose work, and in particular the economic " machine," runs on of itself without interference. The God of the democrat is the immanent God of mystical experience, who reveals himself in the individual soul and in the corporate body and realises himself through man.
2a

i8
Swartbntore Xectuve.
It was this second wave of the Reformation, called by its adherents in England the " Reform of the Reformation," that gave to the world democracy. The despised " step-children " of the Reformation —to use the expression of Troeltsch—were the ancestors of the modern state. This second wave welled up in Germany in the sixteenth century, but it was there suppressed by fire and sword. The surviving remnants, revived by Menno Simons, fled to Holland and thence to England, where their life was merged in those sects which rejected the Calvinist as well as the Episcopal Church, the Parliament as well as the King. They called in question the whole system of church and state, all hierarchies inherited from old days. These ideas of " base people," as Bacon called them, had an immense development and this is the true mark of all of Quakerism, which became the heir and trustee of the Reform of the Reformation.
The distinguished American scholar, Rufus M. Jones, has made the origin of Quakerism clear in a series of profound and penetrating volumes. On German and Dutch soil the movement had three roots. The first was the community of German Baptists and Mennonites, especially the Water- lander Mennonites who already practised silent worship without visible sacraments. The second root is that circle of " Spiritual Reformers " that gathered in Holland about Erasmus, that interdenominational and international atmosphere which found its focus in Amsterdam between 1600 and 1650. It has a spiritual relationship with Spinoza and Rembrandt, the Spinoza to whom God unfolds

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19
himself in the multitude of things, the Rembrandt in whose works the contours of earthly things are blended and blurred with divine light. And finally the Quaker movement had a third root in the contemporary German mysticism, above all in Jacob Boehme, very early translated, whose influence is shown also in the " Behmenites " of the Cromwellian army. The same spirit speaks through the mystic Angelus Silesius, at one time a Leyden student, and steeped in the religious atmosphere of the Netherlands, who has become again a living writer to modern Germany. What Rufus Jones says about the origin and the spiritual relations of the Quakers applies as well to the early English Baptists, the leader of whom, John Smyth, 1 planned even to amalgamate with the Dutch Mennonites. It also applies to the sects, mostly Baptist by origin, which culminated in the Cromwellian army.
As we have no intention to give a detailed historical review, we will try to characterise by a short resume the main ideas of this world of sects from which Democracy crystallised out towards the end of the seventeenth century.
1. The fundamental point of the so-called Reform of the Reformation is Immanence of God in the human soul. From this central conception comes the rejection of Predestination as formulated by Calvin, and the rejection of the substitutionary theory of the death of Jesus, as taught by Luther. Against Calvin stands the firm and
1 W. T. Whitley, The Works of John Smyth, Cambridge, 1915, Introduction, p. 109.

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Swartbmore Xecture.
fundamental conviction : Rebirth is open to all, Christ died for all men. Against Luther it is maintained, a divine spark is kindled in the human soul, and this spark has to be fanned into a flame. A certain degree of " sanctification" is already possible upon earth, even in works. This sanctification is a self-submersion into the will of God whereby man becomes free —all potent as an instrument of the divine will. Sin is selflove and means falling away from the divine spirit that moves through all things. The word of God is no letter written with pen on paper, but the Spirit (Logos) present in every man as the mystic Christ: " Christ a condition in man." Without the sanction of this ever living authority the Scripture would be a dead letter.
2. This fundamental conviction is the source of the rejection of the Church as an institution " administering " salvation, and the rejection of the Sacraments as means to salvation. With the Baptists, Baptism is a " conscious act of faith," on the part of the regenerate, and only adults are capable of voluntary choice. The sensational character of the immersion and the pronouncement of the blessing following upon it have, it is true, added not a few to the ranks of the Baptists, especially among the coloured population of the United States, where there is a negro Baptist church numbering several million members. But at bottom Baptism is for the Baptists merely a symbol of the achieved second birth. Adult baptism had an enormous influence in breaking up the church and the state as hierarchic institutions

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21
into which men are born without being asked. It opened the way to free citizenship from blind subjection.
In contrast to the traditional church as an institution, the church of the sectarians is a congregation of regenerated, a so-called "believers' church," founded by a covenant with God and its members one with another. The outcome is equality of all members, putting also the sexes on an equal footing, and leading to the liberty of women to preach and prophesy, and to the election and the replacement of the preacher by the decision of the congregation. He has no longer the authority of a priest, but as employee he is under the censure of his employers. " One is Lord, even Christ, and all ye are brethren." The congregation maintains the character of a union of the re-born by the penalty of expulsion, which the church may pronounce. Every such church or congregation, large or small, is independent in its external relations, and merely in alliance with similar or kindred congregations without any central authority or hierarchical organisation. This is the religious parent soil from which modern democracy descends.
The contemporaries were fully aware of the revolutionary tendency which was embodied in the covenant doctrine. Robert Browne in his famous " Book which shows the life and manner of all true Christians," 1582, was the first in England to proclaim that the people constitute the church under the immediate leadership of Christ. The mere possession of this book was menaced with the penalty of death !

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3. The rejection 0f the " World " —the world of gluttony, drunkenness and harlotry, and the State as an " outward thing " to which the spirit submits so long as it does not impose a burden on conscience. But even as to the state there ought to be no " idolization of the creature." Hence the " Thou " of the Quaker in addressing his worldly " superior," even the earthly king who as unre- generate belongs to the world. Hence the demand for freedom of conscience and the free practice of religion ; if this demand is refused the principle that prevails is in contrast to the suffering obedience of Lutheranism : " Men must obey God more than men."
The demand for freedom of conscience finds expression in the complete severance of Church and State. This principle does not spring from indifference, but from a high valuation of the religious domain which brooks no intermixture with worldly power. " Faith cannot be administered." In this spirit already the Miinster Baptists, according to their repeated declaration, wanted nothing but freedom to practise their religion, and thus the English Baptists (1614) demanded the complete separation of Church and State. This principle became fundamental law in the New World, where the Baptists of Rhode Island were the first to carry it into practice.
It is a famous word of Roger Williams, Baptist minister and founder of Rhode Island, that he did not desire any liberty for himself which he should not freely grant to his opponent. This word was carried into practice at a time when there was out

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of the little colony Rhode Island not a foot of habitable earth where a Baptist could worship according to his own conscience. John Smyth, who as the father of English baptism, was the founder of the first Free Church in the Anglo- American world, declared an established confession of truth impossible because there is no earthly tribunal to judge it.
But tolerance was more than a legal maxim. It was founded on a new conception of truth. Since the Fall mankind is individualised, uniformity being a sign of death. Or to use a metaphor : The divine light, as Fichte puts it, is broken in the human intermediary into divers rays, and the total Truth is a blending together of all these rays. No one has more finely expressed this profound principle of Tolerance than the early Quakers. So Penington says (Works, 3 ed. 1784,1444) : " How sweet it is for the spiritual eye to see several sorts of believers every one learning their own lesson, performing their peculiar service. The ground for love and unity is not that such a man does just as I do, but because I feel the same spirit and life in him." For Penington, every truth is only the shadow of a higher truth. Remember also the famous word of William Penn in his " Fruits of Solitude " : " The Humble, Meek, Merciful, Just, Pious and Devout Souls are everywhere of one Religion ; and when Death has taken off the Mask, they will know one another, tho' the divers Liveries they wear here make them strangers."
From this source springs that thought of the eighteenth century's Enlightenment to which

Swartbmore Xecture.
Lessing gave the most famous expression : Approaching the truth by honestly seeking means more for man than the satisfied possession of truth.
This view has nothing to do with modern scepticism or pragmatism for which there is no real distinction between truth and error—truth being the opinion which proves useful to-day, a weapon in the struggle for existence, but will be obsolete to-morrow. On the contrary truth is an absolute value and is revealed to mankind, though only gradually. Or as Professor W. E. Hocking puts it: " The corpus of knowledge is at no moment static—but we know this, that change does not eat out what is true in it." 1
4. The traditional Churches have so far spiritualised the Kingdom of God as the final goal of the Christian as almost to put a ban upon it. In contrast to this, the primitive Christian eschato- logy took on again among the Baptists a new life in all its original power. So Rothmann said in his " Restitution " as early as 1534 : " Hitherto the scriptures have been expounded without understanding. What is written of the kingdom of Christ on earth has been referred to the Last Judgment and the Kingdom of Heaven. But the men of Mfinster knew well that what is proclaimed in scripture of Christ's kingdom is to be expected here upon earth, Christ is set as king over Zion, and the heathen and all the ends of the earth are given him for an inheritance. He with his well-armed servants will subdue and overthrow
1 W. E. Hocking, " Action and Certainty," Journal of Philosophy, XXVII, No. 9, April 24th, 1930.

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the devil and all unrighteousness, yea all godless creatures, and then he will enter into his reign in righteousness and peace."
The same views held sway in Cromwell's army, its exponents being called Millenarians or " Fifth Monarchy men." Indeed there can scarcely be any doubt that the Protector himself was full of similar hopes, when he announced to his "Parliament of Saints " : " The Lord will appear among you in a new form." It was from this conviction that the army drew its death-defying valour and the firmness gathered in prayer. It was the common conviction of the Commonwealth period that it was the time of birthpangs which preceded the coming of the Lord. " The Easter Dawn of a new age is breaking." This is the parent soil from which modern socialism springs.
There were two different ways in which Early Baptists strove to realise the new Zion, two ways which still make the divergence between the revolutionary Communists and the reforming Socialists, between Soviets and the Quakers. The one fights with the weapons of war, the other with the weapons of the Spirit. In many instances the Baptists were forced to take up arms only as a result of bloody persecutions of which they were the victims. At any rate their first representatives, such as Hans Denck and the so-called'' Synod of Martyrs " held in Augsburg in 1527, rejected all resort to force and turned to the methods of love and prophecy. In contrast to this attitude an Imperial edict of June 10th, 1535 threatened the

26 Swartbmore lecture.
Baptists with death by fire, those of them that showed " repentance," with beheading, and the women with the punishment of being buried alive.
This cruelty of the persecution to which they were subjected explains much of the eccentricities of the Minister Baptists. Influenced by the reports of their enemies, we are inclined to think of them as a horde of savages. Remember that polygamy was only introduced in a besieged city, when women by far outnumbered the men, and that at the same time Luther had advised Henry VIII of England and the Landgrave of Hesse that polygamy was not opposed to Christian ethics. The famous American historian Bancroft, was the first to point out the lineage between Munster and Rhode Island. "This Colony," he adds, "is witness that the paths of the Baptists were the paths of freedom and peace."
After the downfall of the earthly Jerusalem in Munster the German and Dutch Baptist movement under the influence of Menno Simon renounced the method of violence.
In England also both tendencies continued to show life. The representatives of force gathered into Cromwell's army, and their convictions survived in the expansive sect of the Baptists, and hardly less in the religious undertone that sounds through British Imperialism from Cromwell to Cecil Rhodes.
Even George Fox in his early days appealed to the Protector to establish the hegemony over the Mediterranean by the Commonwealth fleets. This

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little known passage reads as follows 1 : " O Oliver, hadst thou been faithful and thundered down the deceit, the Hollander had been thy subject and tributary, Germany had given up to have done thy will, and the Spaniard had quivered like a dry leaf wanting the virtue of God, the King of France should have bowed his neck under thee, the Pope should have withered as in winter, the Turk in all his fatness should have smoked, thou shouldst not have stood trifling about small things, but minded the work of the Lord as He began with thee at first." Years after George Fox wrote to Charles II : " Sion needs no helpers who fight; his kind- dom stands for peace."
Such in approximate outline were the ideas of the sects called the " Reform of the Reformation " which were suppressed on the Continent in a sea of blood. In England, and in New England likewise, the Stuarts aimed at the same consummation. If the Free Churches were allowed in the Anglo- Saxon world to develop fully and to leave their stamp on the life around them, they owe this to one man who made a breach that broke through into the new age : Oliver Cromwell. The Commonwealth (1653-1658) signifies according to Troeltsch a return to the German Baptist movement, a reappearance of the spirit of the Peasants' War, the last attempt to establish the Kingdom of God with the sword, which though it did not bring about the new Zion did result in the growth of the Anglo- American world supremacy.
1 William C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism, London, Macmillan, 1912, p. 440.

mmmmsmm
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In Oliver Cromwell a whole age was concentrated into a personality of heroic mould. His work, supremely personal and therefore irrational, marks the beginning of a new epoch. The entire mentality of the Anglo-Saxon world would have been different had the Stuarts succeeded in imposing uniformity on the dissenters of England and New England, and subjecting even such a centre as Boston to the Anglican Church. Remember the contemporary world where the peace of Westfalia had just laid down as a fundamental principle " cuius regio eius religio " (i.e. the possessor of the land prescribes the religion of the subjects). In comparison to that Cromwell really was the Protector of what in his age proved to be the germs of a new era. On an old print of the British Museum, we see him clad in coat of iron mail, standing upon the whore of Babylon and guarding the hill of the two kingdoms at his left, the hill of Sion at his right—so he stands in history.
The downfall of the Commonwealth meant a return swing of the pendulum. The eighteenth century that followed was an age of religious lethargy. Among the upper classes the crudest materialism prevailed, together with greed for colonial loot, a frivolous craving for pleasure, corruption and speculation (South sea bubbles). The lower classes, still bound by tradition, could not withstand the assaults of early capitalism. The peasants were driven off the land. Destitution and drunkenness spread to an alarming extent. In the second half of the eighteenth century wages stood, according to Rogers, at a rate below the

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minimum necessary for existence, and had to be made up by various forms of poor relief. Gin and potatoes began their victorious march. In the bourgeoisie Calvinism was losing its back-bone with the withering up of the dogma of predestination. It was becoming diluted to a thin sort of theism, ebbing away to an aristocracy of gentlemen. The Baptist movement was losing its millenarian elan and receding from the poorer to the middle classes, where, especially in agriculture, Baptists became the leaders in invention and technical progress. The Anglican Church failed to meet the spiritual needs of the people. It had become a political institution, in which the Bishops favoured at court for their Whiggery, held in bridle a country clergy, Tory by inclination and closely related to the Country squires. That age produced the fox hunting parson, the absentee rector and the needy curate. The highest claim of the Church was subservience to the authority in power —a doctrine the more despicable as it worked in favour of an illegitimate dynasty.
In this world the Quakers rose to the height of their historic mission.
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Chapter II
THE HISTORIC MISSION OF THE QUAKERS
It was the Quakers who became the trustees of the Reform of the Reformation. They developed it into democracy and social reform. They thereby form the connecting link between the age of religious heroism and the political and social ideals of our own day, of which we are too apt to forget the religious descent.
Refusing the use of weapons, the Quakers attempted to build up the world from within outwards in a more effective manner than was possible by the method of force, which could but win a transitory success and would recoil on its user. The goal of their endeavour remained, however, the same as before, the Kingdom of God upon earth, and wherever it was vividly felt, it involved that millenarian ardour which had a deep influence on the origins of modern socialism.
It was first of all within the bounds of the Society of Friends that conceptions of democracy and social reform made their public debut, which bore in it the promise of the future. What the Quakers undertook to realise on the narrow basis of their little community was taken up one to two hundred years later on the world-wide stage of history with all humanity at work in the undertaking.

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Modem democracy was born in 1683 in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, in that spacious and fertile region which the King of England had made over to William Penn in repayment of an old debt. In Pennsylvania democracy attained both actuality and success. Penn with his " holy experiment " was, as Fiske put it, the greatest state founder in the New World, and eighteenth century Pennsylvania was the most flourishing of English colonies.
The cause of William Penn's success lay in the fact that he brought in his wake a rather united body of immigrants, representing a high level of spiritual life, people for whom democracy had grown to be a religious experience. Among them the German contingent was so numerous that the question was raised whether English or German should be the recognised language of the State. At any rate the " Pennsylvania Dutch " (" Dutch" was still the current word for German) contributed an important element to the soul of America ; they are in fact in this regard much more important than the millions of Germans who were to follow them. 1
What were the fundamental principles upon which Penn erected his State ?
(1) In the forefront stood the principle of No Compulsion, that is, freedom to the widest possible limits. Thus Pennsylvania knew no
1 A. B. Faust, Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner Bedeutung fur die amerikanische Kultur, Leipzig, 1912. W. Hubben, Die Quaker in der deutschen Vergangen- heit, Leipzig, Qu&kerverlag, 1929, p. 100.
\

ae*W
Swartbmore Xecture.
oath of allegiance, no forced labour, no compulsory military service. In contrast to the Baptists, who were not averse to the use of force, the Quakers counted on slowly maturing conviction as the more lasting means of progress. They had for that reason only too often to be content with the second best. They approved the State as an institution of compulsion when it educated its citizens for freedom, but the method of education for freedom which they championed most of all was the free expression of opinion. Even before the soil of Pennsylvania had been cleared of pines Penn had established a printing press, the first uncensored press in America. He believed in the power of truth which will win its cause notwithstanding and despite every kind of lie and deceit. The Quaker was always ready for compromise but without losing sight of the final goal. On one point only he knew no compromise, namely, in freedom of conscience, which he realised by a complete severance of church from state. As Penn made freedom of conscience include even Catholics he was for a time held in suspicion as a " Cryptopapist."
(2) Pennsylvania was the first state where equality of all citizens became fundamental law.
Penn did away with all differences of rank. In contrast to the neighbouring state of Virginia, where inheritance by primogeniture was the rule, and to Carolina, whose constitution had been formed even by such an enlightened man as Locke upon a basis of three classes or orders, in Pennsylvania there prevailed a thorough-going

Democracy an& TReUglon.
33
equality before the law for all the members of the colony, and, further, equality in manners and morals, the style of clothing and style of life. Quakers said " thou " to everyone so long as " you " was the prerogative of persons of quality ; they refused to doff the hat to anyone, even kings and emperors, so long as the men of superior station refused the same courtesy to their inferiors. Penn maintained, to the astonishment of his contemporaries, that even the Negro " had a soul," and declared that the education of the coloured was a plain duty of Friends : it is, in fact, a duty which they are still discharging through Negro schools.
As early as 1688 the German Quakers of Germantown declared that slavery was irreconcilable with Christianity ; in 1711 the legislative assembly of Pennsylvania prohibited the importation of Negroes ; and since 1787 no Negro was any longer the property of any recognised member of the Society of Friends. In this matter the Quakers were a century in advance of their contemporaries—and that, too, at a time when Negro slavery was reckoned indispensable for the opening up of these wide and fruitful new territories, and when the zenith of the development of slavery, following upon the invention of cotton gin in 1793, was still in the future. In defiance of economic interest the Pennsylvania Quaker, John Woolman, became the great protagonist of the abolitionist movement in the eighteenth century.
(3) Penn received his territories to hold and possess entirely at his own disposal; he might
aa
x

34 Swartbmore Xecture.
have reserved for himself both the prerogatives of a king and the revenues of a monopolist. But he sacrificed his right to his ideal, so wholeheartedly that he, the rich admiral's son, fell towards the close of his life into embarrassed circumstances, and was even imprisoned for debt. It was only his descendants who reaped the harvest of his life's work in terms of economic prosperity. Penn's ideal was that of a popular self-government, and when he found the settlers at first more conscious of their rights than of their responsibilities, he thought he could cure the defects of democracy by an extension of democracy. Once he had set foot in the new world, he summoned an assembly the day after landing (October 27th, 1682), in which he expounded the great dream of his youth, the idea of founding a free and virtuous State where the people should be self-governing. Later, when the settlers contested the constitution he had proposed he conceded them the right of altering the constitution by a resolution of the assembly. Penn was a dreamer, but withal a man of sober and practical mind, whose work would remain effective for centuries. His faith in the people—a free and educated people—was lastingly justified by the events. Pennsylvania stood for a hundred years after Penn's foundation at the apex of the colonies, as the best ordered of them all.
(4) The Quakers were early champions in the movement for popular schools, whereas the Puritans distinguished themselves rather as founders of Universities. Penn, in the speech from

Democracy anb IReligion.
35
which I have already quoted, expresses the longing that every child, rich and poor alike, may receive instruction. In Pennsylvania, children of twelve years old were obliged to be able to read and write, on pain of a fine upon their parents. Further, special emphasis was laid on manual dexterity. The Quaker Schools were equipped with gardens and playgrounds. George Fox devoted a rich endowment of land, made over to him as a gift by his friend Penn, for the establishment of a Botanical Garden. Not to recognise any difference in value between head-work and hand-work—this idea of the Quakers was to have a lasting future, and to-day it is still fruitful in America.
(5) From the beginning, the close connection between democracy and pacificism is evident. Both are united by the principle of non-violence, though here too in practice compromises were unavoidable. Force, which in the last resort is armed force, was approved so far as it is in the service of justice, in order that peace may be brought down to our poor earth. Penn, in recognising private property, approved law courts and police as its protectors. But as to war Penn did not accept a compromise. He was the first to put forward a plan for a European league of states for the maintenance of peace, unheard of in that age of mercantilism and trade wars, of the apotheosis of king, state and nation. Penn was enough of a realist to stipulate for a central supreme court which should not only decide disputes between states but should be strong

36
Swartbmore Xecture.
enough to carry out its sentences, and he took as an example of this the United Netherlands. Penn indeed never renounced the use of that force, which underlies the verdicts of the judge. For him a system of just law stood for the highest attainable. But his endeavour was to extend this system of law beyond the confines of a single state to the relations between states and nations.
What remained a mere project in Europe, was to be realised in the New World. Pennsylvania was the first pacifist state. Penn surrendered the right awarded to him by the Charter of raising a militia, a policy that showed a high degree of daring in face of the Red Indians of the interior. While the other colonies waged sanguinary wars against these Indians, treating them as bloodthirsty savages, Penn repaired unarmed to the native camps. He beat them in sports (jumping) and so earned their admiration, and then made a treaty of peace and friendship with them. This treaty, " never sworn to be never broken," lasted seventy years, all the time that the Quakers retained the government of the colony in their own hands. In the sanguinary war with France ( I 755)» in which the Indians fought on the French side, the Quakers arranged a peace with them. Even up to the present day it is said that no Indian has ever killed a Quaker, the son of his great and unforgotten friend and protector William Penn.
Of course, the carrying out of the pacifist principle was neither a simple nor a single process. Thus, for instance, the first Quakers were not by

©emocracs anb tRellgion.
37
any means universally objectors to military service. Colonel Daniel warns General Monk of Quaker soldiers : " Quakers are uncertain folk in carrying out orders." They refused to give the blind obedience that excludes conscience from having its say, and that at a time when it was not unusual to send a Quaker to prison without an escort, trusting—and not in vain—to his bare word.
The Quakers of Pennsylvania also made a distinction between just and unjust wars. Benjamin Franklin recounts that in the war against France and Spain they not only supplied the governor with bread, meal, and " grains of another sort " (i.e., powder), but also furnished a battery. In the War of Independence, they supported the cause of the colonists to their utmost, short of taking up arms. In the late world war they left the question of military service to the individual conscience, and although the majority refused such service there was no expulsion of such members as became combatants. But in one thing all Quakers agree : after the abolition of slavery there is no greater cause in politics than the abolition of war. A confederation of States is the means by which war must be overcome. This idea had its influence in the drafting of the American federal constitution, which united states which had been up to then foreign, if not hostile to each other.
From Pennsylvania the democratic wave overflowed America—the principles of Early Virginia and Early Massachusetts being opposed to it.

38
Swartbmore Xecture.
The American Declaration of Independence of July ifh, 1776, the subsequent constitutions of the several states, the American War of Independence (1776-83) and finally the Constitution of the Union (September 17th, 1787), signify the setting up in the new world of a great democratic and federative republic, which step by step rose to an equality with the powers of the old world, until in our days the world centre of gravity came to be included within its borders. No event in history has held such momentous consequences as this from the point of view of the dissemination of political ideas. Hence Ranke remarked: " This was a greater revolution than any previous in all history, an entire reversal of principle." 1 It was indeed the beginning of the democratic epoch.
It is thus from its source in America that the tide of democracy had flowed over the world, now and then retreating, leaving islands and flooded areas, making perilous shoals and shallows, but on the whole advancing none the less ! The " rights of man," already demanded by the congress of the twelve colonies (October 14th, 1774) travelled round the world. Wherever primitive and enslaved nations awake to self-consciousness, they assert themselves as " men " and demand the " rights of man," which are more or less copies from those of America. So the liberation movement in India, unlike that of seventy years ago, no longer demands the reinstatement of the Mogulate, but aims at Democracy. The masses,
1 Ranke. Vberd: EpochenderneuerenGeschichol. Leipzig, 1888, in Weltgeschichte IX Teil 2 Abt S.216.

IDemocracs artb IReligion.
39
hitherto merely an instrument, are affirming themselves as an end in their own right. One can hear the sound of their million-footed march through the ways of history.
But in America the cradle of the movement was in Philadelphia, the city of the Quakers. There it was that the declaration of Independence was framed, there it was that the constitution of Pennsylvania showed " rights of man " inserted, as a pattern for many others, and civic rights were set under the protection of courts of justice. There the spirit of the Quakers prevailed over that of Episcopalian and Puritan, important as the influence of the latter still is to-day. If we regard Boston and Philadelphia as representing two principles that intercross in the American soul, then we may say that the severance of Church and State, the pacifist trend in the American soul and the far-reaching application of the principle " No compulsion " prove that Philadelphia has preponderated. It is the same spirit that reigns in Wilson's fourteen points, in the Kellogg Pact and in the Hoover-MacDonald agreement. The world peace, if it is to become a legal institution, requires a super-state organisation where free states gain more than they give up, such as the Constitution of the United States of America anticipated for the New World and which William Penn had proposed for Europe.
If American Quakerism realised itself in political democracy, English Quakerism, a sect oppressed by the State, shows a different sort of development. It became in fact from the

4°
Swartbmore Xecture.
eighteenth century onwards the forerunner of the Social Reform of our day. By this word I mean all the measures whereby the harshness and defects of the capitalistic order are softened in the interest of those classes whom this very order crushes to the earth. Such measures are, as Professor Briefs figuratively puts it, " the Red Cross behind the Capitalist front."
But the elements reminiscent of the early Baptists more than once burst the bounds of Social Reform. This is seen in John Betters, Quaker and Socialist, and in the Quaker circle that worked so closely with Robert Owen, who is penetrated with theism despite his hostility to the churches. Like the German Baptists of an earlier day, these men condemned the world of mammon, fattened on " the poor man's sweat."
Even in Marx a strain of Quaker thought survives beneath the surface of materialism and utilitarianism. It leads him to rate John Bellers more highly than any of his predecessors. The Marx who otherwise only speaks of the " bourgeois economists " with contempt, called this Quaker socialist " a real phenomenon in Political economy." 1
The fact that as far back as the eighteenth century socialistic proposals were being put forward from within the Quaker body means simply that there were men among them, striving to realise an ideal of fellowship that should transcend the capitalistic order, independent of
1 Karl Marx. Das Kapital. 2 Aufl. Bd I S. 515. 112, 120, 127.

Democracy an& TReltaion,
the market and the gain-seeking motive, aiming at a systematic provision of necessary wants in the service of the whole community. The labour colonies which John Bellers advocated were attempts in this direction. There, agricultural and industrial work were to be knit together in an independent economic unit. By a centralised supply of food, dwelling and clothing, the waste of the small household was to be avoided. Money was to be abolished and labour to be adopted as standard of value.
Other elements in Bellers' scheme are the high value he assigns to manual work as against book-knowledge, and to the education of young people for a common life and a common work. " The happiness of the next generation depends on the children of the present being well educated." Bellers compares education to the polishing of diamonds so as to bring out their brilliance and value. Bellers' ideas survived in weakened form in the Quaker workhouse at Clerkenwell, founded in 1702, which continued to serve as a school after 1811.
But leaving these more definitely socialistic projects out of account, Quakerism was predominantly active in the sphere of " social reform." Accepting the fundamental facts of the Capitalistic system, the Society of Friends strove for the abolition of pauperism which was the result first of the separation of the peasant from the land by the development of landlordism, and then of the artisan from his handicrafts by the introduction of machinery. The first tendency was already

42
Swartbmore Xecture.
beginning to prevail by the end of the seventeenth century, the latter since the end of the eighteenth. The war against destitution was waged not only by charitable relief of individual cases of distress, but also—and above all—by means of training the young for work and organising work for adults. The root idea of all Quaker philanthropy was, and still is : " help them to help themselves " —a democratic principle and opposed to the mediaeval form of charity which entertained the poor and preserved poverty. By appealing to self-reliance, the Society of Friends, whose members in George Fox's days belonged to the poorer sections of the community, actualfy succeeded in doing away with destitution within its own borders.
Thus Sir Frederic Morton Eden, in his book The State of the Poor, London, 1797, called the Quakers the one people on earth who know no poverty and have no beggars within their ranks. He advises the legislator to investigate the measures by which the Quakers achieved this unique result. The Quakers also were the first to see the great problem of bringing the unemployed poor back to the land, as William Allen advocated it in his booklet, Colonies at Home, Lindfield, 1832.
For details I would refer to a book of one of my pupils in the Economic Department of the University of Freiburg, Frl. Dr. Auguste Jorns, entitled Studies in the Social Politics of the Quakers (Karlsruhe, 1912)—up to the present day the best on the subject.

Democracy an& IReHgtott.
43
A severe blow to pauperism was delivered by the Quaker, John Bright. The Free Trade movement of the nineteenth century as John Bright, Joseph Sturge and other Friends understood it, was in its heart a religious movement. It meant to restore the beneficent designs of Providence against perverse legislation and to vindicate the cause of the poor against the monopoly of the rich. It set real wages rising continually until the close of the century. Obsolete as they are in external features, the fundamental ideas of John Bright are even to-day full of possibilities. The thought of mankind as one economic community embracing the whole globe, to which all nations ought to contribute such goods as they are most fitted to produce through the nature of their land or through their character acquired by history—here is a truth that will never grow obsolete.
Self-help and brotherhood, these two great principles, which lie at the bottom of the social reform work of the Quakers, became the foundation on which the British Co-operators of the nineteenth century have built up their famous organisation, which stands at the top of all the co-operative movements of our day not only as to the number of members, but also as to the amount of capital administered by the working classes. There even seems to be a direct lineage between Quakerism and Co-operation which ought to be investigated. 1
1 Robert Schloesser, Ober die Bezichungen der Quaker zum Genossenschafts wesen. Genossenschafts correspondenz. October,
1925.

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Swartbmore OLecture.
Looking back on the course we have come, we may say that the Quakers have wisely administered their inheritance from the early Baptists and that they prepared for its world-wide acceptance. Baptists, according to Troeltsch, produced " the only Christian social-system" beside the Catholic church. But it was left to the Quakers to bring it down on the soil of this poor earth—idealists who meant business.
Apart from that it is safe to assert on the basis of our insight into the growth and the spirit of the New Testament, as revealed by at least three generations of historical inquirers, that none of the movements for religious reform came so near to primitive Christianity as that of the early Baptists and early Quakers. Both waited even in their lifetime for the reign of God that should come down to earth. In the same way, the Kingdom which Jesus proclaimed, while it did not have its origin in the world, moved into the world. Jesus was anything but a stranger to the world, holding out promises of a hereafter. He demanded a transformation of the world here and now, and most of all He furthered the realisation of this end by His unfaltering trust in God even in the days of earthly catastrophe. 1 A similar trust built up Quakerism in a time when the New Zion, which the Commonwealth had promised, came to a breakdown, and Lust and Mammon seemed to be triumphant.
1 Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben Jesu—Forschung, 1906, IV. ed., 1925.

democracy ant> TRellgton.
45
Chapter III
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AS A WESTERN IDEAL
Between the ideal of a political and economic world order which embodies both liberty and solidarity, justice and peace, such as haunts to-day the mind of western man, and that seventeenth century's vision of the new Zion, there stands at least for the Continent of Europe and the non- Anglo-Saxon World, the French Revolution. We know how much this marvellous event was determined by the American War of Independence and how markedly the French " Rights of Man " show the influence of the American formulation. An extensive literature has confirmed the penetrating conjecture of Jellinek, 1 as his opponents only touch minor points.
To summarise the matter briefly, the philosophy of natural right was the general basis of the movement. In the background stood Locke, who had gone through the school of the Independents. Thus Gooch ventures to assert, 1 that there is little in Rousseau, that is not to be found in Locke,
1 Georg Jellinek, Die Erklarung der Menschen—und Biirgerrechte, 3 Auflage, 1919.
- G. P. Gooch, History of the Democratic Ideas in the 17 th Century, Cambridge, 1898, p. 358.

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Swartbmore Xecture.
little in Locke that is not to be found in the Commonwealth.
But the example of the American Revolution substituted action for theory. America's war with England was understood as a general war of liberation and stimulated the French to follow it up with action of their own. According to Franklin's letter to Cooper in 1777 the opinion prevailed in France that the cause of the Americans was the cause of the entire human race. Thomas Paine, Quaker by origin and member of the French Convention 1792, avers that the French soldiers and officers derived from America their knowledge of the practice of liberty. 1 According to Condorcet the enslaved European recognised in the example of the New World his own indefeasible rights to freedom. The Frenchman felt it a humiliation to have fought for the liberation of another people while himself subjected to despotism. The " Rights of Man " as set forth by Mirabeau in his tract " Aux Bataves " 1788, or by Lafayette in his draft document of July 1789, are drawn from the several American State Constitutions. In part they are verbally identical, and in much the greater part their context is the same. And the same may be said of the definitive Declaration accepted by the King on October 1st, 1789.
Thus historical research has confirmed the flash of intuition to be found in the preface to Heine's " Franzosischen Zustanden " (Nov. 1832). " That declaration of the rights of man upon which our whole political science is based, has its origin
1 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, London, 1791.

Democracy anb IRellglon.
47
not in France where it was to be proclaimed most gloriously, nor yet in America, from whence Lafayette brought it, but in Heaven the eternal fatherland of reason."
But besides these lines of connexion there are differences that distinguish French and hence continental democracy from that of England and America, differences to which far too little attention is paid.
The French Revolution means that democracy is cut loose from its parent soil in religion. As Aulard says, widespread unbelief prevailed among the upper classes of the French nation, even when they declared religion to be necessary " for the people." This unbelief was buttressed in part by a materialistic philosophy, in part by a brilliant scepticism. This is still to-day the predominant attitude of the intellectual bourgeois Frenchman, organised as so many of them are in the ranks of Freemasonry with its tendency towards atheism. " Le bon Dieu " is something for old women and young girls, a subject to be dismissed with a jest by an enlightened mind.
Corresponding to this attitude in the upper and middle classes is the deep rooted distrust of religion which prevails among the working classes. It is enough for the word " God " to be mentioned and the most progressive speaker is thereby stamped as reactionary. And thus for example, the pacifist propaganda has to employ non-religious formulae in order to gain a hearing from working-class audiences.
It is very different where democracy has become

48
Swartbmore lecture.
a religious experience. The tide of anti-religious " enlightenment " that from France overflowed continental Europe was dammed in the Anglo- American world, owing to the Methodist revival. Methodism, democratic through and through, established the largest of all the free Churches ; but its influence was even greater by permeating the Anglican Church and the older denominations, the Baptists as well as the Quakers, who had entered on their " quietest " period. For the progressive minds of the Anglo-American World, democracy became again what it had been in the seventeenth century, a religious experience.
So Gladstone's whole life centred on religion from the days of his youth when he had been under the influence of the evangelical movement. He became England's grand old man as he developed from a Tory to a Liberal and even to a Radical. Protagonist of democracy he believed in free institutions as God's own way to educate the nations of the world to self-control and self-determination. The same applies to America. So Toqueville in his famous book " La Democratic en Amerique " (1837) could report to his astonished countrymen : " In America, the freest and most enlightened country in the world, the Christian religion exerts a greater influence over the souls of men than in any other land in the world. I do not know whether all Americans believe in their religion— for who can see into the human heart ? But I am well assured that they regard religion as necessary for the just maintenance of their republican institutions. Such is the opinion not of one class or

2Democrac\> anb IReligton.
49
party but of the entire nation. How could the political bond be loosened without the moral bond being strengthened. How make a people master of itself which does not subject itself to the mastery of God ? "
All these features are found united in a personality of monumental greatness. Those Americans, who are not too businesslike to believe in political ideals, still recognise their better self in the person of Abraham Lincoln. This man of Baptist origin, from the days of his childhood lived with the Bible and " Pilgrim's Progress." For Lincoln every political question in the last resort was an ethical question and ethics for him meant religion. His portrait hangs in schools, offices and railway stations as a symbol of the " better America," which for the Americans of German descent is represented by Karl Schurz, the great friend and associate of Lincoln.
Lincoln's spirit is not dead even to-day, as we learned in the World War. In the battle fought by the spirits above the clouds our opponents had fighting in their ranks German Baptists of the sixteenth century and German revolutionaries of 1848—not the worst among our ancestors. And upon that side millions held the belief that the war was " to make the world safe for democracy." In the United States of America the intense activity for war was sustained by the free churches, the women, and the universities, while the men of the business world made their profit by neutrality. Many thousands gave themselves to the cause, convinced that it was Lincoln's cause they were

50
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serving, that it was in the last resort for the Liberty of the German people that they would fight and die. To these men Aristocracy and Militarism, and above all, the spirit of the Prussian " Junkers " seemed to be evil in an absolute sense. Hypocrisy ? Had it been hypocrisy, it would have been powerless.
On the other side the Germans had from the time of Bismarck lost touch with the ideals of the classical age of Germany, with both the democratic traditions of Kant and Fichte and the cosmopolitan traditions of Goethe. During the war a short-sighted militarism seized the political helm, and thus any sympathy with the ideology of the Western World was excluded, although President Wilson had read with strong approval the author's pamphlet " Free Seas," and laid down the freedom of the seas as the first of his fourteen points. While Wilson strove in close contact with German democracy for a peace without victors or vanquished, the edifice of peace, which House and Bernstorff had nearly brought to completion, was shattered by the die-hards on both sides.
To-day it is the task of young Germany to recover faith in freedom, justice and peace, and thereby to renew sympathetic touch with the democratic movement of the West. Nothing stands so much in the waj' of such a spiritual return as the absurd consequences of ,a so-called peace which every German morally rejects, no matter what his party. If the fourteen points of Wilson embodied the best traditions of western democracy, the German feels himself the victim of

Democracy anfc IReltgion.
51
a fraud, at having disarmed himself at the Armistice on condition that these fourteen points would form the basis of subsequent peace. These conditions, he believes, were flouted by the Peace Treaty which Germany had to sign under the pressure of starvation. This is the explanation of the re-emergence of Nationalist ideas among the German youth, which is suffering at the same time under economic depression and moral disappointment. To the young German Republic there was given no chance of success with which to win the hearts of the young generation. The final liquidation of the World War lies still in the future, and only if Germany is allowed to breathe and to hope, will the German youth gain the spiritual victory over themselves which would be worth more than all victories on the field of battle. A new Lincoln is wanted, to prove to the world that America really meant what it proclaimed and signed and that the fourteen points were more than bad propaganda which corroded the German front.
Only in this way can the unity of the western spirit be restored. This unity, inheritance of centuries past, is the best feature for to-morrow. For the waters that form the main stream of Western idealism spring from Greek and Christian sources: Plato our father, as Jesus our Lord. They flow through the highlands of the Middle Ages, that spiritual Empire, the unity of which is represented by Dante and upheld even to-day by the Roman Catholic Church. Its main affluents are the Anglo-American Free Churches,

iswaB«sa88®!Sp!®is-= :
Swartbmore Xecture.
the American and the French Revolution, and the classical philosophy of Germany, from Kant to Hegel. This last brought the two former together in a profound synthesis and strengthened their hold on the transcendant. This main stream of ideals we may call Social Democracy or Democratic Socialism according as we payheed to its upper or its lower reaches. To-day it spreads wide in abroad expanse that unites the nations. Man can never hope to reach the mouth of this mighty river, for it flows out into eternity. Democracy in its completeness, and Socialism in its completeness, as an order realising at the same time both freedom and solidarity, these would be the Kingdom of God on Earth. But we have faith that we may make no insignificant approach nearer and nearer to this goal which lies beyond history. " Mankind is still young " (Kant).
But the great danger is that the religious sources dry up and democracy becomes a swamp full of fatal miasmas. The eighteenth century's Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and the nineteenth century's Social Reform and Democratic Socialism descend from religious convictions. Cut off from their religious origins, the political and economic ideals of our time totter and fall. They become absurd and unworkable generalisations, refuted by the experience—forces of destruction perhaps, but unfit for the construction of a new and better world order. Democracy is founded on the belief in the eternal or absolute value of " Man " and " Mankind "—without the vital grasp on eternity it becomes chimera.

H)emocracE anb IReltgion.
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This truism, apparent in the seventeenth century, was only superficially disguised by the eighteenth century theory of the " Law of Nature " (Naturrecht) which survives in Marx and even in the Soviet doctrine. In the theory of the " Law of Nature " a metaphysical foundation took the place of a theological; but the change is not important, if we regard metaphysics as the religion of the philosophic mind. The " Nature," which it meant, was the world of absolute value, as the final goal of all politics. The democrat has to " reinstate " this nature and " eliminate " what is " contrary to nature,"—notions quite without meaning if we take our stand on the ground of mechanistic natural science, which insists that everything that is, is necessary, everything is " natural," and leaves no room for any sort of teleology. In the " law of nature" on the contrary all is referred to a primal norm or standard, something that ought to be or is to be rather than is. If we exclude from our vocabulary the term " God " then " Humanity," becomes the bearer of the transcendant value, but the term must then mean something very different from the zoological species homo sapiens. In the background stands the immanence of God in humanity. Therefore the "voice of the people" is "God's voice."
What is true of democracy in general, applies to its several main features—religious conceptions which have been secularised and adapted to the conditions of modern life.
(i) Liberty is a paradox of modern civilisation. Man entered history and lived for thousands of

54
Swartbmove Xectuce.
years as a subject to authority which was forced upon him by arms or tradition. Group life overshadowed the individual. Liberty as we understand it is the outcome of that second wave of the Reformation that rose in England and America, from thence to overflow the world. In its wake came the political philosophy from Milton and Locke to Rousseau.
The fundamental idea of Liberty is the great conception of Jesus that no outward work is good for itself. Before God all depends on the spirit out of which the work is done. Or, as Kant puts it, legality which works under compulsion has nothing to do with morality which springs from conviction and is only possible where man is free to do the evil as well as the good. Human progress consists in widening the field of morality by retrenching the field of legality. Therefore the battle cry of those reformers who carried the Reformation to its last consequences : no compulsion, means as little compulsion as is compatible with the very existence of a social order. As man always will sin or err, peace and justice never can be upheld without a certain amount of compulsion, but the less compulsion the better.
Of all forms of compulsion the worst is the attempt to force the religious convictions by law and armed force. " Liberty " therefore meant originally Freedom of conscience, i.e. the right to avow openly any religious or irreligious conviction, and to order divine worship in whatever form conscience prescribes or to abstain from it

Democracy anfc "IReUgton.
55
altogether. In the life of the state all confessions of faith and all philosophical convictions are treated on the same footing and enjoy the same civic rights, so long as they do not—as, e.g., the polygamy of the Mormons—come into conflict with the state's general penal law. Entire freedom of conscience is only attained if the state maintains complete indifference to every religious or irreligious opinion but guarantees to each complete freedom of operation.
From this central core a wide circle of " civic liberties " was derived. Of these there can be no doubt that the rights of free speech and of free press, of free association and free assembly are religious in their origin. They concerned primarily the right of " prophesying " and of forming sects. Similarly the press censorship was of ecclesiastical origin. It is freedom of conscience, conceived simply as the absolute principle of liberty, which inspires Milton in " Areopagitica," freedom " the nurse of all great spirits." It is through freedom that the England of his vision is becoming a chosen people in a world of forced conscience and inquisitions, a people that shakes its locks endowed with the strength of Samson, and like a young eagle spreads its wings for a soaring flight.
Added to this motive was a deep-rooted mistrust of the State.
The Stuarts had after all to make themselves independent of Parliament by the sale of commercial and industrial privileges, and thereby forced their adversaries, the Puritans, to support freedom in trade and commerce. The Early

56 Swartbmore Xecture.
Baptists had been persecuted through all Europe like wild beasts, and the first generation of Quakers was only too familiar with the terrible prisons of that day. And in the eighteenth century England had driven the colonists to revolt by her harsh application of the Navigation Acts, by taxation of the Colonies without their consent, and by industrial prohibitions in a mercantilist sense, such as forbade the New England colonists even to make nails for their own use ! Freedom came to mean, therefore, next to freedom of religious life, freedom of economic life. Cromwell had already opened the gate to this, and the movement grew in England and America during the eighteenth century into the system of free competition, built on freedom of property and freedom of contract, an economic system never tried before and in fact an unheard of innovation. It meant the abdication of the State in the field of economics. For the first time in history the economic fabric was built upon the personal responsibility of each individual. From this root sprang the modern phenomenon of the " self-made man" who came gradually into prominence to burst the confines of tradition in the eighteenth century England, and to create the " American miracle " of the twentieth century.
America was from the first set on private initiative, the effective realisation of personality, the spirit of the frontiersman felling primeval forests and breaking up the virgin prairie with his plough. To such a man the government was in no sense a providence. All he expected of it was

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protection of his property. America went further than England in freeing the land from the restrictions of primogeniture. Its basis became the free farmer on his free patch of ground. In another respect also America went beyond England, where Parliament remained in principle paramount. For America was the first country in which the rights and liberties of the citizens were specifically stated, and protected by the Law Courts even against the State. How often laws have been declared by the Courts to be invalid because unconstitutional I 1 The freedom of the citizen, according to this conception, is superior to the State, the compulsive power of which is fundamentally limited. This interpretation of law was suited to develop all the capacities of the individual. It was the foundation upon which Capitalism erected its citadel in America.
But this conception of liberty has deeply changed with the evolution of capitalism. In many cases the liberty of the strong destroyed that of the weak. The great mass of the wealth became a " social product," which the capitalists appropriated as private property. Consequently a change in the interpretation of law began to set in, though slowly enough. To-day in Europe as in America a " strong government " is desired, in order to make the liberty of the citizen a reality. Compulsion seems in many cases necessary for the purposes of freedom.
This conception applies most of all to private
1 Roscoe Pound : The Spirit of the Common Law. Boston, 1921, p. 102.

58
Swartbmore Xectuie.
property which is not to be abolished but democratised. If property is a " right of man," then everybody ought to have his share in it, sufficient for freedom, though not necessarily equal.
The most important item in this respect is the free access to the land, from which private ownership has excluded the majority of the people. The free access to the land seems to be a fundamental right to every human being who is able and willing to cultivate the land by his own hands. The ideal of liberty seems to be fully realised only there where man owns the house he lives in and the plot of land the house stands on, however small it may be. That at the same time seems the best antidote against communism as the dictatorship of an armed minority. A Silesian miner, up to that date a wild communist, who was lucky enough to buy a plot of land under easy conditions, said to me when I found him a year later ploughing his land with his own cow : Now, as a communist, I would be my own enemy.
If free competition cannot democratise property, intervention by the State is inevitable, though how much intervention is needed is a question for circumstances to decide. In general people in America are satisfied to restore fair competition, to control natural monopolies, to curtail artificial monopolies, public opinion proving more effective for this purpose than State intervention. But in the last resort, European Socialism also, though rejected in America from fear that it is " uneconomic," claims to be a means

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to freedom. Even Marx states that the " Commonwealth of Freemen" (das Reich der Freien) is to be the ultimate goal of socialism. Whereas formerly the demand was for freedom from, the State, against absolutism and mercantilism, to-day under the assault of capitalism and proletarianism it is for freedom through the State. In this respect, to whatever political party we belong, we all have become socialists.
To sum up : since the days of the American Declaration of Independence, the Western World has asserted Liberty as a universal standard to work out the " Law which ought to be " (das richtige Recht). Liberty under this definition means the gradual extension for every adult of a sphere of guaranteed right with which no one is allowed to interfere, neither King nor Parliament, neither decision of the majority nor dictatorship by the minority. The aim of Liberty is the realisation of a man's personality, as an ultimate or transcendent value. Whether we agree with the affirmation or not, is a matter not for knowledge but for will: it depends on a resolve that wells up from the depth of our interpretation of life and the world. Our endorsement of it is the cause of that deep cleavage dividing the Western world from Moscow.
(2) Equality is, like Liberty, a paradox of civilisation, madder even for the " natural man " than liberty. All organic life is a victory of the strong over the weak. Variation is the very basis of biological evolution. All history was till recently a story of conquest; by means of arms it

6o
Swartbmore ^Lecture.
brought about the stratification of society into classes. All economic history was the story of the master's domination over his servants. Although the medieval Guild organisation, religious in its fundamentals, endeavoured to realise equality among guild-members, yet the whole of the Guild system rested on the exploitation of the rural population. The Russian " Mir," which, we are told, established such mircales of equality, was the outcome of the financial policy of Russia's Tartar conquerors, which was continued by the Tsars. Equality "as we understand it " is in fact the result of that second tide of the Reformation which overflowed the world from England and America. It is a claim pursued despite the fact that experience shows men to be utterly different, and even as civilisation develops, becoming more different. So for instance Englishmen and Germans in the Middle Ages were more like each other than they are to-day.
This very modern doctrine of equality has its root in the idea of the divine spark which glows in every human soul. For Jesus there was no difference between Greeks and Jews, men and women, freemen and slaves. All were called alike to the " glorious liberty of the children of God." This thought is full of meaning as long as it is maintained that humanity can trace its descent from the eternal father's home to which we are all striving to return, though to be sure with many detours and aberrations. The value of man is determined by his nearness or distance from God. Compared to eternity all earthly differences, of

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class and clothing, culture and property, even of race and colour, come to nothing.
In spite of this teaching of Jesus in medieval society the conception of equality was buried under a system of hierarchical authority. Even in the Puritan reformation the distinction between the elect and the reprobate in its practical outcome justified the distinction between master and servant and built up a new bourgeois aristocracy. It was only the Reform of the Reformation, which denied all outward authority, the traditional power of priest and king not less than the new power of money which the rising tide of capitalism brought to the front. It was in the world of the sects where rank and power were superseded by equality. So in the early Quaker meetings master and servant, man and woman, rich and poor met as " Children of the Light " and therefore as equals.
This spirit has survived up to the present time. A little Quaker book of our own day declares that the ancestral veto against removing the hat in presence of a lady should be abandoned if one raises the hat with the same politeness to the lady's serving-maid. In this spirit no calling, not even that of a waitress or woman factory worker, is to be despised, but neither is any resentment to be shown to a millionaire. In America many European tourists have been astonished by the practice of equality as a general style of life. " Fellow " is the key-word : " men and women " or better still "boys and girls" replace the conventional " ladies and gentlemen."

Swartbniore Xecture.
But in the last resort, the same conception is the pole of Kant's and Fichte's philosophy. In every human soul there is to be recognised a transcendant faculty of freedom which has to mould and master the psychological as well as the physical world. This faculty which the conscience obliges us to accept as an ultimate fact—necessity being no excuse for a sin—assures us of our divine origin and divine goal. It guarantees the value of man (" Menschenwurde ") as superior to the whole empirical world. In this sense Kant believed himself equal to the king not because he was the greatest scholar of his time but because he was man. Kant was not afraid of the political consequences of this conception, as he was and remained an admirer of the French Revolution even after its terrors.
Equality, in its essence a religious or metaphysical conception, has revolutionised the State. It has declared war upon the entire traditional system of society with its discriminations between races, castes, and classes. This thought led to the abolition of all privileges due to birth, to the demand for equal rights for all and equal possibility for every citizen to rise—the " carriere ouverte aux talents" of the French Revolution. From it sprang the emancipation of the slaves, Jews, and women, and the cry for emancipation of the " wage slaves " of capitalist industrialism. One wave of emancipation followed another from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
Nowhere have the privileges of birth been so widely demolished as in America. Not a few of

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her Presidents were the sons of peasants or workmen ; candidates for the highest offices in the State boast of having been in their youth manual labourers, if possible cowboys.
Formal equality before the law is to be sure the first step to the realisation of that real equality of which the fathers of democracy caught a glimpse. But equality before the law may be perverted into its opposite and combined with far reaching class divisions through the privileges attaching to education. No privilege is felt more cruelly than that of so-called culture (Bildungsprivileg). Accordingly Democracy demands equal opportunities for education for all, and especially for the gifted children of the poor. By grading educational opportunities, it aims to make transition from class to class, and especially from that of manual labour to that of head workers, almost unnoticeable. It aims at an homogeneous intellectual level among the broad strata of society. Similar ideals, similar standards and habits of life, even similar amusements and similar clothing combined with similar education tend to form a new middle class of which organised and skilled labour will be an important element.
America can justly point to the considerably greater progress it has made towards this ideal than Europe with all its class divisions. In capitalistic Europe " two nations " in many cases live side by side, which are as far apart as if they were born in different zones. According to Garvin America spends more on educational purposes than all the other States in the world put together.

6 4
5wattbmore ^Lecture.
Its " fanaticism for education " is manifested in a varied system of education, including State and Church schools, primary, secondary, and high schools and universities, experimental schools of every sort, varying from State to State, and college to college, and nevertheless pervaded by the same ideals and standards. The student who is at the same time a handworker (Werkstudent) is a universal phenomenon, e.g. the combination of the roles of student and waitress is very common. I was told in one of the University cities of the Western States : " Good progress in the new buildings round our campus is guaranteed by the fact that there are many builders and carpenters among this term's new students." California with a population of three millions, counts some thirty thousand University students. The student seeks from the University, first of all, training for his vocation : hence the return of so many into commerce, industry and manual labour. In the second place he seeks to acquire a general culture with a view to the better discharge of his duties as citizen and the better employment of his leisure. If one adds that university students come to a large extent from working class homes (it is for instance computed that 80 per cent, of the sons and daughters of the organised railway workers attend universities) one begins to realise how wide a domain has been won to cultural unity. However we Europeans estimate all this it is at any rate beyond dispute that the ideal of democracy demands some sort of equalisation of the different levels of education, the production of a

2>emocraq? ant> TReligton.
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common intellectual atmosphere to pervade the community.
Privileges of property are as much opposed to the democratic ideal as privileges of education. Indeed in the capitalist age equality is first of all an economic problem, within which the cultural problem is included. There can be no inequality more glaring than the conception of labour as a tool to serve the profit of the capitalistic class. It is not a case of equalising incomes and fortunes with mathematical precision—-which would be a foolish proposal. The need is rather to build up new middle classes with similar incomes and similar habits of consumption, a grading in economic relationship by gentle degrees from below upwards that would offer facility to the competent man to rise in the scale. Without such intermediate strata, democracy remains a mere paper theory, however fine the paragraphs of its constitution may sound. In contradiction to the spirit of democracy, is the very existence of a class forced by destitution to sell its labour on terms that do no more than secure the minimum necessary for existence. The very existence of a proletariat fettered generation after generation to its particular class is a blow in the face of the democratic ideal. The proletarian in claiming to be a " human being " is protesting in the name of equality against a merely formal democracy. He wants a share in the social product sufficient to make cultural and political democracy a reality.
To sum up : since the days of the American Declaration of Independence and the French
5a

66
Swartbmore Xecture.
Revolution equality is proclaimed as a universal human right with an emphasis very disquieting to its opponents. The demand means not merely the securing of a formal equality before the law, but also equal opportunities of education and property. It means for the privileged classes, for the rulers of birth and wealth, nothing but a revolt of slaves, to be smashed by those who have the arms in their hands. But it wins its cause, when it becomes victorious in the hearts of the rulers, their best sons proving deserters. The Bastille is conquered from within.
(3) It would be a great error to suppose that modern democracy in its original sense sought only the rights of the individual as comprised in the conceptions of Liberty and Equality. It also meant Fraternity, or, as we say to-day, Solidarity— the third of the " rights of man " of the French Revolution. " Fraternity " in its medieval sense —the expression surviving in the University life of America—means a community guided by the principle : all for each, each for all. In such a community, the individuals are members of one body, they live and work for the whole though with different gifts and vocations. If one member suffers, all members suffer (1 Cor. xii.). Such a social unit is the bearer of a value, co-ordinate with or even superior to that of the individual. This conception has been realised to a certain degree in the medieval guild ; it culminated in the medieval conception of a world embracing Empire and a universal Church as trustees of the political and spiritual unity of mankind.

Democracy attfc "Keligton.
67
Such a conception of society has a religious origin and is workable only so long as it is built upon metaphysical foundations. Else the individual, whose interests centre in a short lifetime, will assert his rights at the cost of the community which covers generations ; he will try to reap the pleasures of life at the cost of the neighbour who is regarded as a mere instrument for the interests of the ego. True community life is only possible where the individual is overshadowed by a super individual value however it be called. This subordination in animal life is brought about by instinct. In the life of primitive man, tradition and authority work in the same way, both descending in most cases from conquest and armed force. Another kind of motivation must step in, where man has been awakened to self- determination, where he feels himself free to submit or to revolt.
In the western world this motivation springs up from religious sources as distinctly Christian. The Community which was the vision of Jesus means a very peculiar kind of social life. He and His disciples form a spiritual body of which He is the head, they the members, cemented by the spirit of solidarity or brotherhood, and working together for a transcendent goal which He calls the Kingdom of God. The divine spirit or Holy Ghost which Jesus left to His disciples, is leading mankind step by step towards this ultimate goal —opening up new truths which former times have not been able to digest.
This historic view embracing the whole of

68 Swartbmore Xecture.
mankind, including the conception of progress, was prepared in the asiatic " empires," broke through in Hellenism, and was taken up by the Stoic and the " good emperors " of Rome. It was advanced by the conception of the globular form of the earth, which—unknown to the Babylonians and Egyptians—appeared by the Pythagoreans to find general acceptance by Aristotle and Alexander as a commonplace of the cultured minority. 1 In contrast to the unlimitedness of the flat surface, the ball suggests the idea of unity and prepares the conception of the " oecumenical."
The founders of Christianity built upon the oecumenical idea: God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. For Jesus the distinctions between Jews and Gentiles, Bond and Free had disappeared— they were all children of God. The Holy Ghost came down upon the disciples, when they were " with one accord," i.e. when they were together as one spiritual fellowship. He spoke through them to each people in its own language. He speaks still, for the miracle of Pentecost is not dead.
The Kingdom as an ultimate goal is transcendent, but its stages are immanent in history and even in daily life. Wherever two or three of His friends and followers are united in His spirit there is a germ of the Kingdom which, though invisible, is amongst us. From these small groups of disciples the divine spirit permeates the world.
1 My attention was drawn to this by my daughter, Dr. Ruth v. Schulze-Gavernitz.

Democracy anfc TReUgton.
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The Kingdom of God branches out like the giant tree from the smallest seed of a true fellowship.
Where disciples unite in a more permanent way for the worship of God and His service in the world they form a Church. They are members of one body, responsible for the whole and for each. In such a Church there is a spirit of communion, a collective will and a wisdom superior to the will and wisdom of the individual.
All the churches of true disciples, though they have different missions and talk different languages, form branches of the one invisible Church, which is Christ's spiritual body, militant now, triumphant when the end comes.
The Catholic accepts the visible Church as the mystical body of Christ which under the guidance of the Holy Ghost unfolds dogmatic truth and prepares the " civitas dei " as the end of history. It is on this foundation that the Roman Catholic Church has become the fertile soil of all sorts of co-operative guilds and even of successful socialism in some monastic orders, where private property is suppressed.
The so-called Reform of the Reformation inherited the catholic view of society. The New Zion is built up by social groups in which the spirit of true solidarity reigns. Thus early Baptists developed into communities where corporate life over-ruled the individual, where even experiments in socialism proved successful. Witness of this are the " Hutterers " who built up socialist communities which have outlived centuries. In America many experiments were

7°
Swartbmore Xecture.
made by various sects to build up socialist communities. They remained socialist as long as the religious cement proved stronger than the utilitarian tendencies which, if they prevailed, meant either failure or success on capitalistic lines.
But mark the difference : compared with the traditional and authoritative spirit which pervaded the social structure of the Middle Ages, the sects as exponents of the " Reform of the Reformation " tried to reconcile Solidarity as the leading principle of community life with Freedom and Equality as inalienable rights of the members. Individualism as the outcome of the official reformation was to be accepted, but at the same time overcome by a higher synthesis—it was " aufgehoben " in the Hegelian sense of this word.
This view became a foundation stone of the Classical Philosophy of Germany. It is a great error to regard Kant as an extreme individualist ; for him mankind is one social unit, which from animal life develops in history to a spiritual goal. Therefore he could say, that the animal reaches its destination as an individual—a strong and healthy animal is perfect—whereas man fulfils his destination through the historic evolution of mankind— man is perfect only in a social order where each member accepts the rights and interests of the fellow citizens as his own goal. Kant calls this vision the " state of reason" (Vernunftstaat) which is nothing but the " Kingdom of God " disguised by metaphysics. This conception developed into the German socialism of Fichte, Marx, Lassalle and Jaurte, the last named, who

2)emocraci? and TReltgton.
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though being a great Frenchman by birth was at the same time the spiritual son of Kant.
The idea of the Kingdom of God was the point from which Hegel started for his world encircling journey, as he avowed in a famous letter to Holderlin. For Hegel, man can be " man " in the spiritual sense of this word only as the member of the social organisations which in their variety and abundance co-operate for progress. The divine spirit unfolds itself in the history of mankind, the nations being its chief agents.
To each nation, to each age there has been entrusted a commission that is all their own. 1 A message is to be delivered. The noblest men of each age have fought under this banner, with a sense that it was God's work and they were His chosen workers. Hegel, in this respect essentially Christian, embraces in his world view the whole of mankind—all that is human in space and time. For him there is no difference between sacred and profane history, all history being sacred, all history striving towards the one goal which lies beyond history.
Great possibilities lie at the bottom of these conceptions if they become life convictions presented in terms of modern times. This Miss M. P. Follett tries to do in her remarkable book, The New State. Lord Haldane states in the preface he has written to this book that Hegel himself would have expressed similar views if he had lived in Boston as our contemporary.
1 John Kelman, Honour towards God. Edinburgh, 1903 (with nearly Hegelian words).

7 2
Swartbmore Xecture.
There is another great ally for the work of social reconstruction, a guide who is and will be alive even for our children and grand-children : Goethe who built a vault over Kant and Hegel.
In countless passages Goethe confesses that man as a member of a community, working along the lines of his calling, gains a higher freedom than the unfettered individualist. " Make of yourself an organ, and watch what place mankind will kindly grant to you in the common life." " The best man, in doing one thing, does all." Everybody ought to understand one thing and do it according to his vocation—Goethe said, his vocation was " to write German "—but at the same time nothing that is human ought to be indifferent to him. He ought to be a one-sided worker and at the same time an all-round man. Goethe confessed himself in favour of the subordination of private property to the social needs. " Man should hold fast to every kind of possession ; but he should make himself the centre from which the common weal can radiate." " Here or nowhere is Herrenhut "—i.e. the place of love active in deeds, which widens from " home piety " to " world piety." Goethe likens history to a Fugue composed by a great master in which the voices of the separate nations one after the other come to expression and confesses his allegiance to the cause of mankind : " In each particular being we shall see more and more, through personality and nationality, the common humanity shining through." At the same time Goethe confessed and practised the joyous activism of

©emocracs anb Religion.
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those who strive and work with God, who " praise him in deeds" (tatig ihn preisende). He, with his age, believed in the alliance with the ideas which ultimately govern history. The immanence of God in man and mankind was the ground on which, with " Saint Spinoza," Goethe founded his undaunted optimism which is and always will be the condition of success in private as well as in public life.
Through Germany's classical philosophy, the " Reform of the Reformation " was broadened out from the narrow circles of sectarianism to the all human sphere, though both Kant and Goethe had close contact with these sects through Pietists and Moravians, both being at the same time thorough Bible scholars.
From these sources, the Christian bedrock, the Anglo-American free churches, the French Revolution and the classical philosophy of Germany—springs the western ideal of what could be called Social Democracy, not as a narrow party slogan but as a philosophical conception broadly accepted by the spirit of the age. Social democracy is not opposed to the liberal democracy which stands for the rights of the individual, but it accepts and defends these rights by subordinating them to the community. Men become free and equal in a higher sense by co-operating voluntarily and joyfully for the ends of the whole : freedom through membership (Gliedfreiheit). Such a democracy does not consist in a mere counting of votes, but it produces a collective will, the " volonte generale " of Rousseau which cannot

Swartbmore Xecture,
err. We should call it to-day a strong and enlightened public opinion, which—though by detours—will in the long run find the right way.
There are two fields in which social democracy has to be developed : the -political and the economic field.
The most important of all the political units nowadays is the State. If democracy is described as " popular government " where all power is derived from the people and where the will of the people is sovereign, the people are presupposed as a social unit. Such a unit is called a nation superseding the internal distinctions between political parties and economic classes. The more you have a cohesion between the citizens, the more you can have of true democracy. Such a democracy means more than individual rights ; its chief aim being to produce a collective will. For this purpose the political party is indispensable as the machine to build up a majority which ratifies and in many cases fashions the will of the people.
But democracy at the same time limits the maj ority right and protects the minority at least by the right of free speech, possibly by a suffrage which gives expression to the minority. And since the citizens' will can only find expression within the party, non-party politics are meaningless within the sphere of popular government. On the contrary it is a matter of duty to take a share in party politics.
While democracy in Europe has its last word in decision by majority America has devised as a higher court of appeal public opinion. It is this

Democracy an& IReltgton.
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public opinion to which both the majority-elected president and the majority party listen and which they follow, perhaps with attempts now to restrain, now to incite it. The fact of a public opinion as the last resort in political life opens up unsuspected vistas toward the better democracy of the future.
If public opinion is to be purified and strengthened there is needed first of all the wider dissemination of knowledge, especially of knowledge concerning the social sciences. How much more important it is for instance for the citizen to know something about the fundamentals of currency, as a safeguard against inflation, than to know something about the Copernican system ! Not less important is the reliable and rapid dissemination of news through the press, and the spread of the knowledge of geography, world politics and world economics by means of magazines. No question is of greater moment for Democracy than the possession of a serious- minded and incorruptible press. Furthermore the citizen-elector needs more freedom to assimilate and digest this knowledge than the run and rush of the city allows the poor hunted office worker in particular. The hand worker is in this respect in a more advantageous position. Finally and most of all, democracy needs an intensified feeling of responsibility, which shall make the individual be as sensitive to questions which involve the whole community as though they were his own private concerns.
But State-democracy is only ensured if from the State above it lays hold on those smaller groups

76
Swartbmore ^Lecture.
and associations which buttress the State from beneath. In the local community, from the small village to the metropolis, we have a model of the State, most like to it yet more capable than the State of being controlled by public opinion and collective will, because on a smaller scale.
But at the same time democracy aims to reconstruct the field of international relations called foreign politics. Mankind as a political unit is prepared by the economic interdependence of all nations which the English Free Traders were the first to discern as the great feature of a new time. Democracy aims at an international order where peace is organised and reconciled with equal rights of all nations, great or small. Such an order would mean a world democracy. Every action in foreign politics ought to be judged by the question how far does it work for or against this great goal, which, far from being Utopian, will be reached in due time.
In the economic field, even under the rule of the present day capitalistic system, the germs of social democracy are to be observed. We have to distinguish three stages. First of all we have the trades unions of employees and the federations of employers which, accepting the capitalistic system, fight about wages and hours, coming at the best to some temporary agreements (Tarifvertrage). Such a peace is an armed peace which prepares new wars. But, seen from within, the trades unions are cemented by the solidarity of the members and therefore they are in this respect supercapitalistic. In the second stage are formed

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those organisations, which though working on the ground of the capitalistic order, try to supersede its fundamentals. In this respect a great field has been reclaimed by the co-operative societies embracing to-day millions of working men and peasants. Their final goal is to overcome the capitalistic system by an economic order based on solidarity. The same applies, though in a minor way, to the cartels, trusts and trade associations of the capitalists, which try to exclude or to organise competition. 1 The third stage, to-day only touched in an experimental way, would be reached where capital and labour combined to conduct a factory, even a branch of industry, on the lines of mutual service and voluntary cooperation. Quaker employers, as e.g. the Cadburys at Bournville, have tried to build up their famous works on the principle of solidarity (Werkgemeinschaft). Hugo Stinnes and Sir Alfred Mond have tried to combine organised capital with organised labour in order to conduct a given branch of industry by collective action (Arbeits- gemeinschaf t).
There might come a day when the whole of the economic life will be controlled by mutual consent of labour and leader, brought together in a national council. The germs of such a central power—non-bureacratic but businesslike—might
1 The first cartel known of in history was founded about 1762 by some Quaker ironmasters, the Darbys at their head, who at the Society of Friends' monthly meetings used to talk over business in fixing fair prices of their produce. Isabel Grubb, Quakerism and Industry, London, 1930. S. 147.
6

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Swartbmore Xecturc.
be found in the work of Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce at Washington. The guild spirit of old days has to find its modern form and to be reconciled with leadership and discipline, inevitable where big industry and modern technology prevail.
We may hope for a day when the great organisers of industry shall feel it to be more worthy to co-operate with free and contented fellow-workers instead of with mere hirelings who under the scourge of hunger regard their work with indifference or hostility. To do battle with the blind force of nature we have to summon the force of community action. Only when the born leaders " with a free people stand upon free ground," will they be tempted to say to the moment, Goethe's " nay tarry, thou art so fair," —and on that day it will be found that the year's balance sheet shows a happy outcome. For democracy " pays" if applied step by step and by educational methods.
Disappointed with democracy of the present day, let us remember the word, that disillusionment with regard to democracy is based on the absence of true democracy.
(4) Western Socialism, as to the ultimate goal, coincides with modern democracy. Both strive for a social order where Liberty, Equality and Solidarity reign. Even Karl Marx himself was imbued with the spirit of democracy which he had inherited from bourgeois ancestors. In this respect the western socialism is a synthesis between primitive socialism, where the community meant

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everything and the individual nothing, and Liberalism where the individual was paramount and the community was broken up.
But Socialism is more than that, its field being economics. It is a criticism of the capitalistic order which it condemns, after having explained its origination and its evolution. It condemns it as opposed to the democratic ideal. According to the socialist critics, capitalism means disguised slavery instead of liberty, distinction of classes instead of equality, and individual profiteering instead of solidarity.
But as the world, according to a famous saying of Marx, is not only to be explained but to be improved, socialism at the same time means politics : it advocates a system of measures to overcome the capitalistic order either by reform or by revolution. Its fundamental idea is to build up a central power which on a rational basis leads and regulates the economic life the present state of which is called anarchic.
It is not within the range of these pages to discuss these assertions. One thing is certain : a single slogan will not do. Even the famous word of Karl Marx, " Nationalisation of the means of production," has very little concrete sense when you come to practical business. Here every measure recommended or tried has to be proved on its own merits. You can nationalise the forests, but not the gardens, the electricity works but not the tools of the craftsmen, the railways but not the motor-cars. If you wish to widen the field of State interference, honesty of the officials is the

Swartbmore Xecture.
first condition. Where corruption prevails, laissez faire will prove the better policy.
As to the measures there is to-day even no sharp distinction between the socialist and the non- socialist camp. There is a general distrust of competition carried to its extreme, which is suspected to breed unethical exploitation, to overexpand the productive capacity, and in many cases to tend towards reductions of wages. On the other hand, there is a general distrust of government regulation which is suspected of stagnation and dilletantism, and, therefore, in the last resort of lowering the standard of life of the people. There is rising a new vision of a better way than mere competition and mere nationalisation. It would mean co-operation founded on the principle of social service and managed by practical men of highest character and attainmentd
But while we are discussing these measures, a danger arises which would make this discussion senseless. An itinerary is good as long as we know where we want to travel. Whatever politics mean they presuppose a goal for which we strive, even if it be with the sacrifice of our personal life. But the goal vanishes, when the belief decays on which it is built, just as the flowers wither when the root dries up. Western democracy and western socialism are built on the belief in the immanence of an absolute value in each human being and in humanity as a whole —a value which our ancestors called God. But this faith has suffered shipwreck
1 Magnus W. Alexander, Industry's Age of Reason, National Ind. Conf. Board, New York, 1930.

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not only in Moscow but also in atheistic Berlin, Paris, London and New York. The old forms of religious belief for many contemporaries have become empty shells. " Fundamentalism " as a petrification of the past will not help. The western world not less than Soviet Russia lives on the remnants of the religious past, and spends its spiritual capital which still cements the social fabric. The fact stands that we are surrounded by the ruins of decaying democracy. The young shoots of socialism are suffocated by the drought of materialism.
There is no form of political organisation which offers a better handle to the strong and wealthy to erect a new and soulless domination than a democracy estranged from its spiritual sources. Capitalism is gaining power through the corruptibility of both the elected and the electors. It is gaining power above all over the press in order to make public opinion just as it makes rails and calico. Democracy is becoming a dead form, despised by the intellectuals, revolted against by the " wage slaves." Farseeing observers of our modern State agree with Bryce that the real danger to western democracy lies in political materialism.
There is no form of State organisation which offers a better handle to corruption than that socialism which has become materialistic and utilitarian. No economic system is more subject to stagnation than that socialism whose officials conceive of their own existence as an end in itself and breed officials in order to reward partisans.

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Such socialism is threatened by the revolt of Labour itself, betrayed by its leaders.
Amidst a spiritual breakdown such as the world has not seen since the decay of the Roman Empire neither political nor economic schemes will prevent the age from shooting down into cataclysm.
Our only hope lies in a spiritual rebirth which is to quicken the great ideals of democracy to a new life. Is there a belief, social and democratic at the same time, which is equal to the intellectual achievements as well as to the emotional tendencies of the rising generation ? Shall we succeed in gaining afresh what, as an inheritance from our fathers, for many of us is worse than unnecessary ballast, but has become in fact a dead letter or a lie on which a social fabric cannot be built ?

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Chapter IV
THE MISSION OF QUAKERISM IN THE PRESENT DAY
Not in politics and not in economics lies the final arbiter of our time. Politics and economics are dependent upon belief. Shall we succeed in overcoming the spiritual decay which threatens us with social chaos ? Shall we succeed in permeating politics and economics with the spirit of freedom and solidarity which are both rooted in the spiritual ? Unfettered by history we must give meaning to our life and time out of our own deepest experience. But however desirous the generation which experienced the world war may be of severing itself from history, we all stand upon the soil of the Western tradition which our forefathers have cultivated. If we forsake this, we are in danger of losing ourselves in the void.
It is in this sense that Quakerism, which is neither a political nor a social movement, seeks to prepare the way for the reform of both. It seeks to make a superconfessional synthesis of our Catholic and, Protestant heritage by spiritualising both or, as Carl Heath puts it, Quakerism desires to be " more protestant than the protestants, more catholic than the catholics."

S 4
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Quakers, as guardians of a spiritual religion, without creed, or priest, or visible sacrament, know that they will remain a small group. But they hope to achieve a " peaceful penetration " of their environment. They sow their seeds widely. They frankly co-operate with the churches of all denominations. At the same time they appeal to the so-called free-thinkers who do not believe in God but in mankind and progress, both, at the root, religious conceptions. They gather around them a wider Quaker fellowship, in many lands and of all creeds, the so-called " Friends of the Friends," to make them better protestants, better catholics, better socialists, without separating them from their present spiritual affiliation. In America they are in touch with numerous scientists who, having moved far away from the dogmatic formulas of the past, at heart have remained believers. Quakers do not try to bottle up the truth in old forms, but try to use the language of the present day, open to whatever of modern thought seems valuable and essential. For indeed every age speaks of God in its own language.
Let me give a few instances. A short time ago a communist miner, who enthusiastically affirms Moscow atheism, wrote to me, that he denied God and believed in " the good that was evident in itself." I answered that he had in those words given perhaps the most fitting definition of God for our age. Whether he used two " o's " or one " o," was a matter of complete indifference. It is a peculiar path which is leading a disciple of

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Freud as a psychotherapeutist through observation of medical cases to a " subject beyond time " as a " deepest subconsciousness " in which the roots of logic and of ethics lie. 1
No matter. " Name is sound and smoke veiling the glow of heaven." The better part is silence and it is just in this silence that God is audible : He speaks in the depths of the soul and sounds through the history of the world. He is the " eternal Yes " of the Spiritual Man as opposed to the " eternal No " of the Old Adam.
Loud and manifold are the voices which sound this No in our days when all traditional forms decay. But the crescendo undertone of a Yes rings in the confused soul of the age. The denier asks woefully after the significance and purpose of his life.
I am reminded of a comparison for which I have to thank my unforgettable friend, the cancer specialist, Professor Edwin Goldmann, who said : Cancer is a condition in which the cell abandons its function as part of the whole, and develops hypertrophically at the expense of the whole— in fact a " cell mutiny." In a similar way the man who denies God, denies his relationship to the universe and thereby destroys those social communities which reproduce on a small scale the universal order. In both cases the member cuts itself off from the whole, though it is only capable of living as an organ of the whole.
From this point of view, the Early Quakers'
1 Dr. Oskar Kohnstamm, Erscheinungsformen der Seele, Munchen, 1927, S. 515.
7

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Swartbmore Uecture.
conception of the Inner Light wins a very modern meaning. It was, is and will be the centre of the Quaker's message. So Rufus Jones, one of the leading interpreters of modern Quakerism, speaks of the Inner Light as a " radiation of the central light of the spiritual universe."
As a Christian society the Quakers believe that the Inner Light broke through with peculiar radiance in the man Jesus, without denying the divine mission of other prophets. Together with the old church they call Jesus their Master and Lord, the Son of God, the Logos. By Him death is turned to victory, Good Friday to Easter Day. He lives ; where two or three are gathered together in His spirit He is there in their midst. Are we to believe that the visible appearances of the risen Lord ended with the ascension, the story of which, as a later interpolation to the Biblical report, signifies nothing other than a weakening of the belief in resurrection. Was the Lord less visible to St. Francis when he received the stigmata than to Paul on the road to Damascus ?
But Quakers have no dogmatic Christology. For them Jesus is an intimate personal experience which every Christian must express in his own language or about which he may prefer to be silent. He is a progressive experience which grows deeper in the life of the seeker. He is heard differently by the man in the fulness of life and the man on his deathbed. He speaks to each individual in his own tongue-—in one way to the great liberator Kant, to the all round Goethe, in another to the devout mother or the watching sick nurse. But

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for every human being the highest goal of life, attainable in his best moments, is the experience of Jesus : "I and my Father are one."
The Quaker seeks the proof of discipleship not in a credo but in the undertone pervading the life. Joy, peace, goodwill (Freude, Friede, Freundschaft) radiate from the eye of the true disciple to whatever confession he belongs—j oy in the heart, peace with the world, friendship with all life whether of man or beast. He will prove that he holds the " true ring " by that spirit out of which " works " flow and through those results which cannot but come when we surrender our own self and become the tool of the divine will. In this sense, Jesus was the victor on the Cross who amidst the dreadful earthly catastrophe could say " the goal is reached," the great divide of history was built.
With their belief in the Inner Light, Quakers deepen the protestam idea of freedom. The Inner Light is independent of any authority, of saints and prophets, of any event of the past. It is independent also of the written word of the Bible. The Reformers offered a book and did not dare to take the final step and place the truth of that book in conscience as the final arbiter. The official reformation bound the human will to evil and thereby made the doctrine of predestination inevitable. For the Quaker, man is free to choose the evil but also the good. For him as for Kant, freedom is the guarantee of our divine origin. For him as for Goethe the " original good " is rooted as deeply in the human nature as the

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" original sin. " For him life is not a chain of continuous defeats, but a purposeful advance. Efforts to progress are not fruitless, even though the final goal may only be reached in another world. " He who strives on without ceasing, him we can save."
Three spheres are set before man to conquer and to set in order : his own soul, his own body, his social environment. The social environment offers us tough resistance. The despair of despair might creep over us in face of the social sin which entangles us all, from which none escapes who handles money. " Pecunia olet " one might say reversing a well known proverb. We do not know, but we guess at the sweat and blood that clings to the money which we accept and spend. Has it passed in its course through banks or brothels ? Has it through pressure of taxation severed natives from their ancestral soil or as war tribute enslaved generations who were unborn when the war broke out ? In face of the so-called peace treaties upon which the order of present-day Europe rests, in face of nationalism, which piles up the customs barriers and armaments, in face of mammonism and class-war, of unbelief and profiteering, as the moving forces of this age, we confess only too easily our impotence, and fall into useless accusations.
We have started at the wrong end. There is one sphere, which with God's help stands completely within our power, our own soul—and through a changed attitude in our soul oar own body, the " self " of the psycho-physical world.

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Only new men will build the new society. There can be no conquest of the world without previous conquest of self, no social reform without self-reform.
In this respect, we children of the twentieth century are extraordinarily favourably situated. Psychology offers us to-day unimagined possibilities of human capacity. Freud, whatever may be our attitude to his individual assertions, has unveiled the ocean of the subconscious. Psychotechnics teach us how to pacify and sail this ocean. Unheard of horizons open up to us. To our forefathers wireless telegraphy would have seemed like witchcraft, for us the secrets of telepathy are coming into the region of the intelligible. Possibilities of healing are opening out to psychotherapeutics, which resemble the miracles of the Bible. We gladly accept the achievements of Coue and his school. The New Thought Movement has put thousands of its adherents into " Harmony with the Infinite."
In close connection with these advances are those in Biology. Applying the biological laws which centuries of so-called civilisation have abused and trespassed, we can make life a " glorious fate " and become efficient instruments of our calling. In America this movement is associated with the name of Dr. J. H. Kellogg. By reforming ourselves, which nobody can hinder us from doing, we prepare the way for social reform which is bound to come if a minority of strong men and women decide to have it. The social unrest of our time comes in no small degree from physical decay. The man whose biological system is rotten
7a

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Swartbmore Xecture.
and broken, is discontented with himself and the world about him. The strong and joyous man who has his own soul and his own body under control, will—step by step—improve his environment and permeate the social order around him with constructive spirit.
The Quaker, by tradition and conviction friendly to science will be open to the psychological and biological achievements of modern time. He will apply the advices of science as the means and ways to a goal which, as he knows, no science can demonstrate, but which science presupposes as the absolute value of truth which it is possible to reach by earnest endeavour and genial intuition. The " eternal Yes " has to come first as the turning point in life but it has to be worked out by a psychological and biological regeneration.
All these things have nothing to do with the Christian dogma, but they have much to do with the life of Jesus. Born on the outskirt of the cultural circles of His time, He grew up in close contact with nature and far from city life. Schooled in a handicraft He loved loneliness, the desert nor as a place of terror but as the flowering steppes. It was here that He overcame Satan, here the animals flocked to Him, here the angels ministered to Him, here He gathered " in prayer and fasting " the divine strength, with which He —the greatest psychotherapeutist of all ages— set out on the peaceful conquest of the world. We cannot think of Him other than as the strong and radiant youth who anticipated the words of the apostle : " Know ye not that your body is a

'a' ■*•
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temple of the Holy Ghost, and ye are not your own ! "
Glorifying God with His body and His soul He became the great healer from sin and illness which practically flow from the same source. Strong and beneficent as the sun, He radiated the divine light into the world, submerging Himself into the divine will He became free and strong as God Himself. We, too, as His followers are called to the glorious freedom of the Children of God.
(2) The universality of grace stands beside " the Inner Light " as the second pole of Quakerism. Devout Quakers died a martyr's death on Boston Common in the seventeenth century for confession of this faith. The spirit of God not only speaks in the depth of every individual human soul, it is revealed in mankind as a whole,
There is no sphere of life which is to be abandoned to its own worldly authority—neither art nor science, whose close relationship to religion, leading scientists are emphasising to-day, so for example Einstein. Economics and politics, cut off from a religious core, turn into the hunting ground of demons. There is no race or people which is not included in the scheme of salvation. Even at the utmost bounds of the ocean, wherever the missionary comes, to quote the fine words of Zinzendorf, the Holy Ghost has already visited there. This is particularly true of the great peoples of Asia, with whom Quakerism to-day stands in a relationship of spiritual exchange, claiming at the same time their political independence and national self-determination.

Swartbmore ^Lecture.
Widening the Church idea of the Catholics into the idea of Mankind the Quakers hope for the New Zion, " the great rebuilding" of George Fox, the Johannine Church of love, " the Kingdom of Freedom " heralded by Kant, Fichte and Marx. They do not merely hope, they work according to their limited insight and with limited means for this final goal of all history.
They seek to anticipate it in a world wide charity. During the war their charity was extended to the subjects of the enemy governments. As soon as the war had ended, they were among the first to enter the enemy's countries, to feed German and Polish children. They helped to transplant persecuted eastern sects like the Doukobors and Nazarenes to America, the land of freedom of conscience. They cared for Armenian and Greek refugees. They fought famine in Russia and China. They worked for equal rights for the negro population of the United States, not through legal paragraphs, but by means of schools for professional training and religious instruction. That the Holy Ghost knows no colour bar, is supported for them by the spiritual songs of the American negroes with their depth and fervour. Behind this stands the thought of the unity of all human life, as John Woolman says, thinking of the negro slaves : "I was mixed with them and could not consider myself as a distinct or separate being."
This word of John Woolman's points to something higher than mere charity. In order to open the way to a new social order built upon the

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principle of solidarity, as the present day's generation longs for though going astray to find it, it is time to revive the community ideals and the cooperative spirit which is our best inheritance from the Middle Ages. It is time to complete the " Reform of the Reformation " which found its first expression in the communities of the Early Baptists. The Quakers, practical idealists and not satisfied with fine words, try to experience fellowship first of all in the small groups of their own society.
The Quakers believe that they approach this goal in their meetings for worship. By turning their back on the run and rush of the city, by gathering themselves together, they seek to discover the unity in the spirit from above or, as the early Quakers said, the unity in the mystical body of Christ. Thus George Keith reports in 1670 of a Quaker meeting for worship which he attended : " After centreing down, they feel a corporate sense of communion with God and the brethren." If the Quakers attribute sacramental significance to their meetings for worship, the well-known theologian Otto confirmed this in the following words : " The Silent Worship of the Quakers is in fact a realisation of Communion in both senses of the word—inward oneness and fellowship of the individual with invisible present Reality and the mystical union of many individuals with one another. In this regard there is the plainest inward kinship between the two forms of worship which, viewed externally, seem to stand at the opposite poles of religious

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development, viz., the Quaker meeting and the Roman Catholic. Mass."
In the same way the Quakers seek collective wisdom in their business meetings, which strive to discover " the will of the whole " without applying the mechanical principle of counting votes.
In order to understand the formation of such a collective will, determined on a religious basis, let us try to enter into the " spirit " of a Yearly Meeting, which is the ruling body of the " Society of Friends." The meeting opens with a period of silent worship when each member strives to enter into the " holy fellowship," and opens his inward ear to the voice of the Spirit. Then follows the discussion. There is ample opportunity for the free expression of opinion and for the leaders to exercise their influence. This is all the more possible because those present have not come to press their own settled view, but to arrive at a new and, if possible, unified opinion for in the last resort all truth is one. With absolute freedom of speech the members are accustomed to self- restraint through their " silent meetings for worship." Finally the chairman, known by the modest name of " Clerk," declares that this or that is what he " feels " to be the sense of the meeting, which he writes down unless there is any objection. Should there be any serious difference of opinion, a period of silence is interpolated, in which the gathering earnestly seeks to know the divine will about the question before it. Thereupon follows further discussion, until one will has made itself evident. Should that not

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occur and some difficult objection remain, the meeting disperses without coming to any conclusion. For Quakers do not coerce a minority by means of a majority. Chatterers are privately warned, though not without patient love and sympathy for human failings and peculiarities. In many cases minorities do not press their opinion but submit voluntarily to the majority which in time they hope will be ripe for what they feel to be progress.
In this way the Quakers try to pave the way for the better Democracy of the future which shall produce " collective wisdom " and embody it in a strong and enlightened public opinion. At the same time they try to prepare the way for a new social order where by the conception of service men and women shall be free and equal members of the nation, where the nation shall be an organised working community and where the nations shall be free and equal members of an organised mankind.
Life is what we make it. The age becomes what it believes. It becomes chaos when it believes in the self seeking and rottenness of men and thus lets loose the war of all against all. It becomes cosmos if it believes in the powers of freedom and fellowship and calls men to the service of the whole. This seems to be Utopian when seen in the large, but it is very practical in the narrow circles of daily life, of friends, family, and colleagues. Let us build up such circles of peace, joy and goodwill from which the spirit of God may radiate into the peaceless and battling world. The kingdom of God is coming, it even

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is among us. God's peace descends like dew upon this poor earth, let us be its overflowing vessel. Let us do our work whether small or great, here and now, without rest, but without haste, as laying a stone for the kingdom of God. Nobody can hinder us to do so. Let us work, let us hope, let us be silent.
Words are good, but they are not the greatest, The greatest cannot be made manifest in words, The spirit whence we act, that is the highest.
(Goethe.)



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