‘Burthening the Pure Life’

Chapter I of Frederick J. Nicholson's landmark history,  Quakers and the Arts: A Survey of Attitudes of British Friends to the Creative Arts from the Seventeeth to the Twentieth Century.   London: Friends Home Service Committee, 1968

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Preface   |   Chapter 1  |  2

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[1]

CHAPTER I: ‘Burthening the Pure Life’

THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN did gather us and catch us all, as in a net, and his heavenly power at one time drew many hundreds to land.   We came to know a place to stand in and what to wait in; and the Lord appeared daily to us, to our astonishment, amazement and great admiration, insomuch that we often said one unto another, with great joy of heart: ‘What, is the Kingdom of God come to be with men?’
         Francis Howgill, 1618-1669

This Society (of Friends), its members believed, was called into existence to exhibit the features of that kingdom which Christ came into the world to establish. . . .    They were therefore to keep themselves entirely from the habits of this world, from its varying fashions, from its amusements, and, as far as might be, from its phraseology.   With these the so-called Christian body had become defiled; nay, the very devices by which it had seemed to assert its existence were themselves earthly and sensual, bearing no testimony whatever to the distinction between the light and darkness, to the spirituality and universality of the kingdom, and to the presence of the Spirit.
        The Kingdom of Christ: or Hints to a Quaker respecting the Principles, Constitution and Ordinances of the Catholic Church by Frederick Denison Maurice

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The fact that George Fox, the leader of the early Quakers, was in his youth a shepherd and village cobbler, with little formal education, does not in itself account for his opposition to the arts of music, [2] plays, dancing and to the popular games of the period.   Poets, dramatists, musicians and artists before and after Fox have come from peasant stock in rustic communities and their creative powers have broken through environmental impediments.   But George Fox was born in an era and among a people hungry for God and obsessed by religious issues.   He was one, perhaps the greatest, among innumerable Seekers after Truth and Righteousness.    It was inevitable that when he finally found the One who ‘spoke to his condition’ he should strive to communicate the great discovery as the one thing needful.   To that work he brought his whole moral, emotional and practical equipment, his intuitive insights combining with a rare gift of organising ability.   Like a peripatetic but cheerful John the Baptist he tramped the length and breadth of the land witnessing to the power of the Spirit and evoking a Messianic expectation.   With the true valour of the Christian warrior George Fox fought in the ‘Lamb’s War’ for the establishment of Righteousness. (1)   He and the ‘Valiant Sixty’ who stumped the country were no mere passive waiters for the ‘Dayspring upon High’; they announced the immanence of the Kingdom of Heaven and the imminence of the Day of the Lord.   The note of extreme urgency resounds in their preaching, their epistles, prayers and exhortations.   Time was short; all energy, all faculties, had to be concentrated on this mission; nothing that seemed to stand in the way of Righteousness could be tolerated.   ‘I was moved,’ said Fox, ‘to cry out against all sorts of music, and against the mountebanks playing tricks on their stages; for they burthened the pure life, and stirred up people’s vanity.’

These ‘Publishers of Truth’, as they were called, displayed ‘a fervour of itinerant Propagandism, such as had hardly been known since the first Apostles and Christian missionaries had walked among the heathen’. (2)    During the period 1650-1725 no fewer than 440 Quaker writers produced no less than 2,678 separate publications.

Writers as well as preachers among the early Friends [3] courted publicity.   Avoiding only satire, light verse and drama, they forced their way into every field open to contemporary journalists and littérateurs. . . .    Wherever they went they carried their quill pens and inkhorns, writing prolifically in wayside taverns, on shipboard, in prisons. (3)

This output is all the more astonishing when we read that ‘of the men members of the Valiant Sixty band thirty four were closely connected with agriculture, eight with trade and only eight with professions’. (4)    Farmers and tradesmen were not likely to be practised in writing or acquainted with literature and art!

Of these numerous publications of the early Quakers the most interesting to the general reader are the autobiographical journals and histories of the leaders.   They show considerable skill in narration and uncommon ability to express introspection and to uncover subconscious motives.   The most notable of these journals is the massive Journal of George Fox. (5)    This work answers to Milton s famous definition of a book as ‘the precious life-blood of a master spirit’.   The whole man is in this journal: which builds up an unforgettable picture of this man with his bulky figure, piercing eyes, absolute honesty, a person at once lovable and awful.  

‘Through Kendal upon a market day in the dreadful power of God the people flew like chaff before me into their houses.  ’ Fox has the eye of an artist and the poet s power of metaphor. —‘They fell like an old rotten house’: ‘a mountain of sin and corruption’, ‘words were like a thistle’, ‘shattered Baptists’, ‘a flashy man’, ‘a frothy mind’.   A man of ‘more than usual organic sensibility’, (6) he quite naturally employs language that reminds one sometimes of [4] Wordsworth’s psychosomatic expressions.   ‘My heart did leap for joy’, reminds us of Wordsworth’s ‘My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky’; or when the students at Cambridge exclaimed, ‘O, he shines, he glisters’ we may think of ‘And beauty born of murmuring sound, shall pass into her face.’   Such thinking-with-the-senses imparts an extraordinary vividness and vitality to his phrases.   The spires of Lichfield Cathedral ‘struck at his life’.   ‘All things were new; and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.’   ‘The jail at Carlisle had two jailers who looked like two great bear-wards, thick cloddy earth of hypocricy.’ (7)   ‘I went away to the steeple-house.   When I came there all the people looked like fallow ground and the priest like a great lump of earth.’

The peasant in Fox underlies the preacher and his language is full of rural images and redolent of the broad acres of England: seed and the sower, weeding and reaping, threshing and gathering, sheep and shepherds.   And this native love of the open mingles with his intimate knowledge of the Bible to give us passages of poetry:

Sing and rejoice ye children of the day and of the light, for the Lord is at work in this thick night of darkness that may be felt.   And truth doth flourish as the rose, and the lilies do grow among the thorns, and the plants a-top of the hills; and upon them the lambs skip and play.   And never heed the tempests nor the storms, floods or rains, for the Seed, Christ, is over all and doth reign. . . .    (from an Epistle)

And,

Now is the springtime, that the lily and the rose begin to flourish, and the vine is putting forth and the apple tree her fruit by the power of the Lord God who is over all.   (from an Epistle)

Enough has been quoted to illustrate the creative quality of Fox’s [5] imagination and communication.   His approach to life and religion was intuitive and concrete, not rational and abstract.    The vision which he had experimentally (8) he discovered pertinaciously, against all odds, and with all the energy of his intense temperament, embodied in particular, concrete forms in writing, preaching and organisation.   Fox was a Christian artist in the sense that William Blake meant when he declared: ‘The unproductive man is not a Christian. . . . Jesus and his apostles and disciples were all artists. . . . A poet, a painter, a musician, and architect: the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.’   It is surely one of the paradoxes of history that writings which abound with life, colour and movement should become in later years books of appeal for a ‘peculiar people’ who were almost a by-word for drabness and pedestrian piety.   The Quietest Quakers took the heat out of the man of fire and made the man of steel in their own mild image.

Although it is true that most of the early Quakers were unlettered there were some notable exceptions, and four of these have given us a body of writing which is of literary as well as of spiritual value: Isaac Penington (1616-1679); William Penn (1644-1718); Robert Barclay (1648-1690); and Thomas Ellwood (1639-1713).

In the writings of Isaac Penington we encounter not a fire but a steadily glowing light.   This cultured and sensitive Buckinghamshire squire had already written on religion before he became a Quaker.   After his convincement he published The Way of Life and Death made manifest; and in 1681 his treatises were collected and published as the Works of the Long, Mournful and sorely Distressed Isaac Penington ! As these titles might suggest Penington became the interpreter of the more inward, ‘mystical’ aspects of Quakerism, ‘in a style more polished than had yet been used . . . with him may be said to begin the more adequate literary presentation of Quakerism which a few years later was to enlist the vigorous mind of Penn and the learning of Barclay’. (9)    One quotation may suffice to illustrate the [6] smoothness and the quiet cadences of Penington’s style in contrast to Fox’s pungent vocabulary and startling imagery:

Give over thine own willing,
Give over thine own running,
Give over thine own desiring to know or be anything;
And sink down to the seed which God sows in thy heart;
And let that be in thee
And act in thee,
And then thou shalt find by sweet experience
That the Lord knows that, and loves that, and owns that,
And will lead it to the inheritance of life.

Penington does not make any particular attack upon the current extravagancies of dress and manner or upon plays, poems and music of the period.   His attitude seems to be the more general Puritan one of condemning these as creaturely vanities.   The words of John Burnyeat (10) might well apply to the spirit of Isaac Penington: ‘There was a constant sweet stream that ran softly in his soul of divine peace, pleasure and joy, which far exceeded all other delights and satisfactions.’   To such exceptionally pure souls there seems to be no need of anything else.   But an attitude which is positive in such saintly people as Penington becomes negative if imitated by the conventionally pious; a fact which many later Friends failed to realise. (11)

Shortly after his break with his family and his convincement young William Penn found himself among the Peningtons at Amersham.   There he found not only his future wife, the fair and virtuous Gulielma Springett, but a calmness, sobriety and sweetness of living that must have deeply impressed and confirmed the convert so recently escaped from the frivolity and worldliness of his father’s courtly friends.   Well-educated, well-bred, vigorous and courageous, [7] William Penn directed his sharp intelligence to the exposure of the shams of society and to the propagation of Quaker principles.   In Penn’s writings we find the first deliberately composed opposition of Friends to the arts of literature, poetry and plays in particular.   Penn’s castigation of the theatre is, in the circumstances, not surprising; and many students of Restoration drama think it justified.  

Society furnished for the amusement of an idle public certain general oppositions, such as that of the fashionable circles to which the greater part of the spectators belonged, and of the town middle class which remained in the majority faithful to the spirit of Puritanism, and which the theatre shows us in the most malicious light.    From these antitheses, and from the situations they naturally lead to; from the spectacle of elegant debauchery in its struggle with vulgar hypocrisy, from the theme of conjugal misfortune, above all, treated endlessly under all its aspects, are born the ordinary types of plots.   (The italics are mine.) (12)

‘How many plays’, Penn asked impatiently, ‘did Jesus Christ and His Apostles recreate themselves at?   What poets, romances, comedies, and the like did the Apostles and Saints make, or use to pass away their time withal?   I know, they did all redeem their time, to avoid foolish talking, vain jesting, profane babblings, and fabulous stories’. (13)    In the same book Penn parodies contemporary fashions and ‘airy fictions’ in a clever passage too long to quote.   It is strange, however, that such a well-educated mind apparently failed to recognise glorious poetry right under his very eyes.   Penn was a friend of Thomas Ellwood, himself a versifler of serious purpose and reader to the blind ‘genius of Puritan England, John Milton’.   Penn must surely have heard his ingenuous and communicative friend talk about the great poet.   Though he would probably have disliked Milton’s despotic Deity he would have sympathised with his object ‘to justify the ways of God to men’.   Penn himself in his preface to his No Cross, No Crown wrote: ‘The great business of man’s life is . . . [8] to Glorify God and save his own soul.’   But he makes no mention of Milton, nor of that other great contemporary Puritan poet, Andrew Marvel, whose poetry too might have fortified and coloured Penn’s religious beliefs.   His only reference to Shakespeare is in his Christian Quaker where he alludes to ‘the infamous playes of these comical wits, Sylvester, Shakespeare, Jonson, etc.’ (14)    But he approves of Abraham Cowley in spite of the fact that Cowley’s collection of love-verses, The Mistress, is in the manner of the amorists detested by Penn.   His opposition to the affected love-sonnets of the ‘comical wits’ is reinforced by numerous references to ‘noble heathen’ and Christian authors.   Contempt for poetry as an unmanly activity, or as an idle dreaming, is found as early as Plato and as late as Carlyle.   Penn’s contemporary, the philosopher John Locke, urged parents whose children showed a taste for poetry to have it ‘stifled and suppressed as much as may be’. (15)   His objections were similar to the Quakers’: poetry, like music, was a time-waster and the language of poetry was not ‘perfectly conformable to truth and good reason’.

When the weighty, well-documented objections to poetry and drama of William Penn were reinforced by philosophers of reason such as Locke and (as we shall see) by the theology of Robert Barclay it is understandable that Quakers for many generations looked with suspicion upon poetry and with abhorrence upon the theatre.   But with a better appreciation of historical causes and social development Quakers need not have perpetuated an attitude of opposition that had justification in the days of Fox, Penn and Barclay.   As it was, the copious writings of Penn had great influence.   Although primarily a man of action he could write powerfully and persuasively, in many moods and with a variety of techniques. (16)   Penn could write with high eloquence or calm persuasiveness; his style could be rhetorical and involved but it could also be terse and epigrammatic, as in this moving passage: [9]

The truest end of life, is to know the Life that never ends.
He that makes this his Care, will find it his Crown at last.
And he that lives to live ever, never fears dying:
Nor can the means be terrible to him
That heartily believes the end.

And this is the Comfort of the Good,
That the Grave cannot hold them,
And that they live as soon as they die.
For Death is no more
than a turning of us over from time to eternity.
Death, then, being the way and condition of Life,
We cannot love to live,
If we cannot bear to die.

They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.
Nor can Spirits ever be divided
That love and live in the same Divine Principle,
The Root and Record of their Friendship.
If absence be not Death, neither is theirs.

Death is but crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas;
They live in one another still.
For they must needs be present,
That love and live in that which is Omnipresent.
In this Divine Glass, they see face to face;
And their Converse is Free, as well as pure.

Penn’s advice to readers and writers was taken perhaps too seriously.   In the Preface to the 1704 edition of the Written Gospel Labours of John Whitehead Penn warned readers against looking for ‘wordly learning’, adorned style, intellectual stimulation: cautions which ‘dominated the literary aims of Friends for two generations, and for over a century, much of the work of their successors.’ (17)

One of the notable Friends whom Penn encountered in the [10] Penington circle was Thomas Ellwood, (18) son of the squire of Crowell, Oxfordshire.   Thomas was ‘a man of a comely aspect, of a free and generous disposition, a gentleman born and bred, a scholar, a true Christian’. (19)    He had been for some months reader to the blind Milton who found him an apt pupil at the Latin.   He had enjoyed the rare privilege of reading the manuscript of Paradise Lost and had prompted the writing of the sequel, Paradise Regained.   It is interesting to speculate whether Milton would have composed the sequel without Ellwood’s suggestion.   If not, history again presents us with a paradox: that a great English classic of poetry should grow from a seed planted by one of the plain and sober sect.   But Thomas Ellwood was exceptional in the breadth and openness of his mind and in the graciousness of his character.   He could appreciate genius even when that was not expressed in Quaker terms.   Proud to be the friend of Milton he took trouble to find him a refuge from the great plague in a ‘pretty box’ at Chalfont St. Giles; and he counted another poet Edmund Waller among his friends.

Ellwood had a genuine liking for poetry and throughout his long life he composed verses in various metres and manners.   At the age of sixty-two he wrote a love-poem of which Penn would probably not have approved: and which in later times might have led to his being ‘eldered’ by more weighty Friends: (20)

What pity ’twas so fair a dame
for cherries should be put to seek,
Who if before her glass she came
might cherries see on either cheek
Of a carnation, brighter hue,
and to be longed for, more than true.

But now unsatisfied desire
hath inwards, to the fainting heart, [11]
That lovely red caused to retire,
some needful succours to impart.
Yet, where her roses do give place,
lilies succeed, with equal grace,
And see, her iv’ry teeth may nip
fair cherries from her coral lip.

In his autobiographical history Thomas Ellwood included several of his own compositions: elegies, epitaphs, hymns and satires.   His rimed couplets entitled A Looking Grass for the Times echo Fox’s and Penn’s castigations of extravagance in contemporary dress and manners, and some lines have a modern ring:

Each man, like Proteus, his shape doth change
To whatsoever seemeth ncw and strange,
And he that in a modest garb is drest
Is made a laughing stock of all the rest.
Nor are they with their baubles satisfi’d
But sex distinctions too are laid aside;
The women wear the trousies and the vest,
While men in muffs, fans, petticoats are drest.
Some women, oh, the shame, like ramping rigs
Ride flaunting in their powdered periwigs;
Astride they sit, and not ashamed neither,
Drest up like men in jacket, cap and feather.
All things to lust and wantonness are fitted
Nothing that tends to vanity omitted.

No one could describe Ellwood as a great poet: he is scarcely a notable minor poet, but his posthumous Collection of Poems on various subjects contains some poems of real merit.   His religious poems Inward Peace and Divine Worship are sincere and sensitive.   In the following verses from his description of a true lover we catch the note of renunciation, perhaps of his early hopes of marrying Gulielma Springett who became the wife of his friend, William Penn:

He’s a true Lover not who can subdue
Monsters and giants for his mistress’ sake;
And sigh perhaps and weep (with much ado) [12]
For fear she should some other happy make.
But, who so far her happiness prefers
Before his own, that he can be content
To sacrifice his own to purchase hers,
Though with the price of his own banishment.
                .      .      .
Nor can true Love to hatred ever turn
Although it never should acceptance find;
But, like a lamp, clear to the last would burn
And thereby manifest a noble mind.

He could, of course, be exceedingly dull, as in his major effort—a sacred poem in five books, called (like Cowley’s abortive epic) Davideis; and his pseudo-pindaric epitaph on Milton does more credit to his own discernment of his friend’s originality than to Ellwood’s poetic skill, containing as it does one of the flattest verses ever penned:

His natural abilities
Were doubtless of the largest size
And thereunto he surely had acquired
Learning as much as could be well desir’d.
More known his learning was not than admired. (21)

The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (22) is an eighteenth century classic, and of all the early Quaker journals it is to the general reader the most attractive.   It is an ingenuous record of personal fortunes and misfortunes, of domestic and social manners, of Quaker sufferings and fellowship.   Ellwood’s style is easy and the narrative flows smoothly in a clear stream of spiritual and emotional sincerity.   It is an unself-conscious revelation of graciousness, gallantry and genuine modesty not easily found in Puritans.   He had a natural capacity for leadership and a tender solicitude for his fellows.   In prison he was cheerful, resourceful and helpful—as when he applied balsam and dressed a prisoner’s wound with a feather; or [13] sat cross-legged sewing ‘night- waistcoats of red and yellow flannel for women and children’.   Out of prison Thomas Ellwood was continually helping people and for forty years he was the main-stay of the Monthly Meeting of Friends held in his house at Hunger Hill. (23)   Friends appreciated his business ability and his literary skills so highly that they entrusted him with the editing of the Journal of George Fox.   His life and work proves that it was possible, at least up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, to be a respected and influential Quaker minister and something of a poet!

To the passionate protests of Fox against the creaturely activities that ‘burthened the pure life’; and to Penn’s moral objections to the fashions, recreations and literature of the age, Robert Barclay added a strong theological case.   His theological classic, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (English edition 1678) was the first, and perhaps remains the greatest, ‘explanation and vindication’ of the principles and doctrines of the Quakers.   Proposition XV (the final one) deals with ‘unprofitable plays, frivolous recreations, sporting and gaming’.   His objections to gaudy dress, playing and gaming are similar to Penn’s; and, indeed, to those of other non-Quaker Puritans of that time and later. (24) With a wearisome use of scriptural texts he condemns the waste of ‘precious and irrevocable time’ by such as ‘use dancing, and comedies, carding and dicing’.   Like Penn he deplores the extravagance of vain words.—‘Yea, what are comedies,’ he asks, ‘but a studied complex of lying words?’ His language in castigating dancing masters and comedians is lacking in Christian charity.   ‘The hellish conversations (of such people) do sufficiently declare what master they serve . . . and it cannot be denied, as being obviously manifest by experience, that such as are masters of these occupations, if they be not open atheists and profligates, are such at best as make religion or the care of souls their least business.’   (Many generations later the youthful children of Elizabeth Fry were forbidden to attend balls).

[14] It is generally agreed that Barclay’s Apology had an enormous influence on subsequent generations of Friends.   In some Quaker schools it took the place of the Bible which was neglected. (25)    A modern Quaker writer says: ‘It is obvious that Barclay’s position, even though it expresses a certain stern nobility, leads, if followed consistently, to the denial of most cultural expressions.’ (26)

If Proposition XV is read in isolation from the general theological and pyschological framework of the Apology it is difficult to find in it anything different from the general Puritan attitude to wordly interests and recreations.   This Proposition, however, like all the others, hinges upon the Fourth, which gives Barclay’s fundamental attitude to Man as such.   Disclaiming the validity of the doctrine of ‘original sin’, Barclay substitutes the term ‘Man in the Fall’ to denote the innate corruption of the creature.   ‘Man as he is in this state (the first or Old Adam) can know nothing aright . . . for whatsoever real good any man doth, it proceeds not from his nature, as he is a Man, or the son of Adam, but from the Seed of God in him, as a new visitation of life in order to bring him out of this natural condition.’   The one and only thing needful is to put on the New Man, to be sown with the Seed of God, the Inward Light of Christ.   This Seed or Light is in but not of man: it is, Barclay emphatically declares, ‘a distinct separate thing from Man’s soul and all the faculties of it’.   It follows then that the natural faculties of reason, will and imagination can of themselves produce nothing good.  

Now, most Christians would agree that men unillumined by the Inward Light are less than men, but few would now agree that men’s natural faculties and strivings are vain and valueless.   But this is what Barclay seems to be arguing and this is what many generations of pious Quakers came to believe.   This rigid theological separation of the natural and supernatural, flesh and spirit, body and mind, was reinforced by the current philosophical dualism of Descartes, (27) for although, unlike the theologian, the philosopher elevated cognition (‘Cogito ergo sum’) yet the practical, existential result was similar in both cases: Man was a divided being, with an inferior body ‘tagged on’, as it were, to a superior soul.   Barclay’s ‘distinct, separate thing’, the supernatural Light or Seed, had its parallel in the remote Deity of Locke and the ralionalists; the absolute externality of Grace had its twin in the impersonal remoteness of the First Cause.   While the religious man could only wait passively for the invasion of the supernatural, saving Grace, the philosopher, having elevated God so far above the world, could only fall back upon the study of man.   ‘The proper study of Mankind is Man’ became the slogan of an age of reason in which the Christian Quaker endeavoured to preserve the gift of the supernatural Seed from the contamination of his human instincts, emotions and imagination.

We shall see, in subsequent chapters, how lasting was this divorce between mind and matter, the rational and imaginative.   Even as late as the latter part of the eighteenth century few heeded William Blake’s brave attempts, in painting and poetry, to marry body and soul; and it was not until the second decade of the following century that the efforts of the great ‘romantic’ poets to restore and justify the human imagination began to bear fruit.   Quakers, of course, were not alone in missing the inner meaning of the romantic revival but their failure was perhaps the more tragic in that their deepest intuitions were in harmony with the essence of romanticism.   ‘The intuition of our deeper self and of the divine presence which dwells in it—we Christians boldly say, which deifies it—and is thereby the foundation of its grandeur . . . is what in the last analysis distinguishes the romantic movement.   This was the creative centre of Wordsworth, of Shelley, of Keats and of Coleridge.’ (28)

But here I wish to salute the valorous virtues of the first Quakers.    Recapturing the whole-heartedness of the early Christians they obeyed Paul’s injunction to strip off all encumbrances in the race to [16] the goal of Righteousness.   This race they entered, not so much for personal salvation, as in the conviction that ‘Righteousness exalteth a people.’   Narrow in outlook they often were but seldom bigoted or hypocritical.   It was not the fault of Fox and his fellows if later Quakers concentrated upon individual righteousness and tried to impose upon others a strict code of ‘sobriety, gravity and godly fear’.   Not only did the lives of these first Friends speak nobly to their contemporaries but the very buildings they erected bore witness to a simple sincerity that still appeals to the aesthetic as well as to the spiritual sense.   ‘Quakers through three centuries retained to a remarkable degree their architectural integrity in their places of worship, and did not succumb to the seductive blandishments of the Gothic revival.’(29)

This primitive simplicity was not at first, what it became later, a joyless and self- inflicted thing.   Fox asked his fellows to ‘walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyman’, confident that the divine was there to find.   ‘Therefore rejoice,’ Fox wrote in one of his innumerable epistles to Friends, ‘rejoice, ye simple ones, which love simplicity, and meet and wait together to receive strength and wisdom from the Lord God. . . . When your minds run into anything outwardly, without the Power, it covers and veils the pure in you.’   That there were rotten veils smothering wholesome living in Restoration England is admitted by every historian of that period.   In the movement called Puritanism which ripped off the rags of unrighteousness the early Quakers played a necessary part.   If their religious experience was limited it was absolutely authentic.   Centuries of much searching and much error had to pass before men could, in Archbishop Temple’s words, realise that ‘religious experience is the whole experience of a religious man’