QUAKER 'ESCAPISM'
Mayer, Milton
Quaker 'Escapism' THE JOURNAL OF JOHN WOOLMAN. edited by Janet Whitney. Henry Regnery Co. 233 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by Milton Mayer THE modern escapist, who has to find something less rewarding to...
...In the inconsolable year 1951, the consolation of reading John Woolman is precious...
...In the face of the bankruptcy of modern liberalism, this autobiography of a man who never heard of modernity or liberalism is a deadly lesson...
...And the winning of American Quakerism from the scourge was the beginning of slavery's end...
...The simplicity of his writing is the simplicity of prayer itself, and his Journal stands well, in its Quakerish way (what we and St...
...He was a valiant, immovable reformer for the abolition of war, for the restitution of the Indians, for the decency of labor conditions (he would not wear dyed clothes because the dyes poisoned the dye-workers, and...
...Fox and Penn have not brought the Quaker witness into clearer light than the unwearying Quaker revolutionary of colonial America whose eloquence so often gave way, in large meetings and small, to the silent worship and the silent suffering after the manner of the command, "Be still, and know that I am God...
...on his fatal trip to England he would not receive letters from home because both postboys and horses were so brutally used on the English mail coaches...
...we mean the modern American...
...Woolman speaks, as the Quakers say, "to our condition" no less tellingly than Augustine...
...Woolman's Journal, lovingly edited by Janet Whitney, has been an American classic rising two centuries and deserved this new edition in its own right, and as one of the greatest source documents of American history...
...John Woolman tried to go with God...
...if by "our...
...But all his labors had only one compulsion—to strip the human spirit of that "cumber" of evildoing which flows out of and into the love of possessions, so to lighten that spirit that it might rise with Christ...
...John Woolman was a tailor, not a writer, and his writing is so flawlessly beautiful, annealed as it was in the fire of his heart, that Charles Lamb advised those who wish to write well to "get the writings of John Woolman by heart...
...One of those who loved him complained a little that "he appeared to us in some things singular, and the path he trod straiter than the liberty some of us have thought the truth gives," but his straitness, far from being insufferable, seems to have opened the hearts of Indians with hatchets in their hands and seamen in the hold, no less than the still harder (if shinier) hearts of the plantation-owning Friends who were "easy," until he came along, to live in luxury off the forced labor of their black brethren...
...For Woolman was an American reformer, who won the American Quakers from the chattel slavery by "laying his concern," in another Quaker phrase, "on their hearts...
...always with God, and only with God, and has something to show on earth for his going, as the modern liberal, who tries to go with man, has not...
...It is a marvelous book and a tract for all times...
...more so...
...Reviewed by Milton Mayer THE modern escapist, who has to find something less rewarding to escape to than the Word of God, will marvel at this book...
...Augustine would call his "personal" life is scarcely mentioned), with the Confessions...
Vol. 15 • March 1951 • No. 3
