William Penn and George Fox: A Friendship and a Portrait

In earlier articles of this series I introduced you to George Fox, who gathered the first Friends, to Margaret Fell Fox, who organized and sustained them, and to John Woolman, whose tender conscience helped turn a people away from slavery. This time I want to hold up two things that belong together: a friendship and a portrait. William Penn walks through George Fox's Journal as one of Fox's closest companions. Then, at the front of the book, Penn stands up and tells us who he believed his friend was.

The admiral's son

Penn was the son of a distinguished naval commander, born in London in 1644 and educated at Christ Church, Oxford. He had an admiral's name and every door in England open to him, and when he joined the Society of Friends, against his father's strong opposition, he walked through the one his father had barred. There is a mercy at the end of it. He was reconciled with his father before the admiral's death. I have watched families split over less and never mend. This one mended.

The Journal gives particular attention to his imprisonment in the Tower of London, and to what came out of it: his classic No Cross, No Crown. A clever man can argue. A believing man can suffer. Penn did both in the same room.

A close intimacy

The Journal's editor uses a lovely phrase for what existed between these two men: a "close intimacy." Here is what I find most telling. Fox does not lavish praise on Penn in personal terms. What you find instead is Penn's name, again and again, among the leading Friends who accompanied him in the work that mattered most: the missionary journeys, the theological discussions, the public defenses of the faith. Fox did not write about Penn. Fox took Penn with him.

"A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity" (Proverbs 17:17). Fox proved his friendship the way working men prove it, by handing his friend the other end of the load.

A night in a fisherman's boat

In 1677 Fox undertook a missionary journey to the Netherlands, with Penn among the principal companions. Arriving near Brielle, Penn and Robert Barclay went ashore ahead of the rest to meet Benjamin Furly. The city gates were closed, so the two of them spent the night in a fisherman's boat. Picture it. Two of the ablest men in the company, one an Oxford gentleman, folded up in a fishing boat because they could not get through a gate. Nobody made them do it.

Inside the gates, at the Quarterly Meeting in Amsterdam, Fox records that he and Penn both taught on the shape of church life: Yearly, Quarterly, and Monthly Meetings, and meetings for men and women. Those became the framework of continental Quakerism. Fox is showing us a builder, not just a preacher.

A preface that begins at Creation

Penn wrote the Preface to the Journal's first volume. Call it an introduction if you like, but the word does not cover it. It is a sweeping theological interpretation of biblical and church history and of the rise of the Quaker movement, ending in his portrait of his friend. Later editors directed readers' "special attention" to Penn's "admirable Preface." Editors do not usually plead with you to read another man's front matter. This one did.

So Penn begins where no preface should begin. At the beginning. He traces God's dealings with humanity from Creation through the patriarchs, the prophets, Christ, and the apostles, and on into the history of the Church. People depart from God's will again and again, he argues, and God as persistently renews the call to repentance. Then comes the harder part. Penn contends that after the apostolic age much of Christianity came to be dominated by outward ceremonies, ecclesiastical power, and religious formalism, and that the Reformation, while it recovered important truths, did not finish the work. He is explicit that God kept working throughout. But on this reading Fox is not the founder of a new denomination. He is one more of the faithful witnesses God raises up whenever true religion declines.

Let me be plain about my aim, as I was in the article on Margaret Fell's book. I am telling you how Penn read church history, not settling whether he read it rightly. Christians of goodwill have understood these same centuries very differently.

Against that backdrop Penn arrives at George Fox, prepared by God through years of spiritual struggle. Fox went to the ministers of his day looking for answers and did not find them there. What he found at last was that Christ Himself could speak to his deepest need, and no one else could. Penn is not claiming his friend invented something. He is claiming his friend found something that had been set down and left.

The Light, and what Penn insisted it was not

The Preface's central theme is what Friends called the Inner Light. Christ enlightens every person. The Holy Spirit continues to speak to believers. True religion is inward before it is outward. Behind it stands a verse the early Friends returned to constantly: "the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (John 1:9). Christians have read that verse in more than one way for a very long time, and I will not pretend that quoting it settles anything. I only want you to see where Friends believed they stood.

Notice what Penn says next, because he is often misread here. The teaching does not replace Scripture. The same Holy Spirit who inspired Scripture, he holds, also enables believers to understand and obey it. Spirit and Word, in Penn's account, are not rivals. They have the same Author.

If Christ met Fox directly, Penn reasons, then Christ remains the living Teacher, and the rest follows: that worship should be led by the Spirit rather than fixed forms, that Christians should refuse oaths and war, and that faith must be voluntary rather than compelled by the state. Sincere believers have divided over those for three centuries. I am reporting the list, not defending it. But once you know it, the events in the Journal stop being strange.

What Penn saw when he looked at his friend

Much of the Preface is simply Penn describing the man: humble, courageous, completely devoted to Christ. Lists of virtues come cheap. Here is the detail that does not.

Penn writes that the most reverent and spiritually powerful prayer he ever witnessed was George Fox's. Not the finest sermon. The prayer. And even strangers, he adds, were often deeply moved simply by hearing Fox pray. Sit with that. Here is a man who could out-argue a room full of trained clergy, and the thing he could not get over, the thing he set before a nation of readers, was the way his friend talked to God when no argument was being won.

Then Penn does the thing that persuades me he meant all of it. Thousands came to the faith as Friends understood it, and meetings were planted across Britain and beyond. Penn credits all of it to God's work through Fox rather than to Fox's own abilities. "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us" (2 Corinthians 4:7). Penn had watched the earthen vessel up close for years. He knew what it was made of, and he refused to give it the credit.

Two men, one work

Penn carried Quaker principles into literature, public debate, and civil government. That last word has a postscript. Seeing that persecution in England would not stop, Penn sought a place where liberty of conscience could flourish. He obtained the colony of Pennsylvania and established a government meant to promote religious liberty, justice, and peaceful relations. The Journal's editor calls it "a lasting monument" to his wisdom. Penn had written that faith must be voluntary rather than compelled by the state. Then he went and built a commonwealth on it.

So read the Preface, and read it first. It is one friend trying, with everything he had, to make you see what he had seen.

In earlier articles I commended George Fox to you as a brother worth knowing, Margaret Fell Fox as a sister worth knowing, and John Woolman in the same way. Let me now commend William Penn: the admiral's son who took his father's opposition and the state's prisons rather than surrender what he had found, who slept in a fishing boat to get to a meeting, and who spent the front of his friend's book pointing past his friend to Christ. And let me commend that Christ, the living Teacher whom Penn believed had never stopped speaking, and whom George Fox found when no one else could help him.