The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceunder the form again, and said, ‘Yes, Lord, I will.’ From that timeI gave up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man.”The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of lifemay take are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example,had hard battles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity ofthe ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that costthem most wounds was probably that which they fought in defenseof their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee-ingand thou-ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It waslaid on George Fox that these conventional customs were a lie and asham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renouncedthem, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit theyprofessed might be more in accord.“When the Lord sent me into the world,” says Fox in his Journal,“he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I wasrequired to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ all men and women, without any respectto rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and down,I was not to bid people Good-morning or Good-evening, neithermight I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made the sectsand professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the priests, magistrates,professors, and people of all sorts: and especially in priestsand professors: for though ‘thou’ to a single person was according totheir accidence and grammar rules, and according to the Bible, yetthey could not bear to hear it: and because I could not put off myhat to them, it set them all into a rage… . Oh! the scorn, heat, andfury that arose! Oh! the blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonmentsthat we underwent for not putting off our hats to men! Somehad their hats violently plucked off and thrown away, so that theyquite lost them. The bad language and evil usage we received onthis account is hard to be expressed, besides the danger we weresometimes in of losing our lives for this matter, and that by the greatprofessors of Christianity, who thereby discovered they were nottrue believers. And though it was but a small thing in the eye ofman, yet a wonderful confusion it brought among all professorsand priests: but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity ofthat custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth’stestimony against it.”264