The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
George Fox
1624–1691EnglishQuaker (Religious Society of Friends)
The shoemaker's apprentice who walked out of every church in England looking for a living voice.
Summary
- Lived 1624–1691, English.
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Quaker (Religious Society of Friends).
The life
George Fox left home at nineteen and spent four years walking from town to town, asking ministers questions none of them could answer. He recorded the turn in his journal: when every human help was gone, he heard a voice that said there is one, even Christ Jesus, who can speak to thy condition. From 1647 he preached that Christ teaches His people Himself, and the Friends who gathered around him refused to take oaths, refused to remove their hats to social superiors, and let women preach, each of which was, at the time, a crime or close to it.
He was jailed eight times, roughly six years in total, beaten by mobs more than once, and traveled to the West Indies, America and Holland. Friends' distinctive teaching on the inward light set them apart from the Puritans around them, but Fox's insistence that faith is a living encounter rather than an inherited form outlasted the quarrel.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1600–1730
- 1620The Mayflower sailsRoughly a hundred passengers, about half of them from a separatist congregation that had already fled to Holland, cross to a cold New England coast in November. Close to half die before spring.
- 1628John Bunyan is born at ElstowA tinker's son in a Bedfordshire village, baptized that November. He will have almost no formal schooling and will write the most-read book in English after the Bible.
- 1636Harvard is founded to train ministersThe Massachusetts Bay colony votes money for a college because, as an early account put it, they dreaded leaving an unlearned ministry to the churches once the first pastors were in the dust. It is named in 1639 for John Harvard, who willed it his library.
- 1643–1646The Westminster Assembly meetsCalled by Parliament, some 120 ministers and 30 laymen sit in Westminster Abbey through the English Civil War. They produce the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms (1647).
- 1675Spener's *Pia Desideria*Philipp Jakob Spener, a pastor in Frankfurt, publishes six plain proposals: more Bible in laypeople's hands, believers meeting in small groups, faith that shows up in life, gentler argument, ministers trained for godliness, preaching aimed at the heart. The book names a movement: Pietism.
- 1678*The Pilgrim's Progress* is publishedBunyan had spent twelve years (1660–1672) in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching, making shoelace tags to feed his family, including a blind daughter. Out of those years came the dream of a man with a burden on his back, running toward a distant light.
- 1679–1688Scotland's Killing TimeCovenanters who kept preaching in open fields after outdoor worship was outlawed are hunted across the moors of the southwest. Richard Cameron falls at Airds Moss in 1680; James Renwick, the last of them executed, dies in 1688.
- Oct 1685The Edict of Nantes is revokedLouis XIV cancels the protection French Protestants had held since 1598. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots flee France for England, Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, the American colonies, and the Cape.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search George Fox at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Searched every church in England for a living faith, then gathered the Quakers and went to jail for it eight times.
Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists: The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you.
Standing beside himThe Puritans & Pietists · 17 on this stretch of wall
Gave refugees his estate and got back a hundred-year prayer meeting and the first Protestant missionary wave.
Wrote Pilgrim's Progress in the Bedford jail rather than promise the court he would stop preaching.
The Puritans' deepest thinker, who warned that you must be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.