Fox: His Suffering Soul & His "opening"

[alice wellintown]

I'm no expert in anything, other than swinging a hammar. I can swing a
big hammar, frame a house, and I can carry a tune, and I can dance,
but I have no academic credentials and claim none. I've studied
everything and anything, just because.

But I know a jackass from a pony. Joseph, you are not pony.



The purpose of this book is to have him tell his own story, which in the main he
knows how to do. It will, however, be of some service to the reader to
develop in
advance the principle of which he was the exponent. The first period
of his life is
occupied with a most painful quest for something which would satisfy
his heart. His
celebrated contemporary, Bunyan, possessed much greater power of
describing inward states and experiences, but one is led to believe on
comparing the two autobiographical passages that the sufferings of
Fox, in his years of spiritual desolation, were even more severe than
were those of Bunyan, though it is to be noted that the former does
not suffer from the awful sense of personal sin as the latter does.
"When I came to eleven years of age, I knew pureness and
righteousness," is Fox's report of his own early  deliverance from the
sense of sin. His "despair," from which he could find no comfort,  was
caused by the extreme sensitiveness of his soul. The discovery that
the world, and even the Church, was full of wickedness and sin crushed
him. "I looked upon the great
professors of the city [London, 1643], and I saw all was dark and
under the chain of
darkness." This settled upon him with a weight, deep almost as death.
Nothing in the whole world seemed to him so real as the world's
wickedness. "I could have wished," he cries out, "I had never been
born, or that I had been born blind that I might never have seen
wickedness or vanity; and deaf that I might never have heard vain and
wicked words, or the Lord's name blasphemed."
He was overwhelmed, however, not merely because he discovered that the
world was wicked, but much more because he discovered that priests were "empty
hollow casks," and that religion, as far as he could discover any in
England, was weak  and ineffective, with no dynamic message which
moved with the living power of God  behind it. He could find theology
enough and theories enough, but he missed
everywhere the direct evidence that men about him had found God.
Religion seemed to him to be reduced to a system of clever substitutes
for God, while his own soul could not rest until it found the Life
itself.
The turning point of his life is the discovery -- through what he
beautifully calls
an "opening" -- that Christ is not merely an historic person who once
came to the world  and then forever withdrew, but that He is the
continuous Divine Presence, God
manifested humanly, and that this Christ can "speak to his condition."


http://www.chucknorris.com/Christian/Christian/ebooks/fox_autobiog.pdf