To those who know how, in the seventeenth century, another experiment was begun, which after nearly nine generations, is not yet ended, in the holding together of religious communities of which an essential feature has always been the freedom of prophesying, it may, at first sight, seem easy to reply that the change was no necessary one.
One would not say that they were wrong, for who can say what might not have been, if men had only been faithful to their highest ideals, and been willing always to take the rough and narrow way that leads straight up to the heavenly city? But we shall, perhaps judge more fairly if we think how very much greater were the difficulties that beset the Christian organisms of the first and second centuries, than those, great as they were, with which George Fox had to grapple. He had, it is true, to deal with companies of men and women, amongst whom were enthusiasts or individualistic quietists, who would brook no discipline, and many of them were poor and very ignorant folk; but how different in many cases was a church of the first century. Imagine a [p.48] community of varying nationalities, containing a number of slaves, many of them illiterate people, others degraded by their past life to the lowest depths; men and women rescued from lives of terrible evil and still under constant temptation to fall back; a number of Christian Jews with strange oriental customs and traditions, half- familiar only with the language and civilisation of their adopted town; a few men, possibly, of higher social position and greater education, but the majority only able to communicate with each other by a lingua franca of bad Greek, which was the native tongue only of a small minority. One can see what a babel of confusion might easily arise amongst such a community, especially when we remember that many had but an imperfect knowledge of Christ and His teaching, and very few churches possessed all the works which we have in our New Testament.
Moreover, a great change had come from the days of Paul's letter to the Corinthians. That little church was then still living in the days when the Christians as such were tolerated by the law. Gallio's decision had removed the church at Corinth from any need to observe secrecy.