It is the place for withdrawing awhile from the things of outward sense and exercising the faculties of spiritual sense; the place where to the awakened soul the vision of truth may be seen, the Word of the Lord may be heard, the guidings of His hand may be felt; the place where the heart may become aware of its waywardness and want and may gain strength to repent and come to Christ and choose the narrow road of life and dedicated service; the place where many have been able to say, with Isaac Penington, “I have met with my God, I have met with my Savior, and He hath not been present with me without His salvation, but I have felt the healings drop upon my soul from under His wings.” But it is also the place where the worship we render and the life we receive are parts of a fellowship of worship and of life which comes to the meeting as a whole and finds its natural expression through the lips of one and another as the Spirit touches them to utterance.
There is a third type of meeting, which we may call a teaching meeting, sometimes a Bible class and sometimes a service in which teaching ministry is to the front. There, again, surely you get the same forces in operation. The most vital teaching meetings are those which best combine inspiration, personal influence and fellowship. In true educational work the character and the faculties of a group of scholars are being trained by vital contact with one another and with the teacher. The contact of life with life is going on all the time. My friend, Rufus M. Jones, is quite right in saying that the central weakness of the Friends in the past lay in their failure to appreciate the importance of the fullest education of human personality in mind and soul, and the attention that is now being given to education in the Society of Friends is of the highest value. We cannot overestimate the promise to American Quakerism and to English Quakerism of our great educational institutions.
I have now sought to show that Quakerism at its best is always the product of vital forces, and is always producing vital relations. I say “at its best”; that is the necessary qualification.
This brings me to my last point. What is needed besides the life of the Spirit, the life of Jesus Christ in the Church? Surely what we need is an earnest dedication on the part of those who are seeking to know Jesus Christ. God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.