Rufus M. Jones

Rufus Matthew Jones (1863–1948)

Rufus Matthew Jones was born on January 25, 1863, on a farm in South China, Maine, into a family of Quakers whose roots in the state ran deep. His mother, Mary Hoxie Jones, belonged to a line of devout Friends, and the household was formed by silent worship and plain speech. When he was a small child his younger brother died, and then his father's health failed; the loss of his father, Edwin Jones, left a mark on a boy already inclined to solitude. He grew up between his parents' farm and the home of his uncle Eli Jones, a celebrated Quaker minister whose spiritual presence Rufus later credited as formative. A childhood accident, a crushed foot that left him lame, kept him from some of the usual farm labor and turned him toward books and long hours in the Maine woods.

His schooling began at local schools and then at Oak Grove Seminary, a Quaker boarding school in Vassalboro, before he entered Haverford College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1885. He taught for a time at Oak Grove and at Friends' School in Providence, Rhode Island, and later returned to Haverford as professor of philosophy, a post he held from 1893 until 1934. He pursued further study at Harvard and in Europe, and took a master's degree from Haverford in 1886. There was no seminary behind him, and no ordained clergy in his tradition; his ecclesiastical standing came through the Society of Friends, which recorded him as a minister.

Jones came of age in a Quaker world divided between evangelical, revivalist Friends and the older quietist stream. Through the 1880s he wrestled with how to remain faithful to the experiential heart of Quakerism while taking seriously modern scholarship and science. An early and decisive experience came in 1886 in Maine, when, as a young man in search of settled conviction, he felt, as he later described it, the presence of God with a vividness that anchored the rest of his life. He spoke of it afterward as an encounter that made the unseen as real as the seen. In 1888 he married Sarah Coutant, who died in 1899; he later married Elizabeth Bartram Cadbury, and the two raised a family. The death of his young son Lowell in 1903 was a grief he carried and later wrote about with unadorned honesty.

In 1893 he became editor of The Friends' Review, which merged into The American Friend, and he used the editorship to press for a Quakerism that was both spiritually deep and intellectually open. At the turn of the century he helped broker the Richmond Declaration debates and the wider reform of American Quaker life, working within the Society even when he disagreed with parts of it. His standing among Friends was not uncontested: more conservative and evangelical Quakers regarded his liberal emphasis on the inner light and his openness to higher criticism with suspicion.

The decisive public work of his life came in 1917, when the United States entered the First World War. Jones was a founder of the American Friends Service Committee, established to give conscientious objectors a way to serve the suffering without bearing arms, and he served as its chairman for decades. The committee carried out relief in war-torn Europe, fed starving children in Germany and Russia after the war, and in 1947 shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the British Friends Service Council. Jones traveled widely in these years, visiting Germany in 1938 in an effort to aid Jews under Nazi persecution, an errand that brought quiet rebuke in some quarters for its limited result.

He retired from Haverford in 1934 but never stopped writing or speaking. He died on June 16, 1948, in Haverford, Pennsylvania, at the age of eighty-five.

His Writing and Its Influence

Jones began publishing in the 1890s, and his output over the next five decades was enormous: some fifty-seven books and a steady stream of editorials, essays and articles. He came to writing through the editor's desk and the professor's lectern rather than through any literary ambition, and his early work reflects both. His first major scholarly contributions were historical, and his intention was practical: to recover the lineage of the mystical strand in Christianity so that Quakerism could understand itself as part of it rather than as an eccentric seventeenth-century eruption. Studies in Mystical Religion, published in 1909, traced that strand from the early church through the medieval mystics, the Reformation radicals and the Spiritual Reformers to George Fox and the first Friends. It was followed by Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in 1914 and The Flowering of Mysticism in 1939, and the three form a sustained argument that direct experience of God is not a fringe of Christian history but one of its continuous currents.

Alongside the histories came the devotional and autobiographical books for which he is most widely read. Social Law in the Spiritual World appeared in 1904, and The Inner Life in 1916. A Boy's Religion from Memory, Finding the Trail of Life, The Trail of Life in College and The Trail of Life in the Middle Years told his own story with warmth and honesty, including the lameness of his boyhood and the death of his son. Of his books on the life of prayer and presence, The Double Search and The Eternal Gospel are among the best known, and The Luminous Trail and The Testimony of the Soul belong to his later years. His convictions were consistent throughout: that God seeks the soul as the soul seeks God, that the divine is met within human experience rather than against it, and that mystical religion is no escape from the world but the root of costly service in it.

Jones was also a great shaper of the Quaker library. He was the author of the multi-volume Quaker history that began with The Quakers in the American Colonies (1911), written with Isaac Sharpless and Amelia Gummere, and continued with the two-volume The Later Periods of Quakerism in 1921, which remains a standard reference. He was a main editor of the Rowntree Series of Quaker histories, and his labor in recovering seventeenth-century sources helped establish a scholarly foundation for Friends' study of their own past.

His reception was not uniformly warm. Some critics found his reading of the mystics too generous and his account of Fox too tidy, and later scholars have questioned whether his sweeping category of mysticism flattened real differences between figures and traditions. Others have noted that his liberal emphasis on the inner light, and his readiness to harmonize faith with modern science and higher criticism, left questions about the place of the cross and of Christ's atoning work less sharply drawn than evangelical readers wanted. These objections are not frivolous. But the influence of his writing is plain: he helped a generation of Friends and other Protestants recover contemplative depth, and he shaped the way the twentieth century told the story of Christian mysticism. His example of faith joined to relief work, through the American Friends Service Committee, gave his books a credibility that argument alone could not. Thomas Kelly, Douglas Steere and others carried his convictions forward in Quaker circles, and his histories are still consulted.

Who should read Rufus Jones: Readers who sense that the mystical tradition has been left to specialists or enthusiasts and want a guide who treats it as ordinary Christian inheritance. He is especially valuable for those who must hold devotion and intellectual honesty together, and for those drawn to a faith that issues in service. He is not for readers wanting a rigorous account of atonement or doctrinal precision, nor for those who prefer their mystics taken one at a time rather than gathered into a single sweeping story.