The Inner Life

The Inner Life is a short book by the American Quaker philosopher and historian Rufus M. Jones, published in 1916 as part of a series of Quaker devotional and educational literature. Jones was then a professor of philosophy at Haverford College and an editor of the Quaker journal The Friend, and he wrote in the shadow of the First World War, when confidence in progress and in the stability of Western civilization was giving way to grief and disorientation. The book speaks to ordinary readers, not to specialists, and takes its occasion from a plain question: what resources does a person actually have for living a deep, steady, and useful life when outward certainties fail?

Jones answers by directing attention inward, though not toward mere introspection. His central conviction is that the human soul is not a closed, self-sufficient compartment but is open to the divine, so that the life of the spirit is a real meeting between a finite person and God. Religion, in his account, is first of all a matter of experience and communion rather than of creed, institution, or argument, and the great doctrines gain their force from the living experience that stands behind them. He draws on the testimony of the mystics and on the Quaker tradition of the inward light to argue that prayer, worship, and quiet attentiveness are not escapes from the world but the means by which a person is renewed for it. The inner life, as he describes it, is meant to bear fruit in character, service, and a freedom from fear. He is as concerned with how spiritual vision is cultivated through daily habits of mind and will as with the moments of illumination themselves.

The book has continued to matter because it is an early and accessible statement of themes Jones would develop across a long career, including his later scholarly work on mysticism, and because it models a way of holding together intellectual seriousness and warm devotion. Its emphasis on direct experience of God, its suspicion of religion reduced to formula, and its insistence that the spiritual life shows itself in practical goodness have kept it in circulation among Quakers and well beyond them. Readers will also meet the idiom of its moment, including confident language about human spiritual capacity that later generations of theologians would qualify.

Who should read this: readers who want a gentle, humane introduction to the contemplative and Quaker strand of Christian spirituality, and anyone weary of religion that is all doctrine and no encounter. It is not for those seeking a rigorous account of sin, atonement, or the authority of Scripture and church, which Jones treats lightly, nor for readers who want a technical study of mysticism rather than a short devotional and philosophical reflection.