The Story of George Fox

The Story of George Fox is Rufus M. Jones's short biography of the founder of the Society of Friends, published in 1919. Jones, a Quaker philosopher and longtime professor at Haverford College, had already spent years writing on mysticism and the history of Quakerism, and he wrote this book for a general readership rather than for specialists. It came out of the aftermath of the First World War, when the Quaker peace testimony Fox had helped originate was being tested and the American Friends Service Committee, which Jones helped found in 1917, was carrying relief work into a ruined Europe. Jones wanted the movement's seventeenth-century source to be known as a living person and not merely a name.

The book follows Fox from his boyhood in Leicestershire, through his years of anguished seeking among clergy and dissenters who could not satisfy him, to the experience that became the center of his life: the conviction that Christ himself speaks directly to the human soul, apart from any priest or ritual or doctrine. Jones treats this not as eccentricity but as the heart of the matter, and he reads Fox's openings, his preaching, his imprisonments and his organizing of the early Friends as the outworking of that single discovery. He is candid that Fox was a difficult, sometimes abrasive figure, yet he argues that the force of Fox's life came from an inner authority that left even his persecutors unsettled. Jones also draws out the practical side of the movement: its refusal of oaths and war, its equality of women in ministry, and its insistence that worship could be a gathered, expectant silence.

The book has endured because it remains among the most readable introductions to Fox and to the origins of Quaker spirituality, written by someone who shared the tradition from the inside and could convey its inwardness without sentimentality. It shows how a conviction about the immediacy of God can generate a whole way of common life, and it still speaks to readers wrestling with the relation between inward experience and institutional faith.

Who should read this: Readers new to Quaker history or to Fox, and anyone interested in how the idea of the inner light took shape in the lives of ordinary people, will find this a warm and accessible starting point. It is a sympathetic portrait by a committed Friend, not a detached critical biography, so those wanting a rigorous scholarly reassessment of Fox's career and sources should look elsewhere.