His long, hard battle with a stubborn disease which was attacking the very citadel of his powers – his sight, his hearing and his memory – has only made him more heroic and gentle. His physical limitations have all along been turned into inward profit. From that time … he was a gloriously joyous and happy man. Suddenly he felt the love of God wrap him about as though a visible presence enfolded him, and a joy filled him, such as he had never known before. Dazed and overwhelmed he staggered from the doctor’s office to the street and stood there in silence. He was told that before middle life he would become totally blind. Just as he was entering young manhood and was beginning to feel the dawning sense of a great mission before him, he discovered that he was slowly losing his sight. Rufus Jones described the experience which his friend John Wilhelm Rowntree had in 1894: Struck dumb, amazed, she went quietly to her class, wondering that no one noticed that something had happened to her. ![]() ![]() She had been delivered by a love that is greater than any human love. Nothing else is so real as this.’ The child who had cried out in anguish and been silenced had now come inside the gates of Light. The first words which came to her – although they took a long time to come – were, ‘This is the great Mercifulness. ![]() She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. (She writes of herself in the third person.)īut then one bright spring day – it was the 29th of May 1902 – while she sat preparing for her class under the trees in the backyard of Föreningsgatan 6, quietly, invisibly, there occurred the central event of her whole life. She had been put in charge of the religious instruction in a progressive school in Gothenburg at a time when she was oppressed by the failure of her search for the reality of God she was filled with despair, almost to the point of suicide, and felt she was ‘just a shell, a shell empty of life’. I strove to lead a more Christian life, in unison with what I knew to be right, and looked for brighter days, not forgetting the blessings that are granted to prayer.Įmilia Fogelklou (1878–1972) here recalls her own experience at the age of 23. I seemed to hear the words articulated in my spirit, ‘Live up to the light thou hast, and more will be granted thee.’ Then I believed that God speaks to man by His Spirit. The first gleam of light, ‘the first cold light of morning’ which gave promise of day with its noontide glories, dawned on me one day at meeting, when I had been meditating on my state in great depression. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.Ĭaroline Fox (1819–1871) wrote in her journal at the age of 21, of ‘the struggle through which a spark of true faith was lighted in my soul’: Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. And immediately the cloud and temptation vanished away, and life rose over it all, and my heart was glad, and I praised the living God. And as I sat still under it and let it alone, a living hope arose in me and a true voice, which said, ‘There is a living God who made all things’. ![]() But inasmuch as I sat, still and silent, the people of the house perceived nothing. And it was said, ‘All things come by nature’ and the elements and stars came over me so that I was in a manner quite clouded with it. Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts, which are the leadings of God.Īfter this I returned into Nottinghamshire again and went into the Vale of Beavor… And one morning, as I was sitting by the fire, a great cloud came over me and a temptation beset me but I sat still. We recall those who have been upheld by love, or filled with joy, or called to commit their lives to service, or who have sensed a divine reality in the wonder of the world or in the depths of being or in the hardest challenges of life. We remember Nayler in his suffering testifying to ‘a spirit which delights to do no evil nor to revenge any wrong’ and Barclay when he first went to Friends’ meetings, feeling the evil weakening in him and the good being raised up. In this we are helped by the experiences of others which enlighten our path. As we reflect on our experience, intimations emerge about the nature of God.
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