A Quaker Conscientious Objector by Rebecca Wynter

Author:Rebecca Wynter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Handheld Press
Published: 2020-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

5. A Soaring Spirit

20 December 1917

Dear Mother and Father,

Eight years ago, I could not write you a Christmas letter from the neighbourhood of the Cocas Isles so to that extent at any rate, I am better off now. I shall be glad to think of you all at South Hill, or Fryland. It hardly seems appropriate to send the usual Christmas wishes again this year. The death of Roland Gibbins [Hugh’s brother] and L[awrence] Rowntree* within the last few days, has brought this home more clearly to one – but after all, the true Christmas message contains the substitution of the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. May you know this as I have every hope of doing here. My Christmas message this year has seemed to come from some verses from [Frederick William Henry] Myers [1867] ‘St Paul’.

Are there not wrongs too bitter for atoning

What are these desperate and hideous years

Hast thou not heard thy whole creation groaning

Signs of the bondsmen? and a woman’s tears

What more appropriate to present conditions?

YES and to her, the beautiful and lovely

Mary, a maiden separate from men

Camest thou nigh, and didst possess her wholly

Close to thy saints, but thou wast closer then

Camest thou nigh is the centre of my thought and the type of spirit capable of receiving that visit:–

Not to the rich He came, nor to the ruling

Men full of meat whom wholly He abhors

Not to the fools grown in insolent fooling

Most when the lost are dying at the doors.

Nay but to her who with sweet thanksgiving

Took in tranquillity that God might bring.

Blessed Him and waited, and within her living

Felt the arousal of a holy thing

I said in my last letter that I felt to have been making mental progress afresh, as before the stimulus has come from opportune reading – this time HG Wells’ God the invisible King which R and D sent me, emphasized by a background of thoughts occasioned by attending Chapel here for months. I wrote something about that from Weymouth, you may remember. I need hardly say that I do not agree altogether with Wells. I found his criticism stimulating, but what he outlines as the Christian God, is not my personal idea of God at all, though I can recognize it in much current ‘Christianity’. On the other hand, what he puts forward as the characteristics of his true God, I find in considerable measure, though not by any means entirely, coincides with my idea of God. This has brought home very strongly to my mind the supreme need of, on the one hand, stating fearlessly what God is not, drawing away from Him those curtains of crude formulae which we in practice, ignore ourselves though they so generally, from outside, are considered essentials of Christianity. And on the other hand, a clear statement of what God not so much IS, but DOES. What God is almost necessarily leads to creeds and formulae with their barriers; what God DOES brings us to the sphere of

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