George Fox Hears the Inner Voice

I had been walking with him for weeks by then, through lanes that turned to mud after every rain. We slept in barns when the farmers allowed it and under hedges when they did not. Fox kept his own counsel most days, but he still asked directions to the next minister or the next gathering of separate people. I carried an extra blanket and listened when he spoke at all.

We reached a village outside Mansfield late in the afternoon. The air smelled of wet thatch and woodsmoke. He went straight to the house where the dissenting preacher lived and stayed inside until the light faded. When he came out his shoulders were drawn tight. He said nothing about what had passed between them.

That night he sat apart from the fire. I offered him bread. He shook his head once and kept looking at the ground between his boots. I had seen the same look on him after every meeting for months. Each time he returned more silent than before.

By morning he had left the village. I followed the track he would have taken and found him on a rise of open ground where the wind moved the grass in long waves. He stood without moving for a long time. His hands hung at his sides. I stayed back among the trees because something in the set of his back told me to keep my distance.

He began to walk again before noon. I kept him in sight across two fields. At the edge of a small wood he stopped. He turned once as if listening for someone behind him, then faced forward again. I could not hear any voice, only the leaves and the distant lowing of cattle.

Later he came back down the slope. His face looked different, not calmer exactly but emptied of the strain that had been there. He walked straight past the place where I waited and kept going toward the road. I caught up after a quarter mile. He did not slow his step, but he spoke without turning his head.

He said there was one who could speak to a man’s condition when every other voice had failed. He did not name the one. He did not need to. The words came out steady, as if he had tested them first in his own hearing.

We reached another cluster of houses by evening. He asked for the nearest meeting of seekers and was directed to a barn on the far side of the green. I went with him. Inside, perhaps twenty people sat on benches and on the straw. He stood near the door at first, then moved forward when the talk turned to the limits of outward teaching. He spoke only a few sentences. The words were the same ones he had given me on the road. Several of those present leaned forward. One woman began to weep without sound.

After that night he did not return to the same houses we had visited before. Instead he moved from village to village, always asking first whether any there still looked for a living voice rather than the words of dead men. I stayed with him another month. Each time he spoke the same thing happened: a few listened, a few turned away, and the rest asked him to stay longer than he would.