The Ninth Hour

The mild modern stereotype of a Quaker would surprise the fiery Friends of George Fox's 17th Century as much as today's average idea of a Christian would surprise the dangerously living followers of St. Paul. The early Quakers were not quaint and softspoken; they were religious enthusiasts of passion and vociferous outrage who were not afraid to raise their voices against a minister in his pulpit or a slave dealer at his market.

One modern Friend who speaks in the old tradition is Gilbert Kilpack, 38, writer, lecturer and staff member of the Quaker retreat center, Pendle Hill, at Wallingford, Pa. (TIME, June 21, 1948). Published last week, Kilpack's latest pamphlet, Ninth Hour* (Pendle Hill; 35-c-),is a voice raised eloquently against the sweetness & light school of Christians. Excerpts:

The Cross. "The Jews and the Romans barbarously nailed Jesus to a cross. We are more refined, but far more vicious. We have made Him entirely respectable. Jesus was of the line of prophets, and the prophets have always been outrageously disrespectful of ancient customs, have always been daring of speech, have always rebelled against human authority--in a word, they have never been content to conduct themselves properly . . .

"St. Paul declared that in order to be convinced of the truth the Greeks required wisdom and the Jews a miraculous sign. As the perfect evidence of God, they were offered a despised criminal suffering upon a cross. This, said Paul, was a great stumbling block (scandalum) to the convincement of the world...

"The cross is the scandal by which God found entrance into His own world. But look what we have done to it: made it respectable and even stylish ... The scandal is still too much for us, and we twist and turn to escape it, some saying it is God's saving of man, and others that it is man's reforming of man. Both views are right and both are wrong when held separately . . . God has always made the first move and shown the way, but He has sworn that on earth we shall not be saved against our will; we must add our wounds to His before the ninth hour is finished."

Sanctity. "Sanctity consists not of pleasant visions but of faithful discipline. To hold that we are religious only when we feel religious is a most depressing heresy. We may safely wager that the saint never feels like a saint. To make the efficacy of prayer and goodness dependent upon 'feeling' is akin to a Napoleon on the eve of battle calling it all off till he feels more heroic. In His ninth hour, Jesus did not feel the Father near--'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'--but faith and obedience did not fail.

"Sanctity is the spirit of joy which attends all acts . . . Our world is almost in the way of forgetting that joy is a Christian virtue, God's gift to the inwardly reverent and obedient..."

The Church. "There is no salvation outside the church! This is by no means a statement of doctrinal exclusion; it is a statement of the fact of human solidarity, and it is the means by which all mankind may live in the household of the Lord. Sinners need saints and saints need sinners, and no one enters the kingdom without the loving concern of all. Jesus needed the synagogue and the synagogue needed Jesus, who came not to destroy but to cleanse.

"What a strange generation is ours, affirming so boldly the principle of worldwide social responsibility and at the same time denying the church as organized spiritual responsibility. Those who tell us that they want personal faith but nothing to do with the church reduce faith to one dimension; they do not know the true church or her riches. We may very well find it necessary to walk out of the old family church on the southeast corner, but we can't walk out of Church. The church is not a finished product; it is a growing life and escapes complete definition, and yet we must be forever trying to define it. In the heart of God the church is accomplished; in this world it is poor, defeated, obscure, and hard to find . . .

"To worship Jesus to the neglect of the greater whole, the Universal Creator, is to lay the ground for divisions in the church. To neglect Jesus and to worship only the Universal is to rob the church of its humanity, to turn it in the direction of spiritual anarchy. But to know God through Christ and to know one another in Him, this is the perfect unity of the church which cannot be broken."

* "And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour."--Mark 15:33-

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