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March/April 2008
Settled
Upon the Heart:
The Goodness of John Woolman
By James Tipton
John Greenleaf Whittier, concluding his introduction to the 1871 edition of The Journal of John Woolman, wrote: “I am not unmindful of the wide difference between the appreciation of a pure and simple life and the living of it, and am willing to own that in delineating a character of such moral and spiritual symmetry I have felt something like rebuke from my own words.”
Perhaps all who seriously read Woolman’s Journal feel a similar rebuke arising from both our ability to recognize and our inability to act. John Woolman (1720–1772) was a completely good man, and this is our problem. We can recognize and appreciate the goodness of his pure and simple life, his simple peace, his gentle, all-embracing love, but we are unable to go beyond recognition and appreciation of his goodness to the quiet practice of goodness in our own lives. With any attempt to compare our goodness to his, we feel awkward, embarrassed and uncomfortable. Occasionally we try to satisfy ourselves or at least to relieve ourselves of the absolute human responsibility somehow implied in the recognition of goodness — we intellectually profess obedience to the voice within; we profess functional simplicity; we profess all-embracing love. But we cannot settle these things upon our own hearts.
We are victims of deep-rooted habits which, as Woolman recognized, “though wrong, are not easily altered.” We are “too much clogged with the things of this life.” We are stifled, unable to progress beyond the profession or the “word-idea.”
Quiet, gentle men and women, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Charles Lamb and John Greenleaf Whittier, have been strongly attracted to Woolman. These are men and women who would embrace the world in total, would embrace all people rather than one particular person. Lamb, who “in feelings” hoped that he was at least “half a Quaker,” urged that we “get the writings of John Woolman by heart.” Channing pronounced Woolman’s Journal “beyond comparison the sweetest and purest autobiography in the language.” Emerson found “more wisdom in these pages, than in any other book written since the days of the Apostles.” Whittier, like Emerson, placed Woolman’s stature with the early Christians, “John Woolman’s faith, like the Apostles’, is manifested by his labors, standing not in words but in demonstration of the spirit — a faith, that works by love.” George Maucaulay Trevelyan classed Woolman with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and St. Augustine as a major religious thinker and declared Woolman superior to them because he was "good all through." In the same essay Trevelyan declared Woolman "A Quaker Socrates, with his searching, simple questions."
Men and women attracted to Woolman recognize goodness and love as more than intellectual or word-ideas. Woolman’s love was all-embracing, universal and, perhaps more important, a practical love. Like Emerson’s practical thinker, Woolman’s goodness had some edge to it. With gentleness, selflessness and compassion, Woolman worked to improve the condition of the Negroes, Indians, poor workingmen, sailors, English post boys or any group in society that was exploited and made to suffer for the benefit of another group. Softly, quietly attempting to reform established institutions, Woolman refused to be an accomplice in any way to the forces producing the conditions he recognized as evil. He refused to pay a tax to support wars against Indians and refused to accept official payment when he was forced to lodge and entertain military troops. In England, he witnessed the miserable lives of English post boys and promptly directed his friends at home not to send letters to him on any common occasion by post.
Woolman is remembered chiefly as the prime force behind the early Quaker abolishment of slavery. Active as a scrivener, he refused to draw up wills or documents that included slaves as items of property or exchange. During his travels (in which he preached against slavery) it was occasionally necessary to accept food and lodging at the home of a slaveholding Friend. Woolman felt uneasy under these circumstances and paid the Friend (generally against his host’s will) for his food and lodging; and he would often give the owner money to be distributed to the slaves, or distribute it himself.
Woolman hated the evils in society, refused to be an accomplice, worked for reform, but he never ceased to embrace the evildoer in his love. Trevelyan writes, “And when the Friends found that they could not answer John’s questions, instead of poisoning him or locking him up as an anarchist, they let their slaves go free!” Woolman’s love was clearly an outward-directed emotion — an active, practical love. He was unconcerned with the selfish salvation of his soul and professed in words and acts that “Conduct is more convincing than language.” Woolman recognized that “the real substance of religion” is “where practice doth harmonize with principle.”
Like all genuine seekers of truth, Woolman’s life was outwardly simple. And perhaps all true goodness is rooted in simplicity. Like Thoreau, he lived the simplicity he professed. Thoreau, after developing a superior graphite pencil and opening the way to fortune, left the complications of business forever. Woolman, seeing his retail clothing and supply business expand and prosper, gave it up, fearing it would soon control him. He declared, “Every degree of luxury hath some connection with evil,” and advised that if people “were content with a plain way of life, they had ever had more peace and calmness of mind than they who, aspiring to greatness and outward shows, have grasped hard for an income to support themselves therein.” And like the Quaker-born Walt Whitman, Woolman in later years restricted his clothing to undyed homespun. To luxury, Woolman preferred “the simplicity of everlasting truth,” and again we are reminded of Thoreau, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”
Woolman led a simple life in obedience to the light within. Sensitivity to the voice within somehow demands simplicity. The simple life of goodness often has very productive effects because nothing is ever overcomplicated; nothing stifles the decision to act. Woolman’s simplicity and practical love was not a product of doctrine, but of quiet listening to the inner voice. Shortly after his death, theologians criticized Woolman for having little doctrine. But instead of doctrine, Woolman dug deep, “down to the Rock, the sure foundation.” His rock or “inward principle” was not an intellectual fancy or whim or word-idea but was grasped by firm hands from a firm head and then settled upon the heart.
To persons of much fundamental goodness Woolman holds great attraction. Like Woolman, they must find an “inward principle,” as justification of instinctive goodness, a truth by which to live. Instinctive recognition of an inner light does not alone satisfy. Somehow the “inward principle” must be grasped with the head, and only then can it be settled upon the heart.
John Woolman says, “We are wiser than we know.” We all have a shovel near at hand with which we can begin to dig, down deep to that rock, to that “sure foundation” where we will find wisdom, simplicity, peace, harmony and love overflowing.
James Tipton’s ancestors include several generations of Hicksite Quakers. Although born in eastern Ohio, he spent much of his life in Colorado. He now lives in the tropical mountains of southern Mexico where he writes articles, short stories, poetry and reviews. His most recent collection of poetry, Letters from a Stranger, with a Foreword by Isabel Allende, won the Colorado Book Award.