Rufus M. Jones

Getting Into the Right Furrow

Thomas Jones and Thankful his wife left Wales for the New World and settled at Hanover, Massachusetts in 1690. They were probably members of the Society of Friends, and their great-grandson Abel, who moved to Harlem, now called China, certainly was. Harlem was in the province of Massachusetts, but it was included in Maine when the state was established. He married in 1806 Susannah Jepson of Irish descent, and they began their married life in a log cabin at the north end of the lake known as the “Chiny Pond”. The last seven of their eleven children were born in a new home, still standing, which Abel built in South China village. Edwin, his seventh son and youngest child, was Rufus Jones’s father.

He married in 1852 Mary Gifford Hoxie who also belonged to a Friends’ family living in Albion, fifteen miles from South China, God-fearing stalwart people, who knew little of life’s comforts and took its trials without complaint. Abel was a farmer who cleared seven farms, which means before he could plough a field or build a house he cut down the trees, removed the stumps, and made walls of the stones which the Glacial Age had left in abundance over the land. Mary Gifford Hoxie’s father, Matthew, was a cabinet maker in Albion, skilful with his hands, for he could fashion chests, beds or coffins according to the village needs. He was a man of humour, a kind of native wag, so his grandson and part-namesake came by his trait of humour naturally. Through the hard winters and the brief summers of this precarious, rugged existence, there was still room for laughter.

Edwin Jones brought Mary Hoxie to the family home to start her married life under the supervision of his mother, Susannah, and his sister, Peace. Here, in the front parlour, Rufus Matthew Jones was born on January 25th, 1863, a cold snowy night. He was the second son and third child, for Walter had been born in 1853, Alice in 1859. Herbert, four years younger than Rufus, was born in 1867. Edwin’s second eldest brother, Rufus, had died late in 1862 so the baby was named for him and for Mary Hoxie’s father, Matthew. Aunt Peace took the child in her arms and made her prophecy: “This child will one day bear the message of the Gospel to distant lands and to peoples across the sea.” [Finding the Trail of Life, p. 20]

As a child he was always called Rufie and it was he who helped his father on the farm as soon as he was old enough. Walter had become a carpenter and gone away from home. Rufie was a good farm boy, learned quickly and soon became indispensable to his father. He took naturally to caring for animals and tilling the soil; at the same time he was happy at school or playing wild games with the village boys. Whatever was doing, Rufie was in great demand. There came the day, however, when he could neither work nor play. Like all the boys he went barefoot from the moment it was warm enough until the frost forced him to get into stiff, uncomfortable boots, and a bad bruise on his foot became an abcess. The local doctor, sharpening his lance on the nearest thing at hand. plunged it into the foot.

For nine months it looked as though Aunt Peace had been wrong about her boy’s future. The infection spread from the foot to the leg and Rufus lay helpless on a couch in the living-room where the family took turns watching over him. But it was his mother who sat up with him at night holding his leg in her hands, trying to case the pain and the fear of death which enveloped him. His grandmother and he read the Bible aloud together and she told him stories of her pioneer life. Aunt Peace knew that he could not die for he had a destiny. He was born for something great. And he recovered, learning to walk again, without even a limp. There is no doubt that this near approach to death and Aunt Peace’s assurance that he would live to be a great person, gave him not so much a sense of his own importance as the feeling that he was being led forward by pillars of fire and cloud.

While he was ill, there was another prophecy. Their home was a way-station for Friends travelling in the ministry; in spite of South China’s remoteness, an amazing number of persons visited there. James E. Rhoads, who later became the first president of Bryn Mawr College, rose one morning during family worship and laid his hand on little Rufus’s head and said, “In this crooked and perverse world, this boy will be a shining light.” The boy was deeply impressed, naturally, and “it filled me with a sense of awe as it tied in with Aunt Peace’s prophecy. I never reminded James Rhoads in later years of this extraordinary utterance and had no idea, ever, whether James Rhoads remembered making it”. [Note written by M.H.J. during conversation with R.M.J., May 1948]

Probably it was his mother who pondered over these sayings, for Rufus was an ordinary boy and showed little promise of ever getting into the trail she wanted him to find. Once, when he had seriously disobeyed her and he expected and deserved severe punishment, she took him to her room. Instead of telling him what she thought, she knelt in prayer, telling God of her hopes for this son of hers. It was a turning point in his life and although there were many failures, he was trying to be good.

He was needed on the farm and young Rufus knew he ought to stay and help his father. South China was home and he loved it. The beauty of the lake and the hills satisfied some of him, but not all. Something inside was driving him to a different life. As he and his father were hoeing potatoes one day, he stopped, leaned on his hoe and said that he must go away to school. The father’s reply was the natural one, that Rufus had had all the education he needed for he had gone to every village school for miles around. Most serious of all, there was no money. The boy replied, ” ‘I know that well enough, but I guess if an American boy really wants an education, nothing’s going to stop him.’ ‘If thee feels that way,’ father replied, ‘thee’s free to go ahead. I’ve said all I can.’ This decision marked another turning point and I dated my life from that moment.” [Ibid, July 1939]

A scholarship was granted for him to attend the Friends’ Boarding School in Providence, Rhode Island, and at the age of sixteen-and-a-half Rufus Jones left home for this great adventure. He came home at Christmas because he was so homesick to sec his mother, but when he came home again in a few months it was to attend her funeral. In 1882 Rufus Jones was able to enter Haverford College as a “second-year student”

Embarking on the Sea of Life

When Rufus Jones graduated from Haverford College in 1885, he had to decide what he would do next. He was interested in studying law and yet he wanted to continue his studies in history and political science. Funds were available to him in either course. He had written his graduating thesis, at the suggestion of his much loved Philosophy teacher, Pliny Chase, on “Mysticism and its Exponents” and the research for this had strengthened his growing interest in history; it had, even more, indicated to him that there was a field which thrilled him beyond anything he had yet attempted.

At South China in the summer of 1885, he was faced with a choice between graduate work in history at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a teaching position with a salary of $300 offered to him at Oakwood Seminary, a Friends’ Boarding School at Union Springs, New York (now called Oakwood School at Poughkeepsie, New York). He talked it over with Aunt Peace who was definitely inclined to choose the post at Oakwood for she understood teaching in a Friends’ School, whereas graduate work in a great university seemed terrifying to her. Rufus Jones weighed both opportunities. “I knew that, in real fact, I was choosing not so much a piece of work as the kind of person I was going to be, and that consciousness dominated the decision. I felt pretty clear that I preferred the kind of self that would grow out of the year of teaching in a Quaker school—and I took the $300.” [The Trail of Life in College, pp. 143-144]

For this salary Rufus Jones taught all the Greek and German, some of the Latin, astronomy, zoology and surveying. Besides his heavy duties in the school he found time to read Carlyle, George Eliot, Schiller and Goethe in German, English poetry and the mystics.

He had also begun his ministry in the Friends Meeting at Oakwood. “I felt now and then a clear, fresh message open up in my mind as we sat together in the silence. ” [Ibid, p.146]

His first acquaintance with mysticism had been at family worship at home where “someone would bow and tall with God so simply and quietly that He never seemed far away….The roots of my faith in unseen realities were reaching down far below my crude and childish surface thinking”. [Finding the Trail of Life, pp. 21-22] This was a daily experience; and besides this twice a week he went, from the time he was a baby, in the wagon or the sleigh to the meeting for worship in Dirigo, a few miles from the South China home.

Dirigo meeting often had long, dreary silences, terminate sometimes by weird remarks repeated at every period of worship, or a stringing together of texts which gave no comfort to a small boy sitting on a hard form too high for his feet to reach the floor. Yet there were moments of thrill when Uncle Eli or Aunt Sybil rose, and with them the small boy’s spirits. Rufus Jones was only ten when Aunt Sybil died, but he could never speak of her without a sense of awe and wonder, so marvellous was her gift, so rare her understanding, so close was she to God and the heavenly real about which she preached. Uncle Eli was less dynamic; perhaps his feet were more on the ground and his head not quite so near heaven. He spoke of everyday things a boy could understand and he made Bible stories come alive. Uncle Eli and Aunt Sybil had travelled over the world to visit Friends in England and other far off places, and to bring the Gospel to those in darkness. Places that Rufus, some day, hoped to visit.

Aunt Peace and his own mother were daily, Intimate companions and they knew God as their present Friend. The boy, Rufus, had lived among mystics and had not known them by that name, but his senior year at Haverford and the work on his final thesis made him aware of the fact that mystical experience was not only something in history but something he had always known in his own life. The year of teaching at Oakwood served to strengthen his intellectual and spiritual life. It also brought him Sallie, who was likewise a teacher there.

“I have just come home from Meeting, where Uncle Eli preached one of the most powerful sermons I ever heard. The thrills ran up and down my back. He preached from my old text, ‘The word that came to Israel at Kadesh-barnea, Go Forward.’ As he stood there with his grey locks and trembling hand, and got filled with fire as he went on, I felt that he himself was a prophet, who was receiving messages from above for the people. I am getting some of Uncle Eli into my life.” [Letter from R.M.J. to Sarah H. Coutant, July 25th, 1886] Thus Rufus Jones wrote from South China at the age of twenty-three, to Sarah Hawkeshurst Coutant, twenty-four years old, who became his wife two years later.

Sallie Coutant came from a Huguenot family living in Ardonia, near Poughkeepsie, New York. She had been a student at Oakwood Seminary and returned as a teacher the year before Rufus Jones came. They were both filled with a passionate love for truth, for education, for making their lives pure and good. They both came from small, country, Quaker homes where poverty was a reality, but where a homespun culture and dignity were equally real. They had both lost their mothers and yearned for an understanding soul with whom to share all the gropings which young people have.

When he wrote to Sallie on August 7th, 1886, he had an important piece of news. “My European blossom has become a seed which is fast ripening. I propose to go to Europe for a year, spending most of the time getting the French and German languages. I am arranging to go…two weeks from Thursday. Of Course there will be many hard things to endure and a great many lonesome days to be spent, before the year is over, but I think I can stand it, for I have looked on all sides of the question and it looks right.”

No sooner had he made this decision than another opportunity came to him. “I have had the position of principal of Damascus Academy, Ohio, offered to me, which would be a good place, but having put my hands on the plough handles and having the horses nearly harnessed, and furthermore feeling that I am in the right furrow, I do not think it best to turn back. I never felt so much in my life before that I had reached the dividing line between past and future, boyhood and manhood as I have this summer. Sometimes when I stop and listen I can almost hear the infinite sea of life roar and rumble and I know that everything is shouting in my ear, ’embark on it’, and I mean to obey the voice.” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., August 7th, 1886]

Hannah J. Bailey of Winthrop, Maine, loaned Rufus Jones the money for this momentous journey and Uncle Eli provided him with letters of introduction. Before he sailed from New York on the steamer Pennsylvania on August 26th, he visited Sallie at Ardonia and they reached an understanding with each other, although no engagement was announced.

He landed at Glasgow and after a few days in Scotland among strangers he wrote from Wilmslow in Cheshire: “I am now at the ‘Mecca’ toward which I have been tending and if I were in my father’s house I could not be made more at home. I am with Ellen Clare Pearson who went to Palestine with Uncle Eli and Aunt Sybil, and this is my home for a week. Uncle Eli’s name is like ‘Open Sesame’ at every Friend’s house. I had never expected such welcomes as I get, and my friends here have written to friends in the cities which I am to visit, so I shall not feel so much like a stranger as I did in Scotland. ” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., September 12th, 1886]

William Lean, then Headmaster of Ackworth, entertained Rufus Jones. Fielden Thorp met him at York station and Rufus Jones “felt at home with him at once….(At York Meeting) I spoke briefly (as did Fielden Thorp). It did me good to have him say what he did and after Meeting he said some very kind things to me. I went at once to York Minster, the greatest cathedral in England. It is impossible to describe such a structure and the impression it makes. Fielden Thorp gave me a splendid letter of introduction to John Bright, so I started for Rochdale and soon found the home of ‘the great commoner’. The door opened and in came a cat followed by two dogs and the dogs by the real John Bright who looked just as his pictures do. A grand, good face, crowned with snow-white hair.” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., September 20th, 1886]

He visited Birmingham, “where I was met by Richard Barrow who took me to his lovely home at Edgbaston. I attended a Bible school of three thousand members and a very large meeting on First Day. I was called on to address the school, was introduced as a nephew of Eli Jones. It was at Bull Street Meeting that Rufus Jones “rose trembling, to speak, ” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., Ibid] and said that since sitting in this meeting he had been thinking. What his message was, no one remembers, but a Friend took him aside at the close and told him, “Thou shouldst not have been thinking.” The young visitor took this in good grace and the remark became a family saying for the rest of his life but it might have wrecked his ministry, for such an eldering in such a place was a serious matter. Fortunately, Richard Barrow and the daughters of Joseph Sturge encouraged Rufus Jones.

From Birmingham he travelled to Stratford, Warwick and Oxford on his way to London. “Nothing pleased me more (in Oxford) than the monument at or near where Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were burned. They have always been my heroes. Latimer’s last words are grand: ‘Be strong, Master Ridley and play the man, for to-day we will, by the grace of God, light such a candle as shall never go out!’ ” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., September 20th, 1886]

In London he made his headquarters with Hugh Fox. One of his great moments was a chance to hear Spurgeon. “He believes in God, and I think he lives and walks with him.” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., October 2nd, 1886]

He did a good deal of sightseeing with William Charles Braithwaite, also twenty-three years old, as his guide. have seen the most important and interesting things in London, I was with Bevan Braithwaite two nights, one with Stafford Allen.” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., Ibid.]

Before the London visit was over, Rufus Jones was joined by Charles Jacob, his intimate cousin, a boyhood companion, and school and college friend. They had planned this trip together. The two young men arrived in France early in October, going first to the little town of Dieu-le-fit, south of Valence, where they stayed together for a month. It was here that Rufus Jones had a mystical experience and felt “the walls between visible and the invisible suddenly grow thin, and I was conscious of a definite mission of life opening out before me….I remember kneeling down alone in a beautiful forest glade and dedicating myself then and there in the quiet…in the presence of an invading Life, to the work of interpreting the deeper nature of the soul and its relation with God ” [Trail of Life in College, pp. 159-160]

Early in November he left Charles Jacob and moved to the home of Jules Paradon a member of the small group of French Quakers in Nimes, where he struggled alone with climate, food, poor health and homesickness. “l wish I could wake up and find myself sitting on the floor of my room at Haverford, but, I must not look back for fear of becoming a pillar of salt. ” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., November 21st, 1886]

Charles joined him later, but they left Nimes together in February 1887 for Geneva which he thought the most agreeable city he had yet seen, and, after a short stay, leaving Charles there, Rufus Jones went on to Heidelberg where, in a delightful boarding home, he found “the food splendid and everything neat and homelike. It is not cold and I have a stove in my room.” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., March 3rd, 1887]

Spring in Heidelberg was almost idyllic; for a time his health was better and many of his doubts vanished, but he was nagged by the uncertainty of his future. This year was to prepare him to be a better language teacher, but he had no teaching post. Sallie had told him there was a place open at Oakwood, but there was no definite letter offering the position. In any case, he did not really want to go back there; he wanted to teach at the Friends School in Providence, where his first cousin, Augustine Jones, was the principal.

“It is not easy to be good,” he wrote. “How do great souls decide their all important questions so quickly? Their whole life has been preparing them for the moment. I have fought, more than one would think. I do not always succeed, but I am in earnest in this business and I do not intend to be a knot in the tail of the devil’s kite to help it fly…Sallie, thou knows that I aspire to be something and do something, what it shall be I do not know but this I know, that he who would ease the burdens of the world must himself breathe the ‘ampler æther and diviner air.’ The day is past when to be good means to wear grey clothes and a long face. If any man is to be loaded with sunshine it is he who feels himself at peace with the world and its Creator.” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., April 12th, 1887]

In the next few days a letter from Augustine Jones arrived and on April 26th Rufus Jones wrote accepting the position.

With this important matter settled, Rufus Jones looked forward to the future, “the more I think of it the more I rejoice that I am going to Providence”, [R.M.J. to S.H.C., May 1st, 1887] and he was eager to get home. He felt more sure of himself than he ever had. He was now certain that he was not going to be always a teacher of history nor of languages. During his weeks in Heidelberg he had studied under the great philosopher, Kuno Fischer. “My interest in mysticism had been steadily growing and deepening, and now I saw that the best approach to an understanding of this great human experience was to be found in philosophy and psychology….When I finished Fischer’s courses and went on to Paris for my final work in French, I had my mind already made up to turn henceforth to the study of man’s inner life and the spiritual ground and foundation of the universe.” [Trail of Life in College, pp. 166-167]

He was twenty-four years old and life was promising much as he started the voyage back across the Atlantic. He was getting well into the right furrow.

 Testings of Faith

The two years at Providence were happy ones. His letters to Sallie before they were married indicate how deeply he loved his teaching, and that pupils came willingly and eagerly to his class-room. He took an important part in the school meeting for worship and he was becoming more and more interested in American Quakerism. In the autumn of 1887, when his Uncle Eli returned from the conference in Richmond, Indiana, where Bevan Braithwaite and several other British Friends had been in attendance, he saw Rufus Jones and told him about the conference and its meaning for the Society of Friends. It was at that gathering that the “Richmond Declaration of Faith” had its creation. There can be no doubt that Uncle Eli’s reports fired Rufus Jones with enthusiasm to take part in the Quaker movement. Another important visit of this time was a day spent with John Greenleaf Whittier, then an old man living in Danvers, Massachusetts.

Rufus M. Jones and Sarah H. Coutant were married at her home in Ardonia, New York on July 3rd, 1888, and after a brief visit to South China, Maine, they came to live at the Friends School in Providence. He had taught there as arranged, during the year 1887-1888, but the marriage was postponed until he could earn enough money to return what had been borrowed for the trip abroad.

During this summer he started his first book, Eli and Sybil Jones, Their Life and Work, published in Philadelphia in 1889. This first attempt at anything longer than an article must have given him pleasure. It gave him a chance to study and interpret the lives of two persons who had meant much to him, and to begin his work on Quaker research and history.

At the end of the school year in 1889 Rufus and Sarah Jones packed up their possessions and moved to the Oak Grove Seminary, Vassalboro, Maine, where he was to be Principal. Oak Grove was ten miles from South China and was, like the school in Providence, a Quaker boarding school for boys and girls, under the care of the Yearly Meeting of Friends for New England.

He and Sallie stayed at Oak Grove for four years, he as principal, teacher, minister, man of all work, counsellor, companion. The men and women who were his students still speak of those years as wonderful for them. Sallie was housekeeper, and part of the time his brother Herbert was the business manager. Even with all this help it was, for him, a twenty-four hour a day job, with breakdowns in the windmill always occurring just before Meeting. He looked back on those years and said “I could only thank God…that He had led me hither and had laid all these tasks and responsibilities upon me. Through them I had learned the deeper meaning of life, and I had in a new way found the hidden sources of power to live by.” [Trail of Life in College, p. 174]

Here at Oak Grove, on January 23rd, 1892, their son, Lowell Coutant Jones, was born, two days before Rufus Jones’s twenty-ninth birthday. The baby was named for the poet, James Russell Lowell. This experience of holding the new-born child in his arms remained forever a supreme moment of his life. “l never got away from this divine miracle.” [Trail of Life in College, p. 181] Between Lowell and his father there always was a special bond, and the father found in this boy not only the new expression of himself, but a new revelation of God’s love.

Once again a challenging opportunity came. In 1893 Rufus Jones was asked to come to Philadelphia as editor of The Friends Review and he agreed if a way could be found for him also to do some teaching at Haverford College. The President, Isaac Sharpless, teacher and dean during Rufus Jones’s student days, welcomed Rufus Jones to the faculty, to give a course of lectures in Philosophy. Living quarters were found at the college for Rufus and Sallie and baby Lowell.

The Friends Review, founded in 1847, had started “in the midst of a disastrous Quaker controversy…(and) represented in the period of its birth, the ‘evangelical or progressive’ section of the Society of Friends in America. It especially appealed to those who were in sympathy with the famous English Quaker leader, Joseph John Gurney….The Friend of Philadelphia was the conservative paper, expressing in large degree the ideas and ideals of those who were popularly called ‘Wilburites’, so called because of their sympathy with John Wilbur, the stern opponent of Gurney. ” [The Middle Years, p. 14]

Much of this controversy was a dead issue before Rufus Jones became editor, but he inherited a complicated task for there were many Friends who had little understanding of what the various issues were. Rufus Jones had grown up in South China under the influence of evangelical ministry although there was much in his meeting which would seem to have been conservative. It was fed by the living waters of Gospel ministry and there was none of the dissension and bitterness which tore at the vitals of the Friends’ meetings farther south in New England. The Hicksite-Orthodox separation which took place in Philadelphia in 1827 had affected other areas but had not touched Maine. In his childhood, Rufus Jones had little idea of the troubles there were, but in his student days, both in Providence and in Haverford, he began to see what havoc had taken place. He never really became aware of the state of American Quakerism until he started writing editorials each week for The Friends Review and letters came pouring back to the editorial office on Seventh and Arch Streets, Philadelphia.

The Friends who made up the Review’s Board of Managers were older than he—statesmen, with whom Rufus Jones had the happiest relationship. James Wood of Mt. Kisco, New York, perhaps his dearest friend in this group of men, played a leading part in the creation of the Five Years Meeting in 1902, and Rufus Jones worked closely with him during the years of preparation for this event.

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Race Street) featured little in Rufus Jones’s life until much later. But some members of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (Arch Street) looked upon him as dangerous. He wore a moustache, a frock coat, he preached about thinking, anathema to Arch Street Friends in the ‘nineties’ as to some Friends in Bull Street in the ‘eighties’, he represented modern thinking and higher criticism of the Bible.

Had Rufus Jones desired to bring his membership to Philadelphia from China Monthly Meeting and Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting, subordinate bodies of the Yearly Meeting of Friends of New England, where he had been recorded a Minister of the Society of Friends in 1890 he probably would not have been accepted. By the time such a transfer might have been acceptable he was deep in the life of the Five Years Meeting to which Philadelphia did not belong, and he had no desire to make any change in his membership.

It was Rufus Jones’s purpose, in The Friends Review “to promote in every possible way ‘the advance of Christian Truth’…and to maintain and honour spiritual realities rather than forms and traditions“. [The Middle Years, p. 36] Forty years later he could say, “l then foresaw the profound testings of faith I was that were to come with the new century and…I was prepared to meet them calmly and fearlessly.” [Ibid, p.38]

Fearless he always was. It was not so easy to keep calm. Week after week he wrote his editorials interpreting what he believed to be the essence of Quakerism—the great Quakerism which rose above petty differences or power complexes or ingrown lives. Some letters to the editor expressed shocked and horrified sentiments of the writers and some Friends discontinued their subscriptions. But there were many readers of the paper who were enthusiastic, hearing, at last, the ringing tones of a prophetic leader. There was no doubt that a new voice was heard in the land.

After a year’s editorship, encouraged by his supporters, Rufus Jones in 1894 made the daring step of merging The Friends Review and The Christian Worker into a new paper—The American Friend. The Christian Worker, published in Chicago, was a western version of the Review. On his initiative and with diplomacy and patience and the help of older and wiser associates, the union was brought about. On July 19th the first issue of the new paper appeared and his first editorial said, “The religious journal that becomes a power for good must do more than reiterate constitutional beliefs and universally accepted views; it must be an educational power, a help to spiritual growth, marking a continual advance in thought. It must not be narrowly bound to expound the traditions of a section, a party, or a creed.” [The American Friend, vol. I, July 19th, 1894. Author’s italics.]

One Philadelphia Friend who found him particularly annoying referred to him as “that man Jones”, a term of opprobrium representing the opinion of many Friends throughout the United States. “That man Jones” was shaking the complacent, disturbing the smug, shaming the lazy and they didn’t like it. The beauty and the power of the living Christ filled the soul of this young editor just as these experiences had thrilled George Fox and his great succession of torch-bearers.

Rufus Jones not only dreamed what might come to the Society of Friends. His life was not just writing and theorising. He went from his editorial desk to the class-room where he faced young men, only a few years younger than himself, and here he expounded philosophical truths of the ages. He also had their insistent questions. He lived all the time among young people. Life was good and its opportunities were endless.

He had amazing vitality and vigour in spite of hay fever, frequent colds and occasional periods of complete physical and spiritual exhaustion. Nearly six feet tall he had a tremendous stride as he walked from his home to the college class-room or to the railway station at Haverford for a train to his office in Philadelphia. These two jobs demanded great physical energy as well as mental and spiritual, and either one would have been full time for most people.

In addition he spoke more and more often in Meeting, on Sunday. and on Thursday as well when all the college students were required to attend. He was giving lectures in the neighbourhood and he began his travels to distant places. In order to know more intimately the types of Friends who subscribed to The American Friend, he took a trip to the middle west where he visited meetings and stayed with Friends in their homes. He had to write his editorials on trains and whenever he could find a minute. Thus began his peripatetic life which took him into the heart of American Quakerism and into the hearts of its members.

A Heavenly Meeting

Rufus Jones came to England in 1897, just eleven years after his first visit. The second journey was made possible by David Scull, one of Rufus Jones’s special friends among the group backing The American Friend. There were various obstacles in the way of the journey, for he did not want to leave Haverford College before the end of the academic year which would be necessary in order to reach England in time to attend London Yearly Meeting, and did not want to be away from his wife, for he was anxious about her health. She found the Philadelphia climate difficult and had constant attacks of bronchitis, but there was no hesitation in her mind and she urged him to accept the invitation.

Sarah Jones was in every way a helpmeet and companion for her husband. She had helped him at Providence, she had been the housekeeper at Oak Grove, and when she came to Haverford and they had a home of their own after two years of rather make-shift arrangements, she added to the meagre salary by taking boarders. There was nothing slipshod about her and she was a meticulous housekeeper. She worked hard to have things just right and she also found time to help her husband with his editorial work. The only way he could leave for England was by handing to her the oversight of the paper. It was understood, however, that she and Lowell would spend the weeks of Rufus Jones’s absence somewhere in a better climate in the hope that her cough would improve.

Rufus Jones departed for England with a heavy heart. While he was gone he felt constant anxiety for Sallie; her letters told all too little about her health. He kept wondering whether he had done right to come and was tempted to return home.

Arriving at Liverpool, after a brief visit with Irish Friends, Rufus Jones received from Rendel Harris, a warm welcome and the message “Are thee there, Rufus?” [Note taken by M.H.J.] After London Yearly Meeting Rendel Harris agreed to go with Rufus Jones to Switzerland and this dear friend proved to be an ideal companion. As Rufus Jones himself wrote, “he had a fascinating personality, a charm of manner, a striking style both of speech and pen” [Haverford College, A History and an Interpretation, pp. 94-95]

A walking trip was planned so that they would reach Mürren on Sunday, June 20th, when Rendel Harris knew members of the Rowntree family would be there, among whom was John Wilhelm Rowntree. During a spell of severe weather, Rufus Jones says in a letter to Sallie, “We are now all together and we have had some most valuable talks together. I am especially glad that during this dreadful weather we can sit and talk over the vital questions of Quakerism. We had a beautiful meeting this morning, there were fifteen of us Friends. John S. Rowntree (father of Arnold S. Rowntree), Rendel Harris and I spoke and prayers were offered. It was. a heavenly meeting.” [R.M.J. to S.C.J.. June 20th, 1897]

Thirty years later he wrote that John Wilhelm and he “spent most of that Sunday finding our intellectual and spiritual contacts, reviewing our past lives and forecasting possible plans for the future”. The next day they climbed the Schilthorn and “walked much of the way together side by side, talking eagerly of plans for the future….It was a day of continual thrills—my first experience on a high snow mountain—but greater than the joy of climbing or of seeing sunrise on the Jungfrau .. . was my highborn joy as I went on discovering the remarkable character and quality of the new friend who was walking by my side. We both knew before the day was over that we were to be comrades for the rest of life. ” [Trail of Life in College, pp. 191-192]

John Wilhelm Rowntree, five years younger than Rufus Jones, was even in 1897, at the age of twenty-nine, ill with the terrible kidney disease which was threatening his eyesight, his hearing and his life.

Both these young men were thrilled with the history of the Society of Friends and the potentialities which they saw in Quakerism as a movement. They had managed to throw off some of the strangling, smothering aspects which had tended to destroy the dynamic force of the Society, and they had each come into the experience, as did George Fox, of knowing God experimentally. Each felt that he had a special part to play in this great movement and what could they not do if they worked together? Rufus Jones loved to quote Wordsworth about the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; to be young was very heaven” [William Wordsworth, “The Prelude”] So, too, was it at that moment to be a Quaker and to find John Wilhelm Rowntree.

Together they planned to write the history of mysticism and of Quakerism. One Summer School, to be held later in that summer of 1897, could lead to later ones. They saw the need for young Friends, seeking like themselves, to have opportunities for study, discussion and worship together, and they began to plan ahead.

A Closed or an Open Door?

On the voyage back to New York Rufus Jones’s mind was filled with these new mountain-peak experiences. When he reached New York in July, however, his whole world broke around him. Sallie had struggled with her coughing spells and realised she was not getting better. She took Lowell to his grandparents in Ardonia and then she visited a doctor. The result of this visit she reported in a long letter which greeted her husband on his arrival in New York. Sallie’s illness was no longer bronchitis but tuberculosis and the doctor was sending her to Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains.

This was a staggering blow. Rufus Jones had always urged her to take care of herself, and to work less strenuously in the care of the home so as to keep strong and well. Now he was determined that she should be cured. He could not leave his work but he managed to come to Saranac, an overnight journey, for occasional week-ends. During the summer of 1898 he spent his vacation with her, a distressing time, for she was obviously no better. They tried to buoy each other up with a hope which neither one really felt. Rufus Jones was distraught both about Sallie and about Lowell, lest he should become ill too, and he spent sleepless nights trying to believe that Sallie could recover, knowing, deep down, that her case was hopeless. But he kept up a brave front when he visited her and when he wrote her his daily letter. In the autumn of 1898 she moved to her father’s home in Ardonia because she felt she would be too great a burden of care for her husband. This was a hard decision. Lowell remained with his mother for a short time, but she was too ill and it seemed best for him to come back to Haverford.

Sallie died on January 14th, 1899. Her death left Rufus Jones with a heavy heart. He, and Lowell even more, needed her love, help and care. Now the father had to be mother as well for the little son. Utterly devoted to one another, he and Lowell started life over again in their home at Haverford. Fortunately he had work which occupied all his time.

Teaching at Haverford College was becoming a more and more important part of his life. He was by this time, doing most of the work in philosophy and psychology. His work as editor also increased and the many responsibilities for American Quakerism crowded in upon him. He was working constantly with James Wood on drafting a plan for uniting some of the American Yearly Meetings in what later was called the Five Years Meeting. In 1900 the draft Discipline to be used by this body appeared in The American Friend for comment and criticism, of which there was a great deal. The first sessions of the Five Years Meeting were planned for 1902.

The first American Summer School was held at Haverford College in 1900, to which several British Friends came, including Rendel Harris and John Wilhelm Rowntree. Rufus Jones had done much of the preparation for the Summer School and had written five lectures, later published in book form, entitled A Dynamic Faith.

American colleges and universities allow the members of their faculties to take a sabbatical leave, every seven years. Rufus Jones spent the year of 1900-1901 at Harvard University, doing graduate work with the great men who were there, Hugo Münsterberg, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer and George Santayana. “For the moulding of my intellectual outlook in this period I owe most to my teachers at Harvard….A year’s work in that ‘Philosophy Four’ course (with G. H. Palmer) came nearer to being a ‘complete education’ than any other course of study I have ever known. ” [The Middle Years, pp. 5-6] During that year he took three courses in Philosophy and one in the New Testament. Lowell spent the year happily at the Friends School in Providence and was near enough to Cambridge for father and son to have frequent week-ends together.

Rufus Jones came to England for the Scarborough Summer School in 1901, bringing Lowell. He gave a Sunday evening address at Scarborough. “I felt I made a mess of it but the oddest thing was, it had a marked effect on so many people. Some date their interest in Quakerism from that moment. Something outside of myself happened. ” [Note taken by M.H.J. during conversation with R.M.J., April 1948]

Rufus Jones was deeply appreciated in England but he was still being criticised and misunderstood in America. It was hard work to awaken Friends in that great country. While he was at Scarborough, a post-card brought this message written by an Iowa Friend. “I write to ask thee to stop my paper. I trust that I and my family believe the Bible is divinely inspired from lid to lid, and therefore do not want a paper coming into my home that begins to smell of the Pit. The American Friend is doomed if it does not get right with God soon.”

His sorrow and loneliness made these attacks harder to bear than they had been. In England he found a different atmosphere and almost he wished he might remain there. The opportunity to do so was coming in the very near future but on his return to Philadelphia his mind was well occupied with other, more urgent matters.

As early as 1900 Rufus Jones was corresponding with a young Philadelphia Friend, Elizabeth Bartram Cadbury. She had written, at his suggestion, a full account for The American Friend of a trip to Palestine which she and several other Philadelphia Friends took in the winter and spring of 1900. The number of letters was increasing and by the summer of 1901 Elizabeth Cadbury was writing fairly frequently to “My dear friend, Rufus M. Jones”. She seemed to take much interest in the progress of the Scarborough Summer School. Not very long after his return, the “dear friend” is dropped and the letters begin “Dearest Rufus”. On November 19th, 1901, David Scull, an intimate friend of Elizabeth’s father, Joel Cadbury, wrote to him, “I have heard with great pleasure of thy engagement. Happiness would seem assured with such a wife as thou art securing. With excellent mental qualifications are joined in her the priceless blessings of the influence of a godly home life and a good solid Quaker training. I am glad to believe that thy life will be yet fuller and richer with such a helpmate in thy burdens.”

Lily, as she was then called by her family and close friends, was born on August 15th, 1871, and was the eldest child of Joel and Anna Kaighn Cadbury of Philadelphia. Her grandfather Joel, having come from England to visit his aunt, fell in love with her daughter—his first cousin—Caroline Warder. Friends at that time did not permit first cousins to marry, and this young couple were disowned, but fortunately the Monthly Meeting decided it had made a mistake and some years later Joel and Caroline Cadbury were taken back into membership. The tie between the families in England and America was strong; visits and letters back and forth kept the parents and children acquainted.

Rufus Jones and Elizabeth Cadbury were married on March 11th, 1902, in Philadelphia. Thus began the forty-six years of their wonderful companionship and the association with her parents, brothers and sister which enriched Rufus Jones’s life beyond measure.

Elizabeth brought to her husband a quiet, happy disposition, a delightful sense of humour, a well-trained, disciplined mind, an instinctive gift of doing the right thing at the right time, infinite patience, and a deep religious faith, not expressed in vocal ministry but in everything she did.

Before they were married there had come an offer for service in England. Rufus Jones was asked to become Director of Studies at Woodbrooke, Birmingham, soon to be opened. There was much to attract Rufus Jones to a life in England; proximity to John Wilhelm Rowntree and his plans, a leading role in the new settlement, and for his wife a return, in a sense, to a family eager to welcome her and her husband. Rufus and Elizabeth Jones sailed to England in the summer of 1902. John Wilhelm Rowntree, George and Elsie Cadbury, William Charles Braithwaite, and others, presented a strong case for him to accept the Woodbrooke offer.

On the other hand there were his career of service at Haverford College, the editorship of The American Friend, and the needs of the Five Years Meeting, which was due to hold its first session that autumn. It took him until November to decide not to go to but once decided there were no regrets, and it was a place always especially dear to him. He was happy that Rendel Harris could have the position of Director of Studies. Rufus Jones was invited to give a series of lectures at the Summer School in 1903, preceding the opening of Woodbrooke’s first regular term. This was “the most important course I have ever given. It later formed the substance of the book entitled, Social Law in the Spiritual World, which embodied my philosophy of life up to that time.” [The Middle Years, p. 84]

Lowell did not come to England with his parents in 1903. He had been ill with diphtheria, but seemed to be entirely well when Rufus and Elizabeth Jones sailed for England. He went with his nurse to Ardonia and his grandparents.

On the voyage, for no apparent reason, Rufus Jones felt himself invaded with a new sense of God’s love. On arrival at Liverpool he found a cable stating that Lowell was very ill. A second cable came almost at once announcing Lowell’s death on July 16th.

Lowell’s radiant companionship with Rufus Jones had been the most wonderfull gift which life had brought. “The dreadful news has almost broken my heart”, he wrote to Sallie’s stepmother. ‘ ‘No mortal can know what I have suffered these three days. May the dear God help us all. ” [Letter from R.M.J. to Clementine Coutant, Ardonia, July 19th, 1903]

As Rufus Jones walked along a street in Birmingham he saw a child beating against an iron gate which had swung shut, locking her out. She was sobbing for her mother and, as Rufus Jones watched, the mother did come, unlocked the gate and gathered the frightened, crying child in her arms, “Didn’t you know mother would come?”

“Didn’t you know God would come?” Suddenly the father saw the parallel in his own situation. Without any doubt, he knew that God was on the other side of the gate, of the closed door. God would open the door and understand the suffering; even more, God suffered, too.

Friends at Woodbrooke were overwhelmingly kind. George and Elsie Cadbury took the stricken parents into their home and Rufus Jones went ahead with the lecture course prepared for the Summer School.

Going Forward

In Rufus Jones’s life Lowell’s death marked the end of youth and preparation. Marriage to Elizabeth Cadbury began a new period of maturity, achievement, and the rich growth into full harvest. The birth of their daughter, Mary Hoxie, on July 27th, 1904, brought a new joy into the home and in September, Rufus and Elizabeth Jones moved into the house on 2 College Circle which they occupied for the rest of their lives.

In 1905 John Wilhelm and Constance Rowntree started for America and on the voyage he became ill with pneumonia. When Rufus Jones met the steamer in New York, John Wilhelm was delirious and did not recognize his friend. He was removed by ambulance to a New York hospital and died on March 9th. He was buried ‘in the Friends graveyard adjoining the Haverford Meeting House.

Once again Rufus Jones’s bright hopes were shattered and he had to go forward under the burden of suffering. Later that year he went to England to deliver a Summer School lecture course which was published in book form, The Double Search, God’s search for man and man’s for God.

He describes in The Middle Years his meeting with John Wilhelm Rowntree’s father, brother Seebohm and cousin Joshua, and with his friends including William Charles Braithwaite, Joan Mary Fry, and A. Neave Brayshaw at Scalby in John Wilhelm’s new library. Here the group began to plan the continuation of the histories so sadly interrupted by death.

“It was decided to merge my projected studies in mysticism with the plan for a history of Quakerism. The completed series of volumes was to cover the history of the mystical-spiritual movements which prepared the way for the birth of Quakerism in the seventeenth century and to tell the story of its rise and its development up to the present century. I was asked to be the editor of this Historical Series, and it was arranged for William Charles Braithwaite to deal with the beginnings and early periods of Quakerism and for me to write the background movements and the history of Quakerism from 1725 onward, both in England and America. I consequently returned home that summer with a project of added literary labour which was to occupy the next sixteen years of my life. ” [The Middle Years, pp. 85-86] The mystical library collected by John Wilhelm Rowntree was at his disposal. Financially the way was eased by the newly-formed Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust which enabled Rufus Jones to get books and secretarial help.

He read nearly every Quaker Journal and the minutes of many meetings. He asked many Friends to help, both in the United States and elsewhere, and there was endless research. Tuesdays and Thursdays were kept free from classes and in those mornings he shut himself up in his study to be disturbed only for emergency calls. There was, however, a midweek meeting for the Haverford students on three Thursday mornings in the month to which every student was required to come, and Rufus Jones always, if possible, attended these. Speaking to that group of young men meant that he went to meeting having spent some time beforehand getting his “heart and mind prepared”, as the beautiful query recommends. He found time to sit quietly, drawing on the invisible springs of the spirit, storing his mind with the increasing wealth of his knowledge, and communing with God.

He wrote all his books with a pen, never by dictation or with a typewriter. When the galley proofs came from the publishers Elizabeth Jones corrected the proofs carefully, checking also her husband’s spelling, which was a bit casual. She investigated every quotation to find the exact wording, and every statement that seemed wide of the mark. Next came the page proof, and when that was corrected, she began on the index. This also served as a triple-check on the proof reading.

Henry Joel Cadbury who, for some years lived near by, often shared this task with her, as indeed, did Rufus Jones who read everything, too. Henry Cadbury was an invaluable help and had an eagle eye for errors. What a trio this was, husband, wife and brother working together in superb partnership, with joy in the doing.

William Charles Braithwaite and A. Neave Brayshaw were his constant correspondents during these years. Their handwriting was beautiful to see, but difficult to read. When letters arrived they would be laid aside for a free evening and Elizabeth Jones would read them aloud. She could decipher every word but Rufus Jones did not even try.

Rufus Jones found his college work full of interest and joy though he found little to be joyful about yet as far as his impact on American Quakerism was concerned.

In February 1907 his article, “Divine Presence in Human Life”, was published in the Friends Fellowship Papers and George Newman in the April issue of Friends Quarterly Examiner referred enthusiastically to Rufus Jones’s interpretation of the Inner Light in the above article and in his book Social Law in the Spiritual World, an interpretation which many Friends had failed to understand or approve.

“Early Friends, ” George Newman wrote, “thought of the Inward Light as ‘a principle of God’s nature but not of man’s nature‘, as Isaac Penington put it. Now it seems to us that Rufus Jones…has made clear, once and for all, the conception that ‘the Inner Light, the true seed, is no foreign substance added to an undivine human life…’,” but that we are called, he concluded, to “a clear utterance and an evident practice of the great verities of personal contact with the Truth, of an indwelling divinity and of that inward life, not as a foreign or external or supernatural thing, but as an inherent and elemental part of our being.” [Friends Quarterly Examiner, April 1907, pp. 155-157]

Rufus Jones replied to George Newman in May, “I am very thankful for thy editorial. I was beginning to wonder whether there was any use trying to bring any larger points of view to the notice of Friends. All my attempts seemed to fall so flat that I questioned whether I was not wasting my time and ink! The studies on ‘Inner Light’ in Social Law (have) been left largely to the oblivion of silence. This recent study, ‘Divine Presence in Human Life’, which I felt was the most important chapter I had yet written, was receiving a slender, nagging sort of comment which quite depressed me. Thy study of it was the first word I had had which indicated an appreciation of its significance. It did me good ‘all over’ to find that there was at least one person who knew what I was doing. I will go on now and take a new lease of life.” [R.M.J. to George Newman, May 1907]

Another sabbatical year, in 1908, made it possible for him and his family to come to England for several months. They took a house in Charlbury in the early spring and Rufus Jones travelled daily to Oxford where he worked in the Bodleian Library. At London Yearly Meeting he gave the first Swarthmore Lecture, entitled Quakerism a Religion of Life, and he entered fully into British Quaker affairs. Ties of friendship were strengthened.

There was a trip to Switzerland that summer which included Henry J. Cadbury and John Wilhelm Rowntree’s widow and children. Returning one evening to Grindelwald, after climbing the Faulhorn, Constance Rowntree rushed her children to the balcony of the hotel, while Rufus Jones snatched his child from bed and together they saw a double rainbow span the entire valley. It may have seemed a useless effort, for the youngest two in the group were only three and four years old, but the parents hoped that somehow the children might share in the majestic beauty of that moment. Years later, these children grown into women and dear friends, discovered that they all counted that moment of the double rainbow an earliest memory, a flash of beauty from which they dated their beginnings as conscious individuals.

By 1909 the first volume in the Rowntree Series of Quaker Histories, Studies in Mystical Religion, was published. Two years later appeared Quakers in the American Colonies the authorship of which Rufus Jones shared with Isaac Sharpless and Amelia Mott Gummere. He also published his first book for children, Hebrew Heroes. Everywhere he went children came to thank him for writing this book of stories for them. Friendships with and girls were an integral part of his life.

During the summer of 1911 the family went to Marburg, Germany where they lived in a twelfth century house under the shadow of the castle. Rufus Jones worked with Theodor Sippel, scholar and authority on mysticism, whose friendship and help through the years he deeply prized. Elizabeth with her excellent German, spent many hours reading material, and together these three prepared another volume in the Series, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

October 1912 brought the third gathering of the Five Years Meeting, held in Indianapolis, Indiana. A group of British Friends attended. A month earlier, there was a trip to the Canadian Rockies with George Newman and Arnold S. Rowntree who were studying prospects in Canada for the migration of adult school men with their families. This year Rufus Jones retired from the editorship of The American Friend.

It was obvious, however, that he could not be entirely happy without a paper to edit! A year later when he was in England again, it was decided to transform the British Friend into an American-British periodical under his editorship, to be called Present Day Papers, a Monthly Journal for the Presentation of Vital and Spiritual Christianity. It was edited at Haverford and appeared from January 1914 until December 1915 when the war made it difficult to carry on an international journal. This Monthly “has the roots of its life very deep in the past. It is an instance of an old life in a new form and in a strange land. The British Friend has merged its independent life into the new enterprise and the memorable Present Day Papers of 1898-1902 edited by our beloved John Wilhelm Rowntree, is revived in name at least”. [Present Day Papers, January 1914, Editorial]

Lights Are Going Out

Shortly before leaving England in 1913, Rufus Jones spent a few days in Anglesey with George Newman and his wife, Arnold Rowntree, William Charles Braithwaite and others. During the dark years of war which followed, his mind turned to the gaiety and laughter he had enjoyed with these English Friends, and the visit, which, in the last year of peace, seemed to crown the rich association of nearly thirty years.

Rufus Jones was fifty years old in 1913 and the fact depressed him. Old age seemed near and might prevent him from carrying out all the schemes he had in mind. The future appeared as a time of mental decline and physical decay. That he had achieved more than most people was of no comfort to him. But he had been led to a task from which he could not turn aside.

When war was declared in August 1914 he was spending a holiday in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. In the beauty of this mountain retreat the horror of the war’s meaning struck into his soul for he loved people in both Germany and England.

He wrote in September: “Beneath all overt acts and decisions the immense subconscious forces, charged with emotion, have been slowly pushing toward this event. There are no words which can express the gravity of the tragedy. It is one of those appalling events which test to the bottom our central faith in God, in human goodness, in cosmic rationality and in onward progress. But we must not let our cable slip in this storm. The supreme faiths of humanity have always had their births and their baptisms in baffling mysteries and in the deeps of tragedy and suffering….  We shall come out of this crucible with a new and finer temper at the heart of our faith….  Out of this very flood that seems to mock at ideals of peace and brotherhood new forces will appear.” [Present Day Papers, Vol. I, No. 9, September 1914, p. 247, Editorial]

“Whatever may be the ’causes’ that have led to this cataclysm, our main problems just now must be: How to keep our faith in God and in the coming of His Kingdom; how to interpret our ideals of love and peace; how to suffer patiently and loyally where our ideals collide with systems and requirements that are ‘survivals’ from the past.” [Present Day Papers, Vol. I, No. 12, December 1914, p. 341]

On the day before Christmas 1914 Rufus Jones slipped on the ice, and struck the back of his head, causing concussion. Then began a long battle with illness. The doctor encouraged him to take a sea voyage and early in 1915 he went alone to Nassau in the Bahamas. The ship sailed into a hurricane and for several days there was doubt whether it could survive. On top of the fall, this experience brought him into a nervous breakdown and he returned from Nassau physically and spiritually exhausted. He managed, with difficulty, to continue his teaching, but he gave up all out—side activities. Speaking in Meeting he found quite im—possible. He tried various cures but nothing helped and it began to look as though the cloud would never lift.

Patiently, lovingly, his dear Elizabeth coped with this visitation. Never hurried, never cross, she went ahead trying to minister to the varied needs of a sick husband and a growing, often fretful child, endeavouring to be all things to two very different individuals.

Then they were led to spend a month on Mt. Desert Island, off the Maine coast, where it was hoped that he might begin to come back to his former self. The arrival in July was not promising; a fog covered the island, as heavy and smothering as that which weighed upon his own spirits.

“Unusual outside weather is only one of our many means of discipline. Much harder is the fight with inside weather and more dreary and pitiless are the fogs and east winds of our human spirits….  It is not so easy to arm oneself against drizzling and drenching tempers within our own interior zones…. The fight with stubborn inward weather, the battle with the devil in us, if you will, is the best kind of fighting there is to be done, and he who has conquered conditions of inner climate has now the best victories which crown men. Not least (is) the further discovery—joyous like that of Columbus sighting a new world—that there are inexhaustible resources of divine grace for those who are resolved to rise above the fog and mist, the sleet and snow of dreary inward weather. ” [Ibid, vol. 11, No. 9, September 1915, p. 264, Editorial by R.M.J.]

Here on Mount Desert Island a schoolmaster, who loved wood-chopping, was staying at the same hotel, and he was blazing new trails on the mountain slopes of the island. Rufus Jones borrowed an axe and joined in the trail blazing, slowly but surely clearing a new trail for himself as his strength returned. It was one of those wonderful coincidences so fruitful of results in his life.

“l have had the rare good fortune to meet during my holidays this summer a real trail-maker…. He has been taking me along as a companion of his walks and as a helper in the work…. What we are finding is that any old trail needs a good deal of restoration work done up it…and must be re-marked so that the wayfarer cannot miss the trail.” In the course of their work they found that a “disastrous forest fire had swept over that region and had blasted the entire mountain side…. Nature was, however, doing her best to repair the injury. A green carpet of new blueberry bushes covered the whole region where the fire had gone and the soil was already pushing into life the buried seeds that held in their germs a new forest for a new generation…

“It is happy work to go out in this tonic air, on these granite hills…and to cut trails and mark paths for future feet to fresh scenes of beauty and to new sources of physical health and vitality. But it is not so easy to discover how to make those other trails which guide the soul of man to new sources of life and power. Before our eyes we see the blasting fire moving across the old world…As soon as life gets a chance to work again, it will, in its own way, repair the damage and havoc…. What will be needed most will be the trail-makers, with solid cairns and clear-pointing arrows, to help the souls of men to discover the true way of life and the rea sources of spiritual power. ” [Ibid, Vol. II, No. 8, August 1915, pp. 234-6, Editorial by R.M.J.]

Dr. Francis G. Peabody, his friend from Harvard days, invited him to preach one Sunday at the Northeast Harbour Union Church, across the island. At this prospect, his illness returned; he could not undertake to speak to that select congregation. Dr. Peabody would take no refusal and Rufus Jones went over to see the church and try out his voice in the empty building. His heart sank as the echoes came back to him. Next day, after a sleepless night, he faced a congregation which filled the church. He rose trembling, his knees nearly gave way, but his voice came out clear and unshaken. He preached a great sermon, so his friends who gathered around him afterwards told him, and he knew that his lost powers had returned. That moment marked the end of his illness and Rufus Jones began to live again. He returned to his work at Haverford with a new vitality and he tapped new resources.

As a boy in the Providence School, Rufus Jones had weathered a severe test to his faith in God when he had to choose between the Genesis story of creation and the scientific facts. A wise and deeply religious teacher had made it possible for him to see that one could believe both in facts and in God. This teacher, Thomas Battey, “courageously and fearlessly faced the facts of science as they broke upon the world in the nineteenth century, and he not only kept his own faith, but he led his students on into a deeper faith than they had before they came to school.” [Thomas J. Battey, article by R.M.J., July 1931] When both Sallie and Lowell were taken from him, these experiences might again have closed the door forever between him and God, but they served to make more obvious than ever that “underneath are the everlasting arms.”

His illness and the war brought new tests to Rufus Jones’s faith. God seemed to him to be destroying His world and, for a time, to have forsaken it. Rufus Jones had tried to be an optimist, believing that life was slowly moving upward, and was a spiral, not a circle. In the years before the war, although there had been many slips back, it was fairly easy to believe that the steps forward were greater than those backward. Men were ready to

“Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die….
And hear at times a sentinel
Who moves about from place to place,
And whispers to the worlds of space
In the deep night, that all is well.”
[Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam”, cantos cxviii, xccvi]

But now all was far from well, and Rufus Jones, like many another had to find a new faith for this new age. For many, faith was never recovered, and life became a “Wasteland”. But for him the lines from Goethe’s Faust which he quoted often, must have brought him the answer for which he longed.

“Thou hast it destroyed,
The beautiful world,
With powerful fist:
In ruin ’tis hurled,
By the blow of a demigod shattered!
The scattered
Fragments into the Void we carry
Deploring
The beauty perished beyond restoring.
Mightier
For the children of men,
Brightlier
Build it again,
In thine own bosom built it anew!”
[Goethe’s Faust, translated by Bayard Taylor, Part I, Scene IV]

That was it! With God’s help, man could rebuild the broken world. It was man’s blindness which had destroyed it. God needed men with vision and dedication to “build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land” [William Blake], and in France and in Germany. The war laid a new responsibility upon young men and women all over the world. “Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour.” [Rupert Brooke (Sonnet), 1914, I, Peace]

The Burden of the World’s Suffering

The American Friends Service Committee came into existence on April 30th, 1917, only three weeks after the United States entered the war. Rufus Jones could not attend the first meeting but the group which met together that day asked him to be chairman of the new committee. He agreed to accept this position, providing it did not demand too much of his time, for his teaching schedule was heavy and he was hard at work on the sixth and last volume of the Rowntree Series, Later Periods of Quakerism. The condition of his acceptance is amusing for there was hardly a day for many years when he was not involved in some service for the A.F.S.C. [American Friends Service Committee] He was on constant call for trips to Washington or New York, for committees in Philadelphia which might last all day and into the night. Yet he never slighted his Haverford students nor slackened his work on Later Periods.

His introduction to A Service of Love in War Time, the story of the A.F.S.C., tells something about the author himself and much about the underlying reasons for the committee’s birth.

“This book…is the interpretation of a way of life. The relief work took on a peculiar form and character just because it was the expression of a definite religious faith and sprang naturally out of an inner spirit and attitude to life…. [Friends took their unique and difficult position] because they were inwardly pledged to a way of me which, if extended through the world, would eliminate the seeds of war and would bring new and higher forces into operation within the fabric of society. They could not, therefore, of a sudden change the faith of a lifetime and substitute the methods of war for the slower but not less effective forces of love and co-operation…. This position was no hasty expedient; it was as deep as life itself….

“The one impossible course for those of us who held this faith was to refuse the call to fight and at the same time to refuse all responsibility for the tragedy…[to] assume for ourselves a holier attainment than that possessed by other Christians…. No, to do that was to lose the soul…. We were all in our degree to blame (for) the agony of which in some measure we were all bound to bear a share…. We wanted to show our faith in action…in a way that would both bring healing to the awful wounds of war and at the same time take us out of self and selfish aims and carry us into the furnace where others were suffering…. Now that hunger and disease and greed and post-war hate have revealed their…malevolent sway, possibly it may be a relief to turn away from the dark picture and to read the simple story of an attempt to practice love both with friends and enemies in the midst of the disaster and catastrophe.” [Service of Love in War Time, Introduction, pp. xiii-xv]

The success of the A.F.S.C. in living to some extent up to these great words of its chairman has been in a large measure due to the indomitable belief that love does work.

He was particularly pleased that the A.F.S.C. brought British and American Friends into a close, working relationship. The complicated arrangement whereby A.F.S.C. was a co-worker with the (London) Friends War Victims Relief Committee and, at the same time, an arm of the American Red Cross was certainly difficult, but the A.F.S.C. could never have done what it did if the “War-Vics” had not made this co-operation possible.

Rufus Jones sailed for France shortly before Christmas in 1918. He visited the workers and tried to interpret British and Americans to one another. He let them see the vision that he had for the great service they were rendering and he told them that differences of viewpoints regarding food or sense of humour must not prevent their getting on with their work together. The fact that he shared their frustrations, their hardships, ploughed through the mud, ate their food and wore their uniform, made him one with them.

When the young people came back from the French reconstruction work to their homes in the United States, Quakerism had a new meaning for them. They went to France “immature and inarticulate; they are coming back men who have been tested in the fire and are now, as the steel-makers say, ‘bloom-furnaced’…. They are clarified and deepened in their religious experience.” [lbid, p. 143]

A year later, Rufus Jones wrote in a letter, “My A.F.S.C. work has been a tremendous load, but it has been greatly worth while. It has done more to unite Quakers in America than anything else ever has or than all other things put together. It has, too, given a new spiritual power to our Quakerism and it has awakened a universal interest in Quakerism. All that is in addition to the effect it has had on the field where the service lay. As I look back over the four years during which I have carried the load I am inclined to think it is the most important thing I have ever done. God has been very good to me and in spite of the fact that this has been the heaviest winter’s work I have ever done, I am in the best health I ever can remember to have had. I do not understand where the energy comes from.” [R.M.J. to L. Violet Hodgkin, April 17th, 1921]

Serving as chairman or honorary chairman of the A.F.S.C., as Rufus Jones did for most of the years between 1917 and 1948, gave him full opportunity to keep close to the flood tides which were enriching the Society of Friends. He was an excellent chairman of a meeting, bringing in just the right touch of humour at the right moment, easing tensions and guiding discussions so that the important issues were dealt with adequately. He could go through a long, difficult agenda and bring the meeting to a close at the proper time. It is not surprising that he occupied the chair for many organisations.

His own life was well-ordered. He carried on his many and varied obligations without letting them tangle with one another. He had time to spare for at least one game of golf each week or for cutting trees in the college woods. He did his work with a sense of serenity, although it must be said there were occasions when this serenity gave way to confusion and frustration. He concentrated on the occupation of the moment, putting his best into whatever he was doing. Somehow he managed to bring into each occupation the accumulated wealth of past experience while, at the same time, he was preparing for the work which lay ahead. He kept up with the daily newspapers, the Quaker periodicals, the journals of religious thought, philosophy and psychology, and read important current books in addition to his historical research. He never failed to read Punch each week, as it came to the Haverford College Library.

Conference Pan Quaker

Thus William Charles Braithwaite referred to the All Friends Conference held in London during August 1920. Following this there were also two other conferences, at Oxford and at Jordans, a test for the endurance of Friends. Rufus Jones and his family went to England, their first visit since the war. In addition to all the preparation he had to do for the London Conference, he had written three books—the Swarthmore Lecture, The Nature and Authority of Conscience, the Remnant, and A Service of Love in War Time. The manuscript for the two volumes, Later Periods of Quakerism, was nearly finished, and he brought it with him to London for type-setting.

By 1919 he had written to his friend, L. Violet Hodgkin, “I am reading William Charles Braithwaite’s splendid second volume [Second Period of Quakerism, just published]. Now it is up to me to wind up the series. My volume is practically done, even the introduction written, but I hope to put the finishing touches to it next autumn before sending the MS. to the printers. It seems amazing to think the momentous task which was rolled upon us in 1905 is so near completion and that five large volumes are already out. I shall feel very strange not to be carrying this load and no longer to be under this immense responsibility. Nobody could have been a better co-labourer than W.C.B. We have worked most happily together.” [R.M.J. to L.V.H., July 20th, 1919]

But the completion took longer than Rufus Jones expected and he wrote again to Violet Hodgkin in 1921, “My History is practically done. We have a little more of the page proof to read but it should be finished before I sail [for Europe in May on an A.F.S.C. visit]; the index is nearly done. It is a book of an even thousand pages. I have had an Atlas’s burden on my poor old back. It is a large and complicated task but now it is done and I shall not do it again. I hope nobody will have to do this same sort of thing again!” [R.M.J. to L.V.H., April 17th, 1921]

A special suitcase contained the precious pages when Rufus Jones brought this manuscript to London in 1920. The bag was never out of his sight during the voyage and the family knew that whatever else had to be sacrificed in case of a disaster, this must be saved. There was a large label, tied to the bag’s handle, giving name and address, and the sentence, “If lost, Return to Owner.” When the journey was over and the bag and its contents reached the English publisher without mishap, everyone relaxed.

The high-spot of that summer was neither conference nor lecture, momentous as they were, but the aftermath, when the four friends sought relaxation on northern moors.

“How do prophets occupy themselves when not prophesying? It fell to my happy lot”, wrote George Newman, “to travel at pleasure with a distinguished American Professor of Philosophy; the English historian of Quakerism [William Charles Braithwaite]; and a well-known director in a famous firm in the north of England [Arnold S. Rowntree] immediately after the termination of the conference. They had exhausted themselves, and possibly others also. I was selected as a victim of their subsequent reaction. We began our delightful journey through the North Riding moors, the ostensible purpose of all our action and inaction being to supply a rest-cure for the American Professor.”

Several days passed. George Newman continued, “l have to report…great peace and quietude overcame our cousin [Rufus Jones] and the fascinations of the higher criticism and manifold uncertainties of psychological philosophy gave place to a strange professorial monologue, a contented and fully satisfied sort of murmur…respecting the utility of stone walls on moors.” The question under consideration was, were these walls built to keep the rabbits in or out? “The stress and density of the situation, gave way to the brief but final answer delivered in Greek Chorus, ‘anyhow for rabbits’…. This, then, was the Professor’s rest-cure. Dear friend and comrade and beloved Professor.” [Friends Quarterly Examiner, No. 216, 10th Month, 1920; House of the Four Winds, pp. 335-344, by G.N.]

The cure completed, they returned to Low Hall at Scalby to Elizabeth Jones and Mary Hoxie.

Of Perilous Seas and Faery Lands

Sabbatical leave from Haverford College in 1923 made it possible for Rufus and Elizabeth Jones to take a long-planned voyage to Greece and the Holy Land, as a kind of final travel fling. Rufus Jones had reached sixty, not quite as ancient an age as fifty had seemed, but he felt his travelling days were probably coming to an end. They embarked in the “Empress of Scotland” in February, 1923, but under most inauspicious circumstances.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1922—the last Thursday in November—in front of the Cadbury home he was struck by a motor car and hurled several feet. One leg and several ribs were, broken and he was still on crutches when he boarded the ship.

In spite of this the voyage was a great success. Augustus T. Murray and his wife were spending the year in Athens. School and college classmate of Rufus Jones, he met the ship and took the invalid, crutches and all, to the places Rufus Jones wanted to see. He was pushed and pulled up Mars Hill where he read aloud St. Paul’s speech on the Unknown God, “Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, declare I unto you”. [Acts 27:22-24] The short visit made him determined to come again.

As the ship neared Palestine, Rufus Jones kept his Bible in his hand. Some members of the cruise were surprised at his apparent intimacy with a country he had never seen. One woman remarked, after he had explained that this was due to a life-time of Bible study, “Why I’d have brought a Bible too if I had realised it was about Palestine. ”

The days in the Holy Land were deeply moving to Rufus Jones as he traced the steps of his great Bible heroes and saw where Jesus had lived and died. The shrines, covering the supposed spots of birth and burial, did not impress him, but the shepherd’s field, the well at Nazareth, the olive trees, the stones and the flowers were unchanged. So, too, was the Sea of Galilee with its calm surface or its turbulent waves.

While their party was in a small boat on the lake, a sudden storm arose and the boat, its engine stopped because a rope had caught round the propellor, was being carried to some rocks. One of the boatmen plunged over and untangled the rope. The engine was re-started and the passengers returned somewhat the worse from the rough sea and the anxiety, but unhurt.

Before returning to America they visited England in order for Rufus Jones to do research needed for his book The Churches Debt to Heretics. While at Oxford he learned of a remarkable masseuse there, whose skilled though painful treatment on his leg enabled him to walk again as well as ever.

This journey, in spite of his “last voyage” expectations, turned out to be the beginning of new adventures. The Y.M.C.A. planned to hold a conference in northern China in the summer of 1926, celebrating their forty years of work in China. Rufus Jones was invited to be one of the speakers.

“This is our first day on the Pacific,” he wrote in his diary on June 25th, 1926, “a new situation, with new noises, new calls. We must meet the unusual and speak to the age, to the eastern mind in fresh and creative ways.

“All seem alike expectant that the journey will be fruitful and that it is a divinely ordered mission. May it indeed be so. In any case, I am starting forth with a rare joy. I have seldom ever been so penetrated with a deep happiness. My dear wife and daughter seem to share it with me.”

The family reached Japan early in July where they spent a fortnight crowded with beautiful scenes and interesting experiences. Taking a small Japanese boat from Kobe they sailed through the Inland Sea to the Chinese seaport, Tsingtao. In a nearby summer resort Elizabeth Jones and Mary Hoxie remained for a month with Y.M.C.A. friends, while Rufus Jones went to the important conference held in Tsinan. The heat during this period was worse than anything he had ever known. A retreat on Tai Shan, Confucius’ sacred mountain, followed immediately after the Tsinan conference, when a small group of Chinese and foreign leaders met together. Henry T. Hodgkin was with Rufus Jones during these days, adding greatly to his enjoyment.

There were many risks to health on this Chinese trip. Outbreaks of cholera occurred in several places and there was reason enough to fear what effect a twenty-two course feast might have, but he threw aside his fears and enjoyed everything without ill effects, although he had been on a restricted diet for years.

At the end of his time in China he wrote in his diary, October 29th, ” [Canton] was a splendid finish of my three months in China. In all I had 115 meetings and conferences, nearly all of them marked by serious attention and decided sympathy. I am filled with thanksgiving to God for inspiration, guidance and strength. I came to the end of the wonderful days with hush and awe.”

Rufus Jones and his family sailed for Ceylon and India, stopping for a few days in Manila. The supreme moment of the month was a visit to Gandhi at his Ashram in Sabarmarti, a few miles from Ahmedabad. He closed a long entry in his diary, December 1st, describing Gandhi and their conversation together, with this comment, “Gandhi’s simplicity is as natural as everything else about his life. There is no pose in his nature. He is thoroughly unspoiled and the most satisfactory thing about my visit was the conviction I brought away that here was a man who had attracted the attention of the whole world, a man who had controlled the thought of millions and influenced the destiny of an empire and who yet was still sincere and simple and unsoiled. It is the last test of greatness and nobility of soul.”

Christmas week was spent at the Friends Schools in Ramallah, near Jerusalem, and after brief stops in Vienna and London, the family returned to Haverford.

The rich summer and autumn spent in the Orient, the interest and appreciation from people in cultures completely different from his own, were wonderful experiences.

He had little sense of his own importance and he was never spoiled or made blasé by the acclaim people gave to him, It was pleasant to know that men and women of ail ages, cultures, religions and walks of life found his message answering their needs. But there was a deeper satisfaction than that, and it was the knowledge that he was fulfilling what God wanted him to do. He was living out the prophecies spoken by Aunt Peace and James Rhoads.

In 1929 there was another family trip to England, Greece, Italy and Sicily with brief visits to Geneva and Paris, and then in 1932 came the second visit to the Orient. The Laymen’s Mission Inquiry Commission, with headquarters in New York City, invited Rufus Jones to be a member of a group to evaluate a previous study made of mission work in India, Ceylon, Burma, China, Korea, and Japan. The first group of Fact Finders, often humorously called the “fault finders”, had done its work during 1930-1931 and the second group started in the late summer of 1931. Rufus Jones could not undertake the entire survey; he and his family joined the Commission in Hong Kong by the first of February 1932, about ten days after the Japanese had attacked Shanghai. The “President Grant” did however sail up the Yangtze and anchor overnight in the river at Shanghai, and left again without mishap. Japanese planes were seen flying overhead; the few visitors who came on board while the ship lay at anchor gave a distressing account of what was happening. It looked as though the Commission’s work could not continue in China.

Rufus Jones met his colleagues at Hong Kong, as they arrived from India and Burma; they were able to complete their study in South China during the month of February and by the time they were ready to go north the fighting had stopped. The war did not prevent their work and they were able to visit the areas previously included on the itinerary. In April the Commission reached Nara, Japan, where they spent a week working on the China report, and during May the survey continued in Japan. The Commission stopped for two weeks in Honolulu to begin their final report, entitled, Re-Thinking Missions. Later in the summer the group gathered together again in Rockland, Maine, to complete the book.

Rufus Jones wrote two of the chapters and helped considerably in the editing of all the material, a task he shared with Dr. William Ernest Hocking of Harvard University, the chairman of the Commission. There were so many facts and points of view to be correlated that it seemed, at times, to be quite impossible to include the necessary information and to resolve the conflicting interpretations. Rufus Jones, with his unfailing sense of right and order, his clear and direct mind, his gift of humour when tensions were strong, helped to produce a which everyone in the group approved.

These two visits to the Orient put great demands upon his strength but he met them magnificently, and enjoyed his tasks as well as absorbing the wonder of his surroundings.

The Best is Yet to Be

The retiring age for members of the faculty at Haverford College, as in most American institutions, is sixty-five. Rufus Jones reached this age in 1928, but his uneasy premonitions about being old, which had clouded his fiftieth birthday, had, somehow disappeared! The college asked him to continue his teaching and he was delighted to accept the opportunity.

Haverford College celebrated its centennial in October 1933. Rufus Jones wrote for this occasion, The History of Haverford College, and made up his mind to retire in June 1934. Although he had been urged to continue a while longer, after all he was only seventy, he was quite adamant. He was determined to stop his work before the college authorities reached the point of wishing that he would.

There is a humorous college song about “old Founder’s bell is ringing”. But the ringing of Founder’s bell is not always a matter to laugh about. It had, for forty years, called Rufus Jones across the Cricket Circle from his home to his class-room. He realised that he wanted to be out of earshot of Founder’s bell when the autumn semester began in 1934. He and his wife sailed for England and, after some travels in Europe, returned to Haverford early in 1935, by which time he was adjusted to the fact that he was no longer teaching students at the college.

Retirement meant that there was more time for him to spend on work he loved. There was the Service Committee; there was his writing; there were more and more invitations to preach at college and university chapels. On his return home from these Rufus Jones would report that every seat was filled and that he had found the students most responsive. He kept on ‘lighting candles’ for young and old but he had a special gift for reaching the minds of college students.

He had much to do in preparation for the second Friends’ World Conference in 1937. He was asked to be its presiding chairman, a post which he was well fitted to hold, but which he did not enthusiastically accept. All summer long he lived in dread of the responsibility, and he became troubled in his mind. A disturbing roaring in his ears developed. He was assured by physicians, however, that there was no need for worry or to fear an injury to the brain. He gradually overcame this fear and learned to accept the buzzing, which never quite left him.

When September arrived, the time for the All Friends Conference, in spite of the heat and the strain he carried his responsibilities as chairman with his usual vigour and enthusiasm.

Early in 1938 Rufus and Elizabeth Jones sailed for South Africa at the invitation of South African Friends and the encouragement of the A.F.S.C. He had his seventy-fifth birthday shortly before his departure and both he and his wife went off to the unknown continent in great spirits. The long sea voyage gave him the kind of holiday he loved. The days in South Africa were full of new contacts and new experiences. He lectured in many colleges and saw his friend, Jan Smuts, with whom he had an interesting talk about South Africa and world affairs.

Both Rufus and Elizabeth Jones brought courage and inspiration to the small groups of Friends as they visited in Quaker homes and attended the General Meeting held, that year, in Port Elizabeth. The journey back to America took them to Madagascar, Singapore and Shanghai.

Events in Europe made settling down at home impossible for him. On the “Day of Broken Glass”, in Germany on November 10th, 1938, Jewish shops and synagogues were vandalised. Together with Robert Yarnall and George Walton, Rufus Jones sailed at the end of November for Germany, ready to interview Hitler himself, if need be, in the effort to bring help and comfort to the Jewish people in their suffering.

Rufus Jones had a favourite text, “The Lamb made war on the Beast and overcame him.” He believed firmly that the chequer-board of life had a white background on which the black squares were imprinted. On his momentous visit to the Gestapo headquarters, when the closed door of evil seemed to open a tiny crack for the admission of love and goodwill, Rufus Jones believed that the Lamb could and would, eventually conquer the Beast. He felt that the hard men of the Gestapo were touched for a moment and that in the depths of their hearts they knew the meaning of agapé, a pure, unselfish love.

It is questionable, however, whether the visit had any influence at all. The Gestapo promised them that certain of their requests would be granted and Rufus Jones tried to convince himself that they were. Certainly it was one of the most difficult experiences the three men had ever had.

In 1914, when the war came, Rufus Jones thought he was getting old. But in 1939, when all the forces of hate were again unleashed, there was not quite the same despair which had clouded him before. He was now an old man and he had to sit by and watch, an unhappy spectator, suffering over this tragedy. In spite of his sorrow, he was able to keep his optimism and his zest for each day. Young and old who turned to him found him alert and alive.

In Dulce Jubilo

The house at 2 College Circle, Haverford, looked out over the cricket field, to the mighty oaks and maples. When leaves were gone in autumn and winter, the college buildings were visible. Everything about Haverford was deeply satisfying.

There was a fourth member of the College Circle household, Ada Smith, who came in 1905 to be cook general, and nursemaid for Mary Hoxie, and who remained as family friend until the house was closed in June 1953. Ada’s parents had been slaves until Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, but Ada, next to youngest in a family of sixteen children, had been born free. She could neither read nor write, but she was a person of passionate loyalty and deep religious faith. She gave everything she had to her beloved “Mr. and Mrs. Jones and her Miss Mary”. She knew her “Mr. Jones” was a great man and she did everything possible co make his life comfortable. It was to Ada that Rufus Jones said his last farewell before leaving the house on a trip and to Ada that he gave his first joyous shout of greeting when he returned.

Haverford was home. Yet in the spring his mind began turning again to South China, Maine. He had been spending short vacations there ever since his school days. The old house built by Grandfather Abel belonged to him, although his brother Herbert and family occupied it. There was a twenty-five acre field a mile away, adjoining his Cousin Richard Jones’s summer home. As a boy he had, in winter, coasted from the top of the hill on this land, sliding at terrific speed down the slope and across the ice on the lake. He had decided then that this was an ideal location for a house and in 1915 the owner was willing to sell Rufus Jones the field he wanted. During the Christmas holidays he and his brother Herbert cut trees in the woodlot and drew the plans for a summer cottage. The house was ready for the family to occupy by July 1916.

He named this home Pendle Hill after the Pendle Hill in Lancashire which George Fox climbed with “much ado it was so steep”. Sitting on his Pendle Hill porch, Rufus Jones saw the lake spread out before him; the shores with their beautiful white birches and dark green pine trees; the hills and, in the far distance, a range of mountains. He watched the sunsets and their transformation of the lake into sheets of gold and crimson; the storms which swept over the lake in a fury of wind and rain. He loved the days of greater visibility when the distant mountains were clear and blue, a northwest day which seemed to bring the horizon very close. On other days the mountains were hidden in haze.

There was a satisfaction here unlike anything he had ever known. It was a mingling of self with beauty, and it was not so much that this cottage and field belonged to him but that he belonged to them. They fitted and had found each other.

His summers were not all idleness, by any means. He worked at his desk every morning and wrote many of his books and lectures in the Pendle Hill study, and later in the little log cabin he had built away from the cottage. Untroubled here by telephone or conversation he wrote, looking out over the lake as he paused for the right word. In the afternoons he swam in the lake and hoed in his vegetable garden and he found time to read a great number of books during the weeks at South China.

The Fourth of July celebration of Independence Day was a high point for everyone, with a picnic and stories told by “cousin Rufus”. The favourite story, which he had learned from William Charles Braithwaite, was of Brother Jucundus, the monk from St. Mary’s Abbey in York, who was a model Brother for 364 days in the year but on Lady’s Day slipped away from the Abbey to York Fair. Here temptations beset him and he could not refuse. Getting thoroughly drunk, Brother Jucundus would clamber into a swing-boat and shout at the top of his lungs, “In dulce jubilo! Up, Up, Up we go! ” For this serious offence poor Brother Jucundus was taken down to the Abbey cellar and walled in, with a jug of water, a loaf of bread, and, to bring the Middle Ages closer to the Twentieth Century, an electric toaster was included. How Brother Jucundus weathered this desperate punishment and ended the tale as an Abbot, Rufus Jones gave with tremendous flourishes, bringing in as often as he could the magic refrain, “In dulce jubilo! Up, Up, Up we go! ” If he varied so much as a jot or tittle in the telling, a child would instantly demand the correct version. Sleepy children went home across the fields chanting “In dulce jubilo” as they went, not knowing the meaning of the words, but feeling the happiness of the moment.

These summers at South China were the “more yet” of life. It was his childhood association with the bleak, unhappy times forgotten and the happy memories added to the joys of the present. His Maine heritage was precious to him and it was good to touch base for a period each year. But, at the end of the summer, when his potatoes were dug and put in a barrel, his writing stint was finished and his books read, he was ready to go back to Haverford, to go home. He was rested and restored and eager for the winter’s work.

A Garden Greater Than Eden

When in April 1943 Rufus Jones went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to give the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University, on “The Spell of Immortality” he was much under the weight of this undertaking. Rufus Jones gave his lecture not knowing that his dear Elizabeth had been taken suddenly ill with a coronary thrombosis. But as soon as the lecture was over, he was told. Once more he felt the shadow of death. But Elizabeth Jones took this illness as she had everything else, calmly and serenely. She was an excellent patient and settled quietly into the process of recovery. She learned to find pleasure in small recreations which did not tax her strength, but her husband had little use for the crossword puzzles and detective stories with which she passed long hours. He felt sad that his wife who had worked with him in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum, should allow her excellent mind to drop to so low an order of mental stimulants! He took many a trip, however, to the Haverford Library just for the sake of hunting up a crossword and he managed to wrest a good deal of enjoyment from this form of research, though he would never admit it.

By October of 1943 Elizabeth Jones was entirely well and able to participate again in some of her many activities. But she realised that the time had come to take life more slowly and she resigned from many of her committees. It was impossible to believe that she was then seventy-two years of age for she seemed young in her outlook and interests. She radiated serenity and happiness and her face showed no lines.

Rufus Jones was the grand elder statesman, not only in the Society of Friends, but also in a wider religious field. His radiant face caught attention wherever he went, and there was a contagion of enthusiasm about him which permeated the room he entered or even the train he travelled on. He was a man alive in every fibre of his heart and mind and body. But he was eighty years old. People marvelled at this couple who lived as though they were in middle years of activity.

The year 1945 brought to an end the separation of New England Yearly Meeting into two bodies which had taken place in 1845 over the Gurney—Wilbur controversy. It had taken one hundred years to heal this breach and Friends gathered together in the sessions of the united Yearly Meeting under a deep sense of thanksgiving. It was for Rufus Jones a great moment.

Later in that year he attended the sessions of The Five Years Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, and held, as he had since 1912, the post of chairman for the Business Committee. He gave the opening lecture at the Five Years Meeting, entitled Original Quakerism, a Movement not a Sect. “Whether a Movement is to have its day and be ‘done away’ depends on the expansive scope and interior depth of its seed principle, its capacity to go on vitalising lives…. It is to that high hope and expectation that I call you [that Friends were to be a seed and germ of essential Christianity for the whole world]. We can if we will, set our sails to the divine breezes and move away from the shallow waters out into the deeps to which God calls us.” [Original Quakerism, A Movement not a Sect, pp. 3, 24]

During 1947 Rufus Jones was not quite so vigorous or quite so well, but he kept going at a fairly strenuous pace. He could not bear to give up his engagements, and strength always seemed to be given him for them. He was engaged to lecture in March 1948 at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, and although it was an effort, he undertook it. He never could refuse anything to do with students. A few days later at the Board Meeting of Bryn Mawr College Trustees he found that the dinner was held in his honour, celebrating his service on the Board for fifty years. This was his last public function. On Sunday he came to Haverford Meeting and preached with his usual power, but he was not well. Many Friends expressed concern about his health.

He was taken seriously ill that night with a coronary occlusion. Several weeks in the hospital seemed to start him on the way to recovery but he had a second and more severe attack four weeks after the first. For three days he was desperately ill; the family doctor sat up all one night with him and the heart specialist said only a miracle could save him. The miracle occurred. On the third morning the nurse asked Rufus Jones what kind of a night he had had and his voice rang out, with some of its old vigour, “Splendid!”

Rufus Jones had written to Sallie Coutant from Paris in July 1887, “It is my great wish exceeding all others that I may feel in the last hours of my life that I have done my work and that the Great Father is satisfied with my life, so that death may be to me like falling asleep as it is for all who faithfully walk the right road.” [R.M.J. to S.H.C., July 8th, 1887]

He had promised to review a book about Emanuel Swedenborg. It took all his strength to evaluate this long, heavy volume, but he wrote that review, moving his pen slowly and painfully across the pages. He had been asked to give the opening address at New England Yearly Meeting in June. He hoped, for a while that he would be well enough to go, and then even though he could not take his body to the sessions he still had the message in his mind. Slowly he wrote what he wanted to say to his Yearly Meeting, a page each day until he completed A New Instalment of the Heroic Spirit, for his daughter to read in his place.

A Call to What is Vital had gone to the publishers before his illness; he and Elizabeth Jones were back at their old task of proof-reading, his bed was strewn with the pages of galley proof just as his study had been for the past forty years and more. He read a little each day, marking the corrections and talking them over with her, showing that his mind was as keen as ever. There were no detective stories nor crossword puzzles for him. The body might fail, but his mind must hold on to the end.

On the morning of June 16th Rufus Jones received from his stenographer the typed copy of his Yearly Meeting address. He made a few corrections and laid it aside for his daughter to read aloud to him so that he might hear how it would sound as she read it to his friends a few days later. Picking up the last pages of the galley proof, he read these through and laid them down. His work was finished. After his lunch he took a nap, as he always had, and in his sleep he crossed over from the world that is seen to the one which is unseen.

Haverford Meeting House was filled and many great things were said about this dear man who had no enemies but a host of friends who loved him. His body was laid to rest in the little graveyard, John Wilhelm Rowntree’s grave at his head, Isaac Sharpless’ at his feet. Not long after this a little girl tried to comfort her brother when an older brother died. “He won’t be lonely in Heaven. You see, Cousin Rufus is there too!”

Elizabeth Jones lived on quietly in the Haverford home until 1952. The day of her death, October 26th, was warm and beautiful and the leaves lay thick on the ground. Two days later heavy clouds darkened the sky as friends and family gathered at the Meeting House. But as the little group turned to leave the grave where she had been placed beside her husband, the clouds broke away and the autumn sunset flamed over the western sky. There could be no sadness but only thanksgiving for these two lives.

“If God is GOD, which means in other words, Spirit, Life of our lives, Love at the heart of things, the over-arching, under-girding Source of all that is eternally Real and True and Beautiful and Good, then we already have a two-storied universe with a Home in it for all we love and a Garden in it greater than Eden, where transplanted human worth will bloom to profit otherwhere. This faith at least may ‘call home our hearts to quietness’.” [The Radiant Life, by R.M.J., pp. 136-137]