They Mend the Heart

I

IN the old Norse legend Thor tried to empty the drinking horn in the games of Utgard, but he could not drain it, though he tried long and fiercely. Again he tried to lift a gigantic cat, but with all his godlike strength he could not raise the cat from the ground. He failed because the horn which he tried to drain was under the endless ocean and the cat which he endeavored to lift was embedded in the whole created world. If you start asking why the Quakers are feeding children in Spain, or why they are training Jewish refugees in Cuba for agricultural life on the land, you find yourself forced back to a deeper question: why it has been and is second nature for Quakers to take up the burden of the world’s suffering. That in turn takes you back to a previous question: who were the spiritual ancestors of these peculiar people who used to be supposed to ‘quake,’ and why did these forerunners practise gentle and tender ways of life? And there are similar questions behind each one that is asked. Furthermore, in like manner there seems to be no end to the sufferings of the world, and it appears to be as difficult to remove that burden as it was for Thor to lift the world.

The most obvious ‘forerunners’ of the Quakers were the spiritual reformers in Germany, Holland, France, Spain, and Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. Their spirit and their outlook on the world of men were formed by a fusion of the long mystical strain of life with the noble humanism of Erasmus, touched with fresh passion and fervor by the recovery of the New Testament as a live creative force. The book of greatest formative influence after the Bible was the anonymous Golden Book of German Theology, whose unknown writer said, ‘I would fain be to the eternal God what a man’s hand is to the man.’ That aspiration to serve and bless runs like a thread of light through all the little books and tracts which these lonely and hunted reformers of the sixteenth century wrote. ‘We must hate everything that hinders love,’ Hans Denck, the first of them, wrote. ‘Apart from God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks God has already in truth found Him,’ he wrote a hundred years before Pascal wrote his famous, often quoted phrase. ‘To burn a man is not to prove a doctrine true; it is to burn a man.’ Thus the French spiritual reformer, Sebastian Castellio, had written to Calvin when Servetus was burned in Geneva.

The ideas and aspirations of these men for a new order of society and for a return to the Headwaters of Christian Faith and Love came to life again in the period of the Civil War in England. John Everard and his friends translated many of the books of these spiritual reformers and sent them out like winged seeds to germinate in the quickened soil of that awakened epoch. Little mystical groups were formed in many parts of England. Cromwell’s army was powerfully ‘infected’ with novel hopes and aspirations, and just when the Puritans found their chance to remould the Church according to their hearts’ desire they found themselves confronted with a swarm of independent sects and with a leaven of free aspirations. Out of this fermentation, in the years from 1646 to 1652, the Quaker movement came to birth under the leadership of George Fox, who absorbed the mystical yearnings and the social aspirations of the epoch, and gave them a reincarnation in his powerful personality. He furnished, too, a typical form of organization for their growth and spread and permanent expression.

Fox is a peculiarly interesting instance of a union of mystical experience of God with a powerful passion for humanitarian service. ‘I knew God experimentally,’ he says. ‘I was as one who hath the key that opens.’ ‘I was taken up into the love of God.’ ‘I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but I saw that there was an infinite Ocean of light and life and love which flows over the ocean of darkness; and in that I saw the infinite love of God.’ ‘The Lord’s power is now as in the days of the Apostles.’ ‘I saw the light of Christ that it shines through all.’ This extraordinary spiritual optimism went out with Fox into expression in corresponding action. He felt as his contemporary Gerard Winstanley did, when he wrote: ‘My mind was not at rest because nothing was acted; and thoughts ran in me that words and writings are nothing and must die; for action is the life of all and if thou dost not act thou dost nothing.’ From the very beginning of his mission, Fox acted.

He gave his ideals hands and feet as well as voice. ‘The seed of God,’ he said, ‘must be atop of the Devil and all his works.’ It was fitting, therefore, that his last words as he was dying should be: ‘I am clear; I am fully clear. All is well. The seed of God reigns over all.’ This mystical passion for the Ocean of light and life and love to flow over the oceans of darkness somehow got into the blood of the Quaker movement. The pillar Quakers of all the historical periods have revealed it as the deep spring and dynamic of their lives. William Penn, John Boilers, John Woolman, Anthony Bcnezet, Elizabeth Fry, William Allen, Moses Brown, and John Greenleaf Whittier are only striking folio specimens of a long line of humbler octavo and duodecimo Quakers who have toiled at the practical solution of the human problems of life. One instance out of the life of John Woolman indicates, as well as any testimony I can cite, the important fact that in all Quaker service the spirit behind the deed is more significant than the deed itself.

Woolman heard that the Indians on the Susquehanna, in the western part of the Pennsylvania colony, were on the warpath, and he had a ‘leading’ from God to go on horseback to have a Quaker meeting with them. He was so scared that his legs trembled when he mounted his horse, but he nevertheless went, and when he got out on the banks of the Susquehanna he met the Indians in war paint and feathers going on a scalping party. He found the chief there and asked him to call the men back because he wanted to hold a Quaker meeting with them. They sat for a long period in silence, and then Woolman said his few words that he had come to say. Afterwards he overheard an Indian talking to the chief and saying to him, ‘ I always love to feel where words come from.’

It is not so much what one says as the spirit behind the words that the Indian meant when he said, ‘I always love to feel where words come from.’ Behind everything the Quakers have done there has always been the deeper spirit that expressed itself in the deeds. They never practise mere philanthropy, doling out money, food, or other forms of relief. They endeavor to share in the sufferings with the people who suffer. They plan always to enter into the hard situations that exist, to work alongside those who are in agony, and, if possible, to change the stubborn conditions by the impact of a new spirit of faith and confidence. They aim to take up the burden of human suffering, to feel from within its weight, and, if possible, to relieve it by their efforts. Woolman has expressed very clearly this principle in his account of the visit to the Indians. ‘Love,’he wrote, ‘was the first motion and thence a concern arose to spend some time with the Indians, that I might feel and understand their life and the spirit they live in, if haply I might receive some instruction from them, or they might be in any degree helped forward by my following the leading of truth among them.’ That passage presents with a touch of genius the ‘motion’ and intention behind the Quaker service in this present period.

II

The American Friends Service Committee, which has been the major instrument for the Quaker relief work of the last twenty-two years, had its birth in April of 1917. We selected a first unit of one hundred young men and trained them during the summer at Haverford College for a great variety of activities, and in the autumn we took them into the destroyed areas of Northern France, where they joined with the English Quakers in reconstructing the villages of those desolated regions. We built up two factories in eastern France, and the French Government gave us the tops of the trees that had been cut down to get planks for the trenches. We sawed them into boards, and in these factories made portable houses. We put the houses on trains and carried them into the war zone. There our boys put up the démontable houses, brought the peasants back, reorganized village life, took care of the children and the civilian population, ploughing their fields, reaping and threshing their grain, with a constantly growing group of workers. A letter from one of the workers, written just after the German drive of 1918 had swept over a part of the area that had been reconstructed, shows intimately the effect of the work on these peasants who had to be evacuated and also on the workers themselves.

‘We went to mend houses; but the reason we wanted to mend houses was that it would give us a chance to try to mend hearts. Much of our work on the houses has been lost; but I do not believe that any amount of cannonading will break down whatever influence we had on these people’s hearts. We cannot say how much cheerfulness, hope, and love we brought them — surely some reached them. I believe it possible that even now, when their troubles are keener than ever, their experience with us boys may somehow be giving them a little mental comfort. However that may be, the whole perplexing question of our coming will remain in the back of their minds. From time to time it will claim attention until finally a light dawns, until they finally realize why we came — why we crossed the ocean voluntarily, why we worked without pay, why in order to do this we were willing to leave our homes and our professions and take up jobs we never tried before. And when this answer once comes to them it will never be forgotten; in the intimate traditions of these families will be handed down the account of the little group of men who worked for strangers because of their belief in the Great Brotherhood.’

A man in Illinois who went to hear Abraham Lincoln debate with Stephen Douglas at Alton said; ‘Things looked onsartin. ‘Feared like I had more’n I could stand up under. But he hadn’t spoken more’n ten minutes afore I felt like I never had no load. I began to feel ashamed o’ bein’ weary an’ complainin’.’ Something like that feeling penetrated these war-worn people as these eager hopeful young Quakers lived among them, suffered with them, and worked by their side.

When the war was over the Quakers were asked to remain in France and undertake the temporary reconstruction of the villages in the terribly devastated Verdun District, which included much of the Argonne Forest. We had at that time nearly six hundred workers in the field, who rebuilt the villages in that region with demontable houses, with a schoolhouse for each village, planted little orchards, and supplied each family with a pair of goats or rabbits or chickens. We finally, after much dickering, bought the five great American army ‘dumps’ of tools and equipment in that area and sold the material at an insignificant price to the peasants. With the profits that came from these sales we built and equipped the new maternity hospital at Chalons-sur-Marne.

For this undertaking we secured from the French officials a loan of two hundred German prisoners who were stranded there, waiting for peace to be made. When the work was finished we photographed each one of these prisoners, got their home addresses, and sent three of our workers over to Germany. They hunted out every single home, presented the photograph of the prisoner, told the family all about his condition, and then put down on the table the amount of money he would have earned if he had been working for wages during the period. The effect of this visit was electric on the German families involved, and it was an excellent preparation for our next undertaking, which was the feeding of the German children who were brought to a desperate condition by the blockade, continued after the war was over. This feeding program was undertaken at the request of Herbert Hoover in the spring of 1920, was continued for four years, and is the most extensive piece of relief we have so far carried on.

All the children of Germany were medically examined, and those who were most seriously affected by the longcontinued underfeeding were given nourishing food, usually in the school buildings. Forty thousand Germans were employed in the operation under our committee, and at the highest point we fed 1,200,000 children per day. Herbert Hoover helped us to secure the vast funds needed, and General Henry Allen, on his return from Germany with the American army of occupation, went out and raised three million dollars for this work. This was the period when German money collapsed, when there was a widespread state of confusion and discouragement everywhere in that country, and this work of health and healing came as a breath of life and love from another world. A little boy in Frankfurt expressed what many felt. Coming home from school one night, he said to his mother: ‘I was almost killed in the street by a motorcar, but a kind Quaker man ran into the street and saved me from the car.’ The mother asked how he knew it was a Quaker, and the boy said: ’I thought it was always Quakers that saved little boys.’

III

When the American Red Cross finished its work in France it turned over to us its fleet of cars and trucks, which enabled us to undertake relief work which otherwise we could not have done. The English Quakers were the first agency to bring relief into Vienna, where at the time 60 per cent of the children had serious rickets, with many more in a less serious stage. We soon joined them with our stock of cars. There was no milk to be had, and our workers bought and brought into the city eight hundred cows and organized a milking squad. The Quaker boys went to Hungary with their cars and brought in coal to keep the furnace fires going in the hospitals. We have been in Vienna ever since, where we have helped to care for the families that were wrecked by the successive revolutions and have been able to assist those who were forced to migrate as a result of the Anschluss.

When the Polish citizens fled before the German and Austrian armies and were interned in the Samara District of Russia, early in the war, English Quakers sent out a unit of workers to assist them to maintain their lives there. We sent a group of American Quakers in 1917 to help in this work. When the Polish refugees got back to Poland after the war was over they found everything gone, almost no houses, no horses to plough their ground. Even if they had had horses they could not have dragged a plough through the briars and bushes that had grown up. The chief of the Polish refugees sent a letter to America for help. This is what he put on the envelope: ‘Quakers, America.’ That is all. It came to our office. He asked if we could send over a unit to reorganize their agriculture. We picked out tractor men from Western farms and sent a body of workers over to run the tractors and plough the fields, to start the peasants off. Then came an outbreak of typhus fever, and the English and American Quakers formed an anti-typhus unit. When one of the beloved Quaker women of this unit died of the fever the Polish Roman Catholics, who had learned to love her, wanted to have her buried in the sacred ground of the cemetery, but as she had not been baptized the priest decided that this was impossible. They therefore did the next best thing. They dug her grave just outside against the fence, and in the night somebody out of love took down the fence and bulged it out around her grave.

During the great Russian famine, when Herbert Hoover took charge of the American Relief to Russia, we handled the relief work in the Samara District and remained in Russia for some years afterward, engaged especially in child relief. When our first drayload of cod-fiver oil came into Moscow one of the barrels was leaking and the children saw it and ran with dippers and caught the dripping cod-liver oil, which they eagerly drank.

During President Hoover’s administration there came an extensive breakdown of the soft-coal industry in our own country, which left many thousands of miners’ families in abject want. President Hoover invited us to take charge of relief in the regions affected. He assisted us with funds which the Red Cross supplemented, and we undertook to feed the children in the schools as we had done in Germany. But we quickly discovered that something more than feeding was necessary. There were multitudes of families in such desperate straits that they could not go on living, and so we had a vastly bigger job on our hands than we had realized. We slowly worked out plans for rehabilitating these coal miners. We selected a small number of men, bought little farms for them, and arranged them in communities, organizing various industries so that they could supplement what they could get from their small farms. We started such industries as the making of furniture and various forms of metal things for gifts, and we organized the sale of these so that the experimental communities are becoming self-supporting.

Every summer we organize work camps in various parts of the country, in areas of economic conflict, where groups of college youth do a constructive piece of manual labor for the community and are brought into close contact with the issues involved and with the persons who represent the various aspects of the situation. More than eight hundred young persons have worked in these camps. Last summer a group of American boys joined a similar group of Mexican boys and built a schoolhouse in a Mexican village. The Peace Section of the Service Committee maintains and manages ten Institutes for the Study of International Relations each summer. They are held at college or university centres in different parts of the United States and have a large attendance of students.

When the day of broken glass in Germany, November 10, 1938, put 35,000 Jews into concentration camps, destroyed synagogues and business shops, and closed the relief stations for those who were oppressed and without funds, we endeavored to secure permission to take relief supplies to Germany. We were unable to secure permission by cable, and three of us went over in December to find out the actual conditions and, if possible, get permission to administer relief. We endeavored to go without any publicity, but the press got wind of our mission, gave it imaginative color and significance, and to our regret heralded our coming before we arrived. However, we secured from German officials permission to investigate the amount of actual suffering and to bring the necessary relief. The Quaker Commissioners who followed up this visit have rendered extensive service in Germany and have assisted a great many persons to migrate to homes in other parts of the world. We have a hostel in Iowa for preparing refugees to take their place in American life, and from it as a centre have operated a placement service for that area. We also have a hostel and training centre in Cuba. We have established a centre in Shanghai, and we hope to be able to bring aid to both Chinese and German refugees there, though it must of necessity be inadequate.

Throughout the Civil War in Spain we have had units of English and American workers on both sides of the fighting lines, giving care and food to many thousands of children. And now amid great difficulties we are trying to do what can be done to assist t he refugee Spanish children who are stranded in France. Money and supplies for this Spanish work came from many sources in Europe and America, and the Surplus Commodities Corporation in this country gave large contributions of wheat and flour.

IV

In all this work the Quakers, who are in numbers a feeble folk, have received generous contributions from known and unknown donors of all communions and of none, and of almost all races and colors. Their work has always been carried on without any distinction of race or creed or political party, and has always been received with warm and tender love, answering the love that came to give.

What is needed most now in our distraught world is a new spirit of life, an understanding mind, a profounder faith in eternal realities, wider human confidence in one another, and less glorification of abstract ideologies. The world moves so slowly toward these supreme issues of life.

We need now a new type of vernal equinox which will melt the hate out of human hearts rather than the ice out of our lakes and rivers, and which will start the shoots and buds into life in men’s souls rather than on the trees and shrubs of the landscape. Perhaps somebody will have enough wisdom and insight and influence to bring these wars now raging to an end before the youth of promise are killed off, before the resources of Europe are exhausted and civilization is overwhelmed under the debris. God’s allies are our

Some day — not too far off, I hope — the storms of battle will be over and the fogs of hate will pass, and then there will come the most important world-building tasks we have ever known for a restored humanity, relighting the lamps that have gone out. It will call for faith and hope and love as well as wisdom, and it will call for persons who can be to the Eternal God what a man’s hand is to a man.