“All Things Have Their Beginnings”
The Quaker peace testimony, like violence itself, is complex, encompassing many dualisms, such as its extreme individualism while asserting one Truth, the importance of motive as well as behavior, and the tension between private belief and public duties for magistrates (a tension resolved in favor of public duties). It is best described as a pacifist continuum, a line along which both belief and behavior fall, allowing for different parameters and even deep shifts in meaning over time. Thus, while the early Quaker peace testimony focused upon the purity of one's own soul, later Quakers expressed more concern for the victims of violence and for earthly justice. With this shift, the consequences of nonviolent behavior became more important, and spiritually based pacifism came to resemble secular pacifism, more strategic in nature. Quakers did not assume that aggression was necessarily dominant in human nature; rather, they believed that the transforming power of love itself might prevail over the evil within, one person at a time.
Keywords: aggression, individualism, love, pacifism, pacifist continuum, private belief, public duties, secular, soul, violence
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .