George Fox was an English Dissenter, who was a founder of the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers or Friends.
58 Facts About George Fox
2.
George Fox rebelled against the religious and political authorities by proposing an unusual, uncompromising approach to the Christian faith.
3.
George Fox travelled throughout Britain as a dissenting preacher, performed hundreds of healings, and was often persecuted by the disapproving authorities.
4.
George Fox's ministry expanded and he made tours of North America and the Low Countries.
5.
George Fox was arrested and jailed numerous times for his beliefs.
6.
George Fox spent his final decade working in London to organise the expanding Quaker movement.
7.
George Fox was born in the strongly Puritan village of Drayton-in-the-Clay, Leicestershire, England, 15 miles west-south-west of Leicester, as the eldest of four children of Christopher Fox, a successful weaver, called "Righteous Christer" by his neighbours, and his wife, Mary nee Lago.
8.
George Fox left his son a substantial legacy when he died in the late 1650s.
9.
George Fox knew people who were "professors", but by the age of 19 he was looking down on their behaviour, in particular their consumption of alcohol.
10.
George Fox alternately shut himself in his room for days at a time or went out alone into the countryside.
11.
One, in Warwickshire, advised him to take tobacco and sing psalms; another, in Coventry, lost his temper when George Fox accidentally stood on a flower in his garden; a third suggested bloodletting.
12.
George Fox became fascinated by the Bible, which he studied assiduously.
13.
George Fox hoped to find among the "English Dissenters" a spiritual understanding absent from the established church, but he fell out with one group, for example, because he maintained that women had souls:.
14.
George Fox thought intensely about the Temptation of Christ, which he compared to his own spiritual condition, but he drew strength from his conviction that God would support and preserve him.
15.
George Fox came to what he deemed a deep inner understanding of standard Christian beliefs.
16.
In 1647 George Fox began to preach publicly: in market-places, fields, appointed meetings of various kinds or even sometimes in "steeple-houses" after the service.
17.
George Fox's powerful preaching began to attract a small following.
18.
George Fox seems initially to have had no desire to found a sect, but only to proclaim what he saw as the pure and genuine principles of Christianity in their original simplicity, though he afterward showed great prowess as a religious organiser in the structure he gave to the new society.
19.
George Fox's preaching was grounded in scripture but was mainly effective because of the intense personal experience he was able to project.
20.
George Fox was scathing about immorality, deceit and the exacting of tithes and urged his listeners to lead lives without sin, avoiding the Ranter's antinomian view that a believer becomes automatically sinless.
21.
George Fox complained to judges about decisions he considered morally wrong, as he did in a letter on the case of a woman due to be executed for theft.
22.
George Fox campaigned against paying the tithes intended to fund the established church, which often went into the pockets of absentee landlords or religious colleges distant from the paying parishioners.
23.
George Fox was imprisoned several times, the first at Nottingham in 1649.
24.
In 1652, George Fox preached for several hours under a walnut tree at Balby, where his disciple Thomas Aldham was instrumental in setting up the first meeting in the Doncaster area.
25.
George Fox remained at Swarthmoor until the summer of 1653, then left for Carlisle, where he was arrested again for blasphemy.
26.
Parliamentarians grew suspicious of monarchist plots and fearful that the group travelling with George Fox aimed to overthrow the government: by this time his meetings were regularly attracting crowds of over a thousand.
27.
George Fox petitioned Cromwell over the course of 1656 to alleviate the persecution of Quakers.
28.
Nayler and his followers refused to remove their hats while George Fox prayed, which George Fox took as both a personal slight and a bad example.
29.
George Fox wrote that "there was now a wicked spirit risen amongst Friends".
30.
George Fox commissioned two Friends to travel around the country collecting the testimonies of imprisoned Quakers, as evidence of their persecution; this led to the establishment in 1675 of Meeting for Sufferings, which has continued to the present day.
31.
Under the Commonwealth, George Fox had hoped that the movement would become the major church in England.
32.
Once again, George Fox was released after demonstrating that he had no military ambitions.
33.
Penington and others such as John Perrot and John Pennyman were uneasy at George Fox's increasing power within the movement.
34.
Perrot emigrated to the New World, and George Fox retained leadership of the movement.
35.
George Fox counselled his followers to violate openly laws that attempted to suppress the movement, and many Friends, including women and children, were jailed over the next quarter-century.
36.
George Fox was able to meet some of the New England Friends when they came to London, stimulating his interest in the colonies.
37.
George Fox did not perceive this, brought up as he had been in a wholly Protestant environment hostile to "Popery".
38.
George Fox was ten years his senior and had eight children by her first husband, Thomas Fell, who had died in 1658.
39.
George Fox was herself very active in the movement, and had campaigned for equality and the acceptance of women as preachers.
40.
Ten days after the marriage, Margaret returned to Swarthmoor to continue her work there, while George Fox went back to London.
41.
Shortly after the marriage, Margaret was imprisoned in Lancaster; George Fox remained in the south-east of England, becoming so ill and depressed that for a time he lost his sight.
42.
George Fox resolved to visit the English settlements in North America and the West Indies, remaining there for two years, possibly to counter any remnants of Perrot's teaching there.
43.
George Fox wrote a letter to the governor and assembly of the island in which he refuted charges that Quakers were stirring up the slaves to revolt and tried to affirm the orthodoxy of Quaker beliefs.
44.
George Fox was impressed by their general demeanour, which he saw as "courteous and loving".
45.
George Fox left no record of encountering slaves on the mainland.
46.
Elsewhere in the colonies, George Fox helped to establish organizational systems for the Friends, along the same lines as he had done in Britain.
47.
George Fox preached to many non-Quakers, some but not all of whom were converted.
48.
George Fox's mother died shortly after hearing of his arrest and Fox's health began to suffer.
49.
Margaret Fell petitioned the king for his release, which was granted, but George Fox felt too weak to take up his travels immediately.
50.
For three months in 1677 and a month in 1684, George Fox visited the Friends in the Netherlands, and organised their meetings for discipline.
51.
Meanwhile, George Fox was participating in a dispute among Friends in Britain over the role of women in meetings, a struggle which took much of his energy and left him exhausted.
52.
George Fox followed with interest the foundation of the colony of Pennsylvania, where Penn had given him over 1,000 acres of land.
53.
George Fox was interred three days later in the Quaker Burying Ground, in the presence of thousands of mourners.
54.
George Fox performed hundreds of healings throughout his preaching ministry, the records of which were collected in a notable but now lost book titled Book of Miracles.
55.
George Fox portrays himself as always in the right and always vindicated by God's interventions on his behalf.
56.
George Fox is described by Ellwood as "graceful in countenance, manly in personage, grave in gesture, courteous in conversation".
57.
George Fox had a tremendous influence on the Society of Friends and his beliefs have largely been carried forward.
58.
Various editions of George Fox's journal have been published since the first printing in 1694:.