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Let Your Lives Speak?
In the bookstore today a customer called in and asked about "Let your lives speak," a phrase frequently attributed to George Fox (it's the source of a book title, "Lives that Speak"). While a quick Google search finds lots of pages where people say things like "as George Fox said, you should 'let your lives speak,'" no one actually gives details of when and where he said it. The phrase seems to sit only by itself, with no passages before or after it. A few sites claim it was part of his message on Firbank Fell but no one cites a source. Sitting on the same Palm Pilot as the Yardbirds MP3s is Fox's Journal (Jones edition) and a keyword search doesn't pick up "lives that speak" or "let your lives speak" anywhere. Smells fishy, like another one of those too-good-to-be-true Fox quotes. Can anyone document that it's real?
PS: I fly bright and early tomorrow morning for this year's Quakers Uniting in Publications meeting, in Oregon. I don't know what internet access I'll have so my apologies if new comments have to sit for a few days.
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Perhaps that's because the actual quote is to "let your lives preach," which has since -- for some peculiar reason -- been toned down to "speak" by us silly liberal Quakers. Go figure.
A quick search in Earlham School of Religion’s Digital Quaker Collection (esr.earlham.edu/dqc) turns up this in Fox’s epistle 200: “So let your lives preach , let your light shine, that your works may be seen, that your Father may be glorified; that your fruits may be unto holiness, and that your end may be everlasting life.” This epistle, entitled “The line of righteousness and justice stretched forth over all merchants,” is significant for presenting in a clear way Fox’s business ethics, which were quite strict for the seventeenth century and were significant in eventually helping Quaker merchants to become both trusted (because trustworthy) and wealthy.
It can be found in several sources, including both Fox’s Works, VII, 193, and Hugh Barbour and Arthur Roberts, Early Quaker Writings, 1650-1700 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 433-437.
For Fox, lives also spoke, although he does not seem to have use the phrase “let your lives speak.” For example, one can find this in “For All the Bishops and Priests in Christendom,” in Fox’s Works, V, 41: “[H]ow dare you say the scripture is your rule, and that you are successors to the apostles, when your lives and practice speak quite contrary?”
Steve Angell
Jeffrey's source explanation is right. However (speaking as an evangelical Quaker -- does that make me less silly?), I like both versions, when considered on their own merits.
Bill Samuel reprints a Friends in Christ essay on "Let your lives preach" here. I like this essay because it links the various ways our lives "preach" with spiritual gifts and the mutually respectful division of labor that happens in a diverse meeting.
Jeffrey Hipp, Stephen W. Angell and Johan Maurer responding. Is this amazing or what?
Lives speaking is certainly a good goal but why have Friends falsified Fox? Lives preaching is something kind of different and interesting. Thanks for the clarification everyone!