It was late April on the northern moors and the winter had been especially harsh. Flowers were just starting to peek out of the ground as the farmers looked tested whether the soil was soft enough yet to plow. The nobleman dismounted his horse and asked the hamlet’s blacksmith for directions.

It has been a long journey. His ruffled silk shirt was dirty and full of the smells of a dozens of overnight accomodations in pig barns and lean-tos of the English Midlands. His most-prized possession was spotless, however: the silver sword given him by his father, the admiral, last year on his eighteenth birthday. It layed sheathed in its hand-stiched sheath.

The blacksmith pointed the foreigner to the path that crossed the dark moors toward the hillside of Judge Fell’s estate. The manor house was the de facto headquarters of the new cult that was scandalizing the Kingdom, the Children of the Light. A short ten minute walk and our traveler was face-to-face with the man he had come so far to see.

A long tumble of rehersed speaches came out of the young man’s mouth as George Fox warily sized him up. The young William Penn wanted to join the movement. Fox knew it would be a coup for the Children of the Light. Penn’s father was one of the wealthiest men in England and the family money could buy protection, fame, and land in the new colonies.

But Penn wasn’t quite ready. He had that sword. It would be a grave disrespect to his father to leave it or give it away. “Friend George, what can I do?” The wise Fox knew that Penn was led to join. With a little encouragement, it was a matter of time the new apprentice adopted their pacifist principles. Fox cleared his throat and answered: “Wear thy sword as long as thee can, young William.” Before tears could well in each man’s eyes they turned their attention to logistics of a preaching trip to London. On their way out a few days later, Penn quietly slipped back into a blacksmith shop and gave away his sword. By the time they left the Yorkshire, farmers were working the spring soil with their new silver plowshares.

It is a beautiful story (which I’ve made even more melodramatic, because why not). Unfortunately it’s also fake.

Both George Fox and William Penn left behind dozens of volumes of writings and memoirs. Their friendship was one of the most significant relationships for each of them. Surely such a foundational story would have made it to print. Paul Buckley tracked down the story in “Time To Lay Down William Penn’s Sword” in the December 2003 Friends Journal.

The sword story is fake but it is also somehow true. Buckley calls it a “authentic anecdote.” Every year Friends Journal gets otherwise-wonderful essays whose narrative turns on the story of William Penn’s sword. We can’t run them without correction so it falls on me to tell authors that the scene never took place. Occasionally I’m told it doesn’t matter that it’s not true.

What is the deeper myth inside our beloved tall tales? First: they depend on the celebrity status of their characters. If I substituted more obscure early Friends in the sword story—George Whitehead asking Solomon Eccles, say—I doubt it would be as compelling or get repeated as often.

Fame is an odd draw for modern-day Friends. There’s a baker’s-dozen of famous-enough Friends upon which we graft these sorts of stories—John Woolman, Lucretia Mott, Elias Hicks, Joseph John Gurney and his sister Elizabeth Fry. Changing celebrity Quaker’ stories began early: editors chopped out the embarrasing bits of recently-departed Friends’ journals. Dreams would get snipped out. George Fox’s accounts of miraculous healings disappear with his first editor, presumably worried they would sound too wild

It’s probably no coincidence that the Penn/Fox story dates back to the moment when American Friends split. The denomination’s origin story was fracturing. Paul Buckley thinks the sword story prefigured the tolerance and forbearance of the Hicksite Friends. Philadelphia-area Friends healed that particular wound almost three-quarters of a century ago. What does it say about us today that this tale is still so popular? Related reading, I tracked down another authentic anecdote in 2016, “Bring people to Christ / Leave them there.”

1 Year Ago: October 2016

Bring people to Christ / Leave them there: One thing I love to do is track back on cultural Quaker turns of phrase. Here I looked at a phrase sometimes attributed to George Fox and find a largely forgotten British Friend who laid much of the groundwork for Quaker modernism and the uniting of American Quakers.

5 Years: October 2012

The secret decoder ring for Red and Blue states: Discussion of the Quaker cultural influence of American voting patterns based on David Hack­ett Fischer’s fascinating (if over-argued) book Albion’s Seed.

10 Years: October 2007

An Autumnal Halloween: A family post, pictures of kids posted to the web long before Instagram was founded.

It’s one of those quotes we frequently hear: that George Fox said a minister’s job was “to bring people to Christ, and to leave them there.” But when I go to Google, I only find secondhand references, sandwiched in quote marks but never sourced. It turns up most frequently in the works of British Friend William Pollard, who used it as kind of a catch phrase in his talks on “An Old Fashioned Quakerism” from 1889. Suspiciously missing is any search result from the journal or epistles of Fox himself. It’s possible Pollard has paraphrased something from Fox into a speech-friendly shorthand that Google misses, but it’s also possible it’s one of those passed-down Fox myths like Penn’s sword.

So in modern fashion, I posed the question to the Facebook hive mind. After great discussions, I’m going to call this a half-truth. On the Facebook thread, Allistair Lomax shared a Fox epistle that convinces me the founder of Friends would have agreed with the basic concept:

I’m guessing it is paraphrase of a portion of Fox’s from epistle 308, 1674. Fox wrote “You know the manner of my life, the best part of thirty years since I went forth and forsook all things. I sought not myself. I sought you and his glory that sent me. When I turned you to him that is able to save you, I left you to him.”

Mark Wutka shared quotations from Stephen Grellet and William Williams which have convince me that it describes the “two step dance” of convincement for early Friends:

From Stephen Grellet: “I have endeavoured to lead this people to the Lord and to his Spirit, and there is is safe to leave them.” And this from William Williams: “To persuade people to seek the Lord, and to be faithful to his word, the inspoken words of the heart, is what we ought to do; and then leave them to be directed by the inward feelings of the mind;”

The two-step image comes from Angela York Crane’s comment:

So it’s a two step dance. First, that who we are and how we live and speak turns others to the Lord, and second, that we trust enough to leave them there.

But: as a pithy catch phrase directly attributed to Fox it’s another myth. It perhaps borrowed some images from a mid-19th century talk by Charles Spurgeon on George Fox, but came together in the 1870s as a central catch phrase of British reformer Friend William Pollard. Pollard is a fascinating figure in his own right, an early proponent of modern liberalism in a London Yearly Meeting that was then largely evangelical and missionary. Even his pamphlet and book titles were telling, including Primitive Christianity Revived and A Reasonable Faith. He had an agenda and this phrase was a key formulation of his argument and vision.

He is hardly the first or last Friend to have lifted an incidental phrase or concept of George Fox’s and given it the weight of a modern tenet (“That of God” springs to mind). More interesting to me is that Pollard’s work was frequently reprinted and referenced in Friends Intelligencer, the American Hicksite publication (and predecessor of Friends Journal), at a time when London Friends didn’t recognize Hicksites as legitimate Quakers. His vision of an “Old Fashioned Quakerism” reincorporated quietism and sought to bring British Friends back to a two-step convincement practice. It paved the way for the transformation of British Quakerism following the transformational 1895 Manchester Conference and gave American Friends interested in modern liberal philosophical ideals a blueprint for incorporating them into a Quaker framework.

The phrase “bring people to Christ/leave them there” is a compelling image that has lived on in the 130 or so odd years since its coinage. I suspect it is still used much as Pollard intended: as a quietist braking system for top-down missionary programs. It’s a great concept. Only our testimony in truth now requires that we introduce it, “As William Pollard said, a Quaker minister’s job is to…”

And for those wondering, yes, I have just ordered Pollard’s Old Fashioned Quakerism via Vintage Quaker Books. He seems like something of a kindred spirit and I want to learn more.