“I believe there is something in the mind, or in the heart, that shows its approbation when we do right. I give myself this advice: Do not fear truth, let it be so contrary to inclination and feeling. Never give up the search after it: and let me take courage, and try from the bottom of my heart to do that which I believe truth dictates, if it leads me to be a Quaker or not.”
February 2026: For the first time, our monthly theme is based on one quote: “Truth will not lose ground by being tried.” Isaac Penington wrote these words in a letter to a friend in 1670, encouraging her that truth will always prevail, saying, “Darkness is afraid of the light, because it has a secret sense that it cannot stand before it.” In this moment when the truth seems under attack, we explore what it means to live truthfully, to seek Divine truth, and to share it with others.
“Oh come! be not wedded to your own ways, nor prejudiced against what God hath taught others; but let things be fairly scanned, that all things may be proved, and that which is good held fast; for truth will not lose ground by being tried; but darkness is afraid of the light, because it has a secret sense that it cannot stand before it.”
“In my own life, I was steeped in the religious understanding of my Quaker forebears on both sides of the family, and in a closely-bordered childhood on a dairy farm in an Indiana Quaker community. But it wasn’t until a spiritual epiphany in 1964 that led to my becoming a conscientious objector that I made Quaker spirituality experiential rather than ‘inherited.'”
“I’d rather be jolly St. Francis, singing his canticle to the sun, than a dour, old sober-sides Quaker whose diet would appear to have been spiritual persimmons.”
“To sit down in silence could at the least pledge me to nothing; it might open to me (as it did that morning) the very gate of heaven. And, since that day, now more than 17 years ago, Friends’ meetings have indeed been to me the greatest of outward helps to a fuller entrance into the spirit from which they have sprung.”
“If one has had the experience of an inward, spiritual transformation, no outward forms are necessary. If one has not, no outward forms will suffice.”
“Truth for authority, not authority for truth.”
“There is that near you which will guide you. O! Hearken unto it, and be sure ye keep to it.”
“And when all my hopes in them, and in all people was gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, Then, O! Then I heard a voice, which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’: and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.”
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