by Marshall Massey

The name "Quakers" was originally a taunt — hurled at George Fox and his followers in the 1650s because they trembled in their meetings for worship. The name stuck, but the trembling largely did not. In this December 2003 post to soc.religion.quaker, Marshall Massey explains what the quaking actually was — not epilepsy, not performance, but a specific theological experience: the overwhelming awareness of standing before God's judgment in the present moment. He traces it through James Nayler's defense of Friends' behavior, through John Audland's first-hand account from Bristol in 1654, and through George Fox's phrase "the power of the Lord."

Massey's conclusion is quietly devastating: the loss of quaking in modern unprogrammed meetings is not simply a change in expression but a measure of how deeply Friends have "lost that keen awareness of how they look to God." This post was written in response to a question about whether Friends still quake. Massey answers: some of us do. His explanation transforms what might seem a historical curiosity into a living theological question about the nature of convincement and the nearness of divine judgment.

The accusation that it was like epilepsy has always been fairly common among those who haven't personally experienced it. James Nayler, one of the most prominent early Friends (second, for a time, only to George Fox) found it necessary to write that "grovelling on the ground" and "foaming at the mouth" were not the habit of Friends, although "quaking and trembling we own to be a condition the saints passed through."

The quaking comes from awe of the Lord. Nowadays, most unprogrammed Friends seem to experience it, if at all, only on the first few occasions that they stand to speak in meeting for worship, when they feel the religious gravity of what they are doing with a freshness that drives it home to them. But anciently that trembling had more to do with what Friends call "convincement" — that is, the awareness of the gravity of our deeds in God's eyes (given that we will all be judged for eternity by our deeds), the awareness that God is present right here and now watching, and the awareness of how our own deeds appear to God right here and now.

Most Friends nowadays seem to have lost that keen awareness of how they look to God. But in the early days that awareness was probably the single thing that was most likely to make a person a seeker and bring her to Quakerism, and it was an awareness that early Friends retained after they found Quakerism, and returned to again and again in their meetings for worship.

Friends feeling the seriousness of God's judgment would not only tremble at it, but would heave great sighs, sob, and pour out heartfelt prayers to God. All this behavior is well recorded in contemporary descriptions of early Friends meetings. Fox described it as "the power of the Lord", a phrase that appears at many places in his writings, and other Friends used that phrase as well.

John Audland, a prominent early Quaker preacher, wrote of a day of open-air meetings in Bristol in 1654:

The word of the Lord came to me, and when he had done, I stood up and all my bones smote together and I was like a drunken man ... and I was made to cry like a woman in travail and to proclaim war from the Lord with all inhabitants of the earth, and such a dreadful voice rang through me as I never felt before and the terror of the Lord took hold upon many hearts and the trumpet sounded through the city. The afternoon we met at the fort where soldiers are, the greatest meeting I ever saw ... and all flesh was silent and not one dog moved his tongue.

The antique imagery here may be a bit confusing, but the intensity of the experience is unmistakeable. And it is clear how all the symptoms, from trembling and weakness and disorientation to awestruck total silence, came from a keen sense of the gravity of our behavior here on earth in the eyes of the Lord: "I was made to proclaim war from the Lord with all the [sinful] inhabitants of the earth."

Colophon

Written by Marshall Massey in soc.religion.quaker, December 30, 2003, in response to a question about whether Friends still experience the trembling that gave them their name. Massey was one of the group's most theologically grounded contributors, deeply versed in early Quaker history and practice.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: [email protected]

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