These words from Janet Scott in the 1980 Swarthmore Lecture to Britain Yearly Meeting seem to summarize what Friends believe:
“We feel the presence, sometimes as a gentle comforter, sometimes a firm assurance,sometimes a light that illuminates our thoughts and gives us new words, sometimes a fearful reality whose loving, tender, awful power enters our pounding hearts and trembling bodies.We know this power, this light, this reality, this tender love, as individuals and at anytime, but we know it most surely in our meetings for worship together where, at our best, we help,encourage and guide each other, taking, as it were, the clay of experience and together moulding it into a new and different form which no one mind, but only the eternal, could have envisaged. This is the essential truth of Quakerism, held not as a belief but as experience. However, our experience is wider than this and carries with it other discoveries which we must express in words but which we know first as living truth. We have found that this power, this light, turns us from evil to good and brings us into unity with God and thence with our fellows, into that “spirit which takes away the occasion of all wars.”
South Central Yearly Meeting, faith and practice, p. 14-15
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