It is a mistake to call Quakers “nonresisters” or passivists.” They do not face any giant evil with a passive attitude. They seek always to organize and to level against it the most effective forces there are. They know as well as anybody does that instincts and passions are not changed by miracle and that peace cannot prevail where injustice and hate are rampant. They seek to do away with war by first doing away with the causes and occasions for it; that is, by removing the fundamental grounds from which war springs, by eliminating the roots and seeds of it in the social order, and by forming an atmosphere and climate that makes war unthinkable. This means of course, that peacemaking is big business.
The forerunners of the Quakers had for some centuries before George Fox been opposed to war. The Waldenses were strict and scrupulous in their refusal to fight or to take life in any way. Many of the small heretical sects before the Reformation had similar views on these matters. The Anabaptists were divided in their conclusions about the right of a Christian to bear a sword and they varied in their practice, though there was a large wing of the movement that refused utterly to have any part in war. The influence of Erasmus, the greatest of the humanists, upon the scattered groups of spiritual reformers was very profound. He discounted the value of dogma and theology and turned instead with freshly awakened interest to the original teachings of Jesus. Every page of the New Testament, he declared, “speaks of little else but peace and concord; and yet the whole life of the greater portion of Christians is employed in nothing so much as the concerns of war...It were best to lay aside the name of Christian at once or else to give proof of the teaching of Christ by its only criterion, brotherly love.” It was no doubt the rediscovery of the message of the New Testament that swung Erasmus so strongly against the spirit and methods of war. This note of opposition to war, which receives its most powerful expression in the great scholar’s Querola pacis, from which I have quoted above, recurs again and again in his writings. He was one of the major shaping influences in the life and thought of the spiritual reformers. They held his view of the freedom of the will; they shared his revolt from theology; they returned with him to the primitive teaching of Jesus, and they felt as he did about the prevailing evils of society and about the wickedness of war. Gentleness, love, grace, light, truth, and the forces of the Spirit are their armory. They had no fixed propaganda. They quietly and simply taught a way of life with which war was entirely incompatible. “What will Christ say,” Jacob Boehme asks the ministers of his day, “When he sees your apostolic hearts covered with armor? When He gave you the sword of the Spirit, did He command you to fight and make war, to put on the sword and kill?”
Rufus M. Jones
The Faith and Practice of the Quakers p.83