Mission with Prophetic Power: The Journal of John Woolman (SRSC 12)

116

Mission with Prophetic Power: The Journal of John Woolman

destruction, but later presents his positive view of history. The church declined from the primitive church until the Protestant Reformation freed the church from “Popery,” after which increasing enlightenment provides increased opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others. Woolman himself decides to experience the sufferings of slaves and avoid other temptations by traveling on foot. He indeed suffers, albeit through sickness, and learns to attend to the Spirit’s correction through affliction. He longs for the conversion of the “Gentiles” (slaves and natives), expressing a deep consciousness of the missionary impact of our treatment of others. The government we really need is the purity of Christ’s government. T he T ext Further Reflections on His Meeting in Newport (1760) In visiting the meetings in those parts we were measurably baptized into a feeling of the state of the Society,* and in bowedness of spirit went to the Yearly Meeting at Newport, where we met with John Storer from England, Elizabeth Shipley, Ann Gaunt, Hannah Foster, and Mercy Redman, from our parts, all ministers of the gospel, of whose company I was glad. Understanding that a large number of slaves had been imported from Africa into that town, and were then on sale by a member of our Society,* my appetite failed, and I grew outwardly weak, and had a feeling of the condition of Habakkuk, as thus expressed: “I hear, and my body trembles; my lips quiver at the sound; rottenness enters into my bones; my legs tremble beneath me. Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble” (Hab 3:16). I had many thoughts and was sorely distressed. I was desirous that Friends might petition the Legislature