Overview: Rufus Jones was a Quaker giant of the 20th century. Charismatic and controversial, he reshaped the way many Quakers thought about the relationship between God and humans.

Rufus Jones and the Presence of God traces Jones’ life from adventurous farm boy to much-loved college lecturer and popular author on mysticism, showing how he wove together ideas from Quakerism, psychology and philosophy.

It also explores some of his spiritual practices, asking whether there is anything we can learn from them today, whatever our beliefs.

Verdict: In what is a well-rounded, impassioned, thoroughly engrossing and fully deserved, nay longly-awaited for book on the man himself, Rufus M. Jones, a highly influential American Quaker (1863-1948) - we learn from the off that he was one of the founders of the American Friends Service Committee and an instigator of the Quäkerspeisung feeding program after the First World War.

His influence enabled the two divisions of American Quakerism, which split in the mid 19th Century, to reunite after his death. Often described as a Quaker mystic, he was able to reconcile science and modern, liberal thinking with his Quakerism. He delivered the first Swarthmore Lecture in London in 1908, and is the only person ever to have given two, the second being in 1920.

Jones was born in Maine, USA, to an old Quaker family. His uncle and aunt, Eli and Sybil Jones, established Friends Schools in Lebanon (then part of Syria) and Palestine. He attended the Providence Friends School in Rhode Island and Haverford College in Pennsylvania and, having obtained an MA from Harvard, returned to Haverford as a professor of Psychology and Philosophy.

Having learnt in the study of natural science that “the world was not made in six days and that man did not begin with Adam,” far from being troubled by the scientific evidence, he found, “his religious faith all the more secure when it marched with facts.”

The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson introduced Jones to the idea of George Fox as “one of a great historical succession of mystics.” This revelation changed Jones’s conception of his family’s religion. From the writings of the early Quakers, Jones crystallized the concept of the ‘inner light,’ an idea central in particular to modern liberal Quakerism.

“The Inner Light is the doctrine that there is something Divine, ‘Something of God’ in the human soul,” he wrote. This inner light was something integral to the human condition, irrespective of a person’s religious conviction.

But he didn’t become the man he grew to be overnight, or even easily. He told a story of how once when he was an awkward, tall young man, unused to public speaking, he rose in a Quaker meeting and broke the solemn silence with what many considered a most bizarre sermon; and when his halting periods came to an end and he sat down, an elderly woman Friend rose on the facing benches and acidly remarked, “Our Lord said, ‘Feed my lambs.’ He did not say, ‘Feed my giraffes.’”

Quite how the giraffe became the lamb has some aspects of an American success story - a poor New England farm boy developing into a national and international figure. The success was a by-product. The ambition was to serve God. “While I was too young to have any religion of my own,” he wrote in Finding the Trail of Life, “I had come to a home where religion kept its fires always burning. I was not christened in a church [Quakers do not practice the sacraments], but I was sprinkled from morning to night with the dew of religion.”

“At Meeting some of the Friends who prayed shouted loud and strong when they called upon God, but at home He always heard easily, and He seemed to be there with us in the living silence. My first steps in religion were thus acted. It was a religion which we did together. Almost nothing was said in the way of instructing me. We all joined together to listen for God and then one of us talked to Him for the others.”

In 1947, Jones represented the AFSC in Stockholm when the Quakers were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Throughout his life, Jones sought to heal the divide between the two branches of American Quakerism that resulted from the split in the mid 19th Century. The founding of the AFSC was one of the first ventures in which both branches worked together. His patient efforts are credited with bringing about the reconciliation, which was finally achieved in the mid 1950s, a few years after his death.

About the Author - Helen Holt has PhDs in physics and Quaker studies and an MSc on the relationship between science and religion. She is active in her local Quaker meeting in the beautiful Scottish Borders.

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