Navigating the Thick Night of Darkness

HOW TO FIND YOUR FAVORITE GEORGE FOX QUOTE IN THE DIGITAL QUAKER COLLECTION, SO THAT YOU CAN CITE IT IN SOMETHING YOU'RE WRITING, PONDER IT, TAKE WARNING OR ENCOURAGEMENT FROM IT, OR JUST BASK IN ITS WISDOM, GOODNESS, AND BEAUTY:

Step 1: Say, for example, that you recall that somewhere George Fox wrote the phrase, "in this thick night of darkness that may be felt," and you want to find its source. Go to esr.earlham.edu/dqc/ and click on the button that reads "ENTER."

Step 2: Trim the phrase down to its key words: "thick night of darkness," for example. This minimizes the possibility of your sabotaging your own search by misremembering part of it. (If you key in “during this thick night of darkness” or “night of darkness which may be felt,” your search will include wrong words and so will yield no results!) Now that you've entered the DQC, click on the button that reads "Search Collection." It will take you to “Simple Search." In the field identified by "Please enter your search:" key in "thick night of darkness," REMEMBERING TO ENCLOSE IT WITH QUOTATION MARKS, and...

Step 3: Look down the page to where you can restrict your search to a specific author. There is a field that gives you choices beginning with "Allen, William; anonymous; and Antrobus, Benjamin." Scroll down that list until you come to "Fox, George." Click on "Fox, George" to highlight it. Then...

Step 4: At the bottom of the page is a dark blue button marked "Submit Search." Click on that. Your act of clicking will bring up a page with the heading, ""Collection Of Many Select And Christian Epistles, Letters And Testimonies" In Works of George Fox (Volume 7 & 8)." In a window below will appear a block of text beginning "Sing and rejoice, ye children of the day and of the light," and your searched-for phrase will appear highlighted in red italics. (Warning: there's no easy way to determine whether this is in Volume 7 or Volume 8 without browsing through both!)

Step 5: At the bottom of the page is a dark blue button marked "View Page." Click on that. Your act of clicking will bring up Page 241 of Volume 7 of the Works of George Fox in a format that allows copying of the text and pasting it into a blank document in any word-processing program you may have open. (This user-friendly format is taken from an original printed page, which you can see by clicking on “Page Image” at the bottom of your screen.)

Step 6: To facilitate your copy-and-paste operation, there is a dark blue button at the top of this page marked "Hide Line Breaks." This eliminates the line breaks at the end of each line on the printed page. And here is the result of your work:

[George Fox: Epistle 227, from Works, 1831 American ed. (= 1990 New Foundation Fellowship reprint), v. 7, p. 241:]

CCXXVII.

Sing and rejoice, ye children of the day and of the light; for the Lord is at work in this thick night of darkness that may be felt. And truth doth flourish as the rose, and the lilies do grow among the thorns, and the plants atop of the hills, and upon them the lambs do skip and play….

Download your own one-page copy:

Navigating_the_Thick_Night_of_Darkness.PDF