Life & Mortality Quote by George Fox

Fox gives you apocalypse and antidote in the same breath: an "ocean of darkness and death" so vast it feels elemental, then a second sea that doesn’t merely coexist with it but spills over it. The image is doing Quaker theology without the doctrinal scaffolding. Fox isn’t arguing evil away; he grants it scale. What he refuses is its finality.

The rhetorical trick is the pivot from "an ocean" to "an infinite ocean". Darkness is immense, but it’s still measurable; light is unbounded. That asymmetry is the point. In the mid-17th century, England is convulsed by civil war, sectarian violence, plague, and political whiplash. Fox, founding what becomes the Religious Society of Friends, is also being jailed and mocked for insisting that access to God isn’t mediated by priests, sacraments, or state church authority. The "ocean" metaphor maps onto that world: institutions and coercion feel like a tide, but Fox claims there’s a deeper current available inside the self and across the community.

Subtextually, "flowed over" is a quiet rebuke to despair and to the religious gatekeeping of his era. Light doesn’t conquer through force; it inundates, it outlasts, it covers. For a movement committed to pacifism and the "Inner Light", this is strategy as much as solace: keep meeting, keep listening, keep refusing the logic of retaliation, because the larger reality is not the one making the loudest noise.

It works because it’s both cosmic and practical. Fox offers a scale big enough for suffering, then insists on a scale bigger than that.