"Deep humility is a strong bulwark"
Woolman was not just coining pretty slogans when he penned this metaphor as part of a letter included in his journal. Woolman was a devoted Quaker and took great pains to avoid a life that could in any way be interpreted by his fellow Friends as being anything less a total devotion to God. The humility of which he writes is obeisance to God rather than an expression of humble personality to others.
The Turning Point
Woolman is precise and honest in his account of his life. While he rarely indulges in examinations of past failures, he also is not afraid to fess up to them. Such as confession that the first 18 years of his life essentially were without any impact enough to reference a full accounting. Instead, he gets right to the point of the matter of importance of what occurred when he attained adulthood, outlining its significance in familiar metaphorical imagery:
“Thus time passed on; my heart was replenished with mirth and wantonness, while pleasing scenes of vanity were presented to my imagination, till I attained the age of eighteen years, near which time I felt the judgments of God in my soul, like a consuming fire, and looking over my past life the prospect was moving.”
The Red Sea
Humility to God is a recurring motif throughout the Journal and at one point Woolman carefully considers its significance within the construct of a truly breathtaking metaphor framed through an allusion to the parting of the Red Sea for Moses during the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt:
“In an entire subjection of our wills, the Lord graciously opens a way for His people, where all their wants are bounded by His wisdom; and here we experience the substance of what Moses the prophet figured out in the water of separation as a purification from sin”
The Duality of Humility to God
Such is Woolman’s devotion to the irrefutable truth that God at his most foolish would still be beyond man at his most intelligent that he is even capable of seeing the beneficent hand of the almighty in the terrifying sensory experience of a lightning strike. Here he transform that natural event into pure metaphor for devotion to the wisdom of a Supreme Being:
“I have, at times, with awfulness, beheld the vehement operation of the Lightning, made sometimes to accompany these blessings, as a messenger from him who Created all things, to remind us of our duty”
Woolman the Leftist
In reading the Journal, it is obvious that Woolman held certain political perspectives which would today brand him a leftist; a Democratic certainly and for millions of uninformed people an outright socialist. What is most fascinating about Woolman is that while he did hold views that were distinctly contrary to the conservative causes of the time, he also held fast to certain “conventional wisdom” which today would be revealed as merely a disguise for equally outmoded conservative principles. But when Woolman really gets going, he can use the power of figurative language to present himself as almost an anarchic firebrand for the progressive agenda:
"Wealth is attended with Power, by which Bargains and proceedings contrary to Universal Righteousness are Supported, and here Oppression, carried on with worldly policy & order, clothes itself with the name of Justice, and becomes like a seed of Discord in the soil.”
