[Historically, Quakerism offered] a very modern form of spirituality, encouraging people to take responsibility themselves for the things they believed in and were committed to. Their truth was to be found as they opened themselves up to the experience of their own life, and the life around them. Their own, everyday life was to be the field of their experimentation. And that meant rejecting Christianity as they had known it in the culture of their time….
But in another respect the Quaker way was profoundly Christian. Though rejecting the Christianity of its time, it was, in its own view, recovering the Christianity of the founders of this faith. It was, to cite Penn again, “primitive Christianity revived.” When they read the Bible again … they discovered it was not as they had thought. It was not telling them what to believe, but pointing them to the experience that would give them the light and life they sought. It was “testimony” in the very sense they had used that word to describe their own accounts of experience. So they could now draw richly on what it said to deepen their life in the Spirit. Even then its truth would have to be acted on if it was to be truly embedded in life, as the Bible itself had taught. As we have seen “truth” has to be “obeyed.” They had to “act truth,” as Fox once put it. So this was another element of their mystical practice that made it distinctive….
In classical mysticism the “active life” (vita activa) had been separated from the “contemplative life” (vita contemplativa), one to be pursued by “secular people,” the other by “the religious,” i.e., the monastics. Here, with the Quakers, they are brought together. So the goal of the spiritual life is not simply to see the ultimate oneness so that the vision can be applied to practical life. It is much more to realize the oneness in practice, so bringing the understanding and action together.
You can see how this integrated approach would affect community life and political life. The confidence in that “something of God in everyone,” combined with a commitment to this earthly life as the place where oneness is to be realized, leads people to cherish communal life and do everything possible to mend it and make it whole.
–Rex Ambler in Pendle Hill Pamphlet 463: Mind the Oneness – The Mystic Way of the Quakers