Religion: Unanimous

George Fox was once offered a captaincy in Cromwell’s army. “I told them,” he wrote in his Journal, “I knew from whence all wars arose, even from the lust, according to James’s doctrine; and that I lived in the virtue of that life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.”

The Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, which began to form around George Fox exactly 300 years ago, has done its sober best to take away the occasion for war by refusing to bear arms. “The leveled gun, the battle-brand, we may not take,” wrote Quaker Poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

In 1850, British Quakers founded the London Service Council to promote faith and international good will in Europe, India and China. In 1917, U.S. Quakers, unsatisfied with a purely negative form of pacifism, organized the American Friends’ Service Committee to give any kind of help wherever it was needed, without consideration of politics, nationality or creed. Since 1929, the Committee has been administered by able, affable Clarence E. Pickett.

Last week the Nobel Prize Committee awarded this year’s Peace Prize ($38,990) jointly to the American Friends’ Service Committee in Philadelphia* and the Friends’ Service Council in London. According to the will of the late Swedish dynamite-inventor Alfred Nobel, the award is required to be voted “unanimously.” This time, said Committee Vice Chairman Carl Joachim, Hambro, it really was.

*This week a Quaker official predicted that the U.S. share of the prize money (about $20,000) “will almost certainly go into foreign relief.”