The American colonies seemed to the early leaders of the Quaker movement to offer at once a field for the free development of their faith and a base whence they might spread to the ends of the earth. The possibility of buying land from the Indians was being discussed in the society as early as 1660. But though, it is true, Quaker influence was decisive in establishing religious toleration in America, though the relationship between the native tribes and the colonists was transformed through their substitution of unarmed treaty parties for the existing methods of intimidation and of strictly fair dealing for dishonesty and contract-breaking, though they initiated and took the lion’s share in the abolition of slavery,[17]and established the precedent of a State founded on brotherly love, although they did more than any other group of refugees or body of colonists to settle the foundations of the religious and civil life of the country; yet the texture of the religious life of the American people is to-day largely Puritan Protestantism, and of the Quaker influence in government there remains not a trace.
For more than half a century after the savage persecution[18]by the Puritans—reaching its fullest fury in Boston under Governor Endicott—had come to an end, Quakerism was a steadily growing power in America.
The Quakers flourished in Rhode Island, to whom they supplied many Governors, and where at one time they were continually in office; they made fair headway in Connecticut.In Long Island their establishment was finally secured by the advice of the Dutch home Government on the ground of their excellence as citizens. They achieved a foothold in Virginia in face of the indignant persecutions of the Episcopalians. Their history in Maryland is an excellent illustration of the nature of their work on behalf of religious toleration. When, in 1691, an Act was framed to secure the establishment of the Protestant church, the Quakers, who were by this time both numerous and influential in the colony, laboured in opposition to it until they brought the bill to nought. They supported the Catholics in their struggle for emancipation, and were largely instrumental in securing the repeal, in 1695, of the Act against them. They also joined with Rome to prevent the Episcopalian Church from being established by law, but in this they were only partially successful. In the Carolinas they appear to have fared well. For years, though in a minority, they controlled the government. New Jersey was thrown open to them by a largepurchase of land. William Penn’s share in this transaction was the beginning of his practical interest in America, finally to express itself in the foundation of the Quaker State of Pennsylvania,[19]which was very largely his own work. His labours as a religious apologist, filling some five volumes, and representing in his graceful, polished style the application to social life of the Puritan morality upon which the Quakers had grafted their beliefs, are secondary to his work in America, for which he gave up all he possessed—influence, the prospect of a brilliant career at home, friends, fortune, and health.
This colony, bought strip by strip in honest treaty with the Indians, developed more quickly than any other. It was a home for refugees of every shade of opinion. Friends at no time formed more than half the population, but their influence was supreme.
Two years after the settlement of the State[20]Penn writes that two general assemblies had been held with such concord and despatch that they sat but three weeks, and at least seventy laws were passed without one dissent in any material thing.
For thirty years there was peace, liberty, and refuge for all, and an unrivalled prosperity. We may picture Penn, in the days of witch crazes, holding his one trial of a witch, and establishing the precedent of finding the woman guilty of the common fame of being a witch, but not guilty as indicted; and in another characteristically Friendly moment refusing, when greatly in need of funds, six thousand pounds for a trade monopoly which would have violated his principle of fairness to the Indians. Free thought was encouraged, and a little group of distinguished men appeared in Philadelphia. The final downfall of Friendly administration in Pennsylvania was the result of the refusal on the part of the majority of the Quakers to adjust their principles to the demand sent to the Quakerlegislature for means to proceed against the French and the Indians.
Up to the time of this occurrence it had seemed as if America were on the way to becoming an autonomous province of the British Empire, steered by Quaker principles. Privilege after privilege had been quietly secured by Penn from the home government, and it is not difficult to believe that if on the eve of the Revolution negotiations had been left in Friendly hands, the war of separation need not have taken place. When it broke out, the Quakers retired decisively from legislative and municipal positions. A Quakerized liberty party carried on the traditions of civil liberty up to the last moment. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who despised the Quakers, and treated the Indians as heathen to be exterminated, formed the main body of the Pennsylvanian revolutionary party.
Friends suffered under English taxation, and their principles prevented them from smuggling, yet they opposed not merely warfare, but revolution, disowning those who supported it, and reiterated theirloyalty to England. They were arrested and imprisoned as friends of the British, their goodly farms and their meeting-houses were placed at the mercy of troopers and foragers, whose pay they would not accept. Their decent streets were demoralized. They went quietly about their business as best they might, pursuing, even while the war was in progress, their labours in the aid of drunkards and slaves, their succour of the uneducated.
They built schools for the negroes, and when, after the revolution was at an end (whereupon they duly suffered at the hands of the rejoicing multitude), there came the scandal of the “walking purchase” of land from the Indians and the fear of a serious outbreak, they formed a private association and pacified the Indians, preventing warfare at the cost to themselves of weeks of negotiation and the sum of five thousand pounds paid by them. Incidents of this type occur again and again in Quaker history, and are practical proof of the fact that their avoidance of the spirit of strife, so often present in political life, was no kind oftimidity, of passive resistance, or comfortable retirement from the business of the world. Least of all was it indifference to what went forward in the public affairs of the nation.
Apart from its temporary dominion of “affairs,” American Quakerism follows much the same line of development as does the movement at home. The original impulse tends to be superseded for the imitative mass by a doctrine embodied in an institution; the dogma of the Inner Light becomes dangerously absolutist. There is a corresponding return to the steadying refuge of an infallible scripture, and the modern church, while still united and distinguishable by the marks of Quaker culture, of faith and practice, kindling here and there to the older insight and vision, shows a divided front.
In 1827 a large group—now known as Hicksites—separated under Elias Hicks, whose repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and insistence on right living, resulted, in the opinion of “orthodox” Friends, in a wrong attitude towards Christ and the scriptures. The evangelical reaction inEngland, which was, in part, a result of the Hicksite controversy, brought about a further division in America under John Wilbur, who protested against Evangelical biblicism, and reasserted the doctrine of the Inner Light, insisted on plainness of speech and dress, and looked with suspicion upon “art.” The orthodox group, deeply tinged with Protestant evangelicalism, have largely adopted the pastoral system. There are now at least four distinct groups in America.[21]
Watching pilgrims who pass one by one along the mystic way, we see both women and men. Teresa, Catharine, Elizabeth, Mechthild, no less than Francis, Tauler, Boehme, stand as high peaks of human achievement in entering into direct relationship with the transcendental life. But when we reach the humbler levels of institution and doctrine, the religious genius of womanhood tends to be pushed, so to say, into an oblique relationship. Under organized Christianity, and particularly under Protestantism, has this been so. Amongst the first Christians, it is true, women preached and prophesied. There is, moreover, in the history of the early centuries sound evidence of an ordained and invested female clergy. Taking that history as a whole, however, women havebeen, and are still, excluded from the councils of the churches and from the responsibilities and privileges of priesthood. Devout churchwomen, and, in particular, devout Protestants, are nourished on literal interpretation of records, which assure them of an essential inferiority to their male companions, and enjoin subjection in all things. At marriage, they sacramentally renounce individuality. Quakerism stands as the first form of Christian belief, which has, even in reaching its doctrinized and institutionized levels, escaped regarding woman as primarily an appendage to be controlled, guided, and managed by man. This escape was the result, not of any kind of feminism, any sort of special solicitude for or belief in women as a class. Nor was it the result of a protest against any definitely recognized existing attitude. Such unstable and fluctuating emotions could not have carried through the Quaker reformation of the relations of the sexes. The recognition of the public ministry of women was an act of faith. It was a step that followed from a central belief in the universality of theinner light. It was taken in the face of difficulties. It hampered the Quakers enormously in relation to the outside world. It was the occasion of profound disturbance within the body. Heart-searching and hesitation rose here and there to an opposition so convinced as to form part of the programme of the first schismatics.[22]Fox had to fight valiantly. His central belief once clear, he cut clean through the Pauline tangle of irreconcilable propositions, and forged from the depths of his conviction phrases that would, were they but known, do yeoman service in the present agitation for the release of the artificially inhibited responsibilities of women. He is never tired of reminding those who cling to the story of the Fall that the restoration of humanity in the appearance of Christ took the reproach from woman. He rallies men, often with delicious humour, on their desire to rule over women, and exhorts those who despise “the spirit of prophecy in the daughters” to be “ashamed for ever.” But although faith won, it is probable that themajority took the step only under the urgency of deep-seated consciousness, the surface intelligence still loudly asserting the necessary pre-eminence of masculine standards. Even amongst the most determined advocates of the recognition of a woman’s spiritual identity, amongst those who condemned its suppression as blasphemous, we meet the suggestion that this recognition need not in any way interfere with her proper subjection to her husband. Nevertheless, Fox succeeded in equalizing the marriage covenant.
The government of the society, therefore, was for many years carried on by men alone, a women’s meeting coming into existence, as we have seen, only when obviously imperative—in relation to the care of the women and children suffering under persecution—and persisting only for special purposes quite apart from the business of the society as a whole. Men and women, however, occasionally visited each other’s meetings, and joint sittings were sometimes held.
It was the experience coming to the support of dawning theory, of the superiorworking of these joint meetings, that finally enfranchised Quaker womanhood.
It is interesting to note that one of the most striking features of the technique of Quaker meetings, whether for business or worship, is the working out of the distinctive characteristics of the sexes. Their contradiction, and the tendency psychology has roughly summarized of women, as a class, to control thought by feeling, and of men, as a class, to allow “reason” the first place, is here at its height.
The two rival and ever-competing definitions of reality both find expression. Each must tolerate the other. Reaction takes place without bitterness. Again and again there is revealed the fruitfulness of that spirit which believes in and seeks goodness, beauty, and truth—these alone, and these in all. Recent statistics have shown[23]that women, though always numerically superior in the society, have supplied a comparatively small number of both officers and ministers, and of clerks relatively none, and that, moreover, this deficitis gradually increasing, and is not made good by any sufficiently compensating output of public work outside the society.
It has been suggested that we may presume, in consideration of these facts, that women Friends have by this time availed themselves of their opportunity to the full extent of their capacities, and that the result, as far as government is concerned, is that the conduct of large public meetings is almost entirely entrusted to men.
In the correspondence that followed the publication of the statistics certain modifying statements were made. It was suggested that of late years the increasing membership had brought in women who were without the Quaker tradition—a fact which would account for the growing deficit of feminine activities. Attention was also drawn to the unseen mass of feminine initiative, the result of which is credited to men.
It is, of course, evident that if we begin by assuming that equality of opportunity shall result in identity of function, if we believe, moreover, that government is merely a matter of machinery, and ministry can beestimated by the counting of heads and of syllables, we shall be led to the conclusion that, while the more obvious results of the Quaker experiment may do something towards disarming haunting fears as to the safety of acknowledging the full spiritual and temporal fellowship of women, it does comparatively little to justify the claims and expectations of the feminists in general.
But whatever standard we apply, however we may choose to approach the question of the public ministry of women; however, further, we may estimate the value of the fact that all the practical business of the society is talked out in their hearing, that measures are sometimes initiated, sometimes abolished, invariably commented on, modified and steered by them, we cannot form any idea of what Quakerism has done for women or women for Quakerism without some consideration of an aspect of the matter hitherto almost entirely neglected by historians and commentators, which yet, in the opinion of the present writer, may be claimed not only as giving some part of the explanation of the relativeinactivity of women in the more obvious transactions of the society, but as being a very substantial part of the clue to the rapid development and the healthy persistence of Quaker culture—and that is the profound reaction upon women of the changed conditions of home-life; for amongst the Quakers the particularized home, with its isolated woman cut off from any responsible share in the life of “the world” and associating mainly with other equally isolated women, is unknown. A woman born into a Quaker family inherits the tradition of a faith which is of the heart rather than of the head, of intuition rather than intellectation, of life primarily rather than of doctrine; and, therefore, it would seem particularly suited to the development of her religious consciousness; and she comes, moreover, into an atmosphere where her natural sense of direct relationship to life, her instinctive individual aspiration and sense of responsibility, instead of being either cancelled or left dormant, or thwarted and trained to run, so to say, indirectly, is immediately confirmed and fostered.
She is in touch with, has, as we have seen, her stake and her responsibility in regard to every single activity of the meeting of which she is a member. Through every meeting and through every home, moreover, there is the cleansing and ventilating ebb and flow of the life of the whole society, and this not merely by means of the circulation of matter relating to the deliberations and the work of the society, but also in the form of personal contact. Beyond the exchange of hospitality in connection with monthly and quarterly meetings for worship and for business, there is a constant flow of itinerating ministers and others of both sexes between meetings either on special individual concerns or in the interest of some single branch of the society’s work.
Simple easy intercourse between family and family, meeting and meeting, is part of the fabric of Quaker home-life. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps just because amongst the Quakers, in a very true and deep sense, the world is home and home is the world, because, in other words, the inner is able without obstruction to flow out and realizeitself in the outer, the sense of family-life, of home, and fireside, is particularly sweet and strong. The breaking of family ties is rare. The failure that leads to the divorce court is practically unknown.
We may look with wonder and admiration at the great figures amongst Quaker women, upon those who built their lives into the first spreadings of the message; upon those who went, under the urgency of their faith, alone into strange lands, where means of communication were the scantiest; upon the persecuted and martyred women, the women of initiative and organizing genius; upon Anne Knight of Chelmsford pioneering female suffrage in England, founding the first political association for women; upon Elizabeth Fry, after a full career as house-keeper, mother, and social worker, turning, late in life, to the prisons of England, and transforming them, so to say, with her own hands. But, perhaps, it is in the daily home-life of the society that the distinctively feminine side of doctrinized and organized Quakerism reaches its fairest development.
The counter-agitation[24]brought forth in England by the American Hicksite movement, ended, after prolonged discussion and stress, in a decisive readjustment of the Society of Friends. There were numerous secessions into the Evangelical church and the Plymouth Brotherhood. There were separations of those who followed Elias Hicks in his repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and of those who favoured Wilbur in protesting against “book religion,” reasserting the doctrines of the Quaker fathers, and insisting on simplicity of life; but the society as a whole was swept forward, under the leadership of Joseph John Gurney (brother of Elizabeth Fry), by the invading wave of Protestantevangelicalism. Gurney, coming of old Quaker stock, though religious and pious and full of zeal for the salvation of the world, never grasped the essentials of Quakerism. He had no touch of the intuitive genius which makes the mystic. Every line he has written betrays the Protestant biblicist, the man who puts the verbal revelation before any other whatsoever. He did not repudiate the Fathers, but he denied that they had ever questioned the supreme authority of the scriptures as the guide of mankind.
His strong persuasive personality revived the enthusiasm of the imitative mass of the society, and once more the Quakers faced the world. It was a new world. The religious liberty Friends had prophesied and worked towards had come at last. The Test Act had been repealed. Nonconformists were admitted to Parliament and to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The London University had been established. The emerging Quakers, on their side, began to break down the barriers they had erected between themselves andthe world by their peculiarities of speech and of dress, and showed a tendency to relax their hostility towards “art.”
They were a little band, tempered and disciplined by their century of quiet cultivation of the Quaker faith and method, and they were at once available for a share, strikingly disproportionate to their numbers, in the evangelical work of an awakening Christendom. From the time of their emergence their missionary labours have been unremitting. They engaged in prison reform and the reform of the penal code. They initiated the reform of the lunacy laws, working for the substitution of kindly treatment in special institutions[25]for the orthodox method of chains and imprisonment. They began to educate the poor. The foundation of their Foreign Missions dates from this period of revival.
They have widening centres of missionary work in India, Madagascar, Syria, China, and Ceylon. They have been themain movers in the work of abolishing the opium traffic, and are engaged, both at home and abroad, in all the many well-known efforts towards social amelioration, amongst which, perhaps, the leading part they have taken in experimental philanthropy, in educational method (their co-education schools scattered over the country are models of method, standing for common sense, humanity, and a wise use of modern resources), in the housing and betterment of the lot of the working classes, and in the establishment of garden suburbs, are particularly worthy of mention.
From their Sunday-school work, begun in Bristol in 1810, and gradually spreading over the country, has arisen what is perhaps the most widely influential of the present activities in which Friends are interested on behalf of the working classes—the Adult School Movement. Originally initiated[26]in the interest of loafers at street corners, it has now become a national movement, with a complete organization, upwards of a thousand schools, and a membershipin its ninetieth thousand. It is spreading on the Continent and in America. At the meetings of its weekly classes, which are open to all who care to attend (the men’s and women’s classes are held independently), led by an elected president, who may be an adherent of any creed or of none, part of the time is devoted to the consideration of religious questions and part to lecturettes, debates, readings, and so on. Each school develops secondary interests and engages in special work.
Within the society from which this perpetual stream of evangelical work flows forth we must distinguish two distinct types of religious culture. There is, first of all, the main mass, differing only in its method of worship from the main body of Protestant nonconformity—taking, as we have said, its stand first and foremost upon the scriptures. In most Quaker meetings to-day this typically “Protestant” attitude predominates numerically. But while we recognize this state of affairs as one of the inevitable consequences of any endeavour to found an “open” church upon a mystical basis, itis, nevertheless, amongst the Quakers, modified, to a certain extent, in two ways: first, by its subjection to its environment, the framework of the old Quaker culture, the training implied in Fox’s method both of private and public worship, in the expectation of unmediated Divine leadership in all the circumstances of life, the training in freedom from the domination of formulæ and deductions, the insistence on the important meaning of the individual soul.
It is modified, in the second place, by the nucleus of genuine mystical endowment, which has persisted through the centuries at the heart of the Quaker church, both handed down in the direct line and coming in from without; the remnant whose influence has so often made this little church the sorting-house, so to say, amongst the sects for mystically minded persons. And during the last ten years—the years which have seen such a striking revival of the interest in mysticism, have felt a clearing and a growth of the recognition of the importance to the race as a whole of mystical genius, have produced a mass of seriouslyundertaken studies of this phenomenon from every point of approach—the Quaker church has continued increasingly to fulfil this function. Not only from the sects, but from the older establishments, and from the ranks of religiously unclassified “philosophy” and “culture,” there is a steady migration towards the Quaker fold.
The vitality of this modern Quaker group is expressing itself at the present time in a twofold activity over and above the home and foreign missionary work we have already noted. This activity is visible throughout the society, both in England and in America. There is, on the one hand, an effort emanating from the more intellectual section of the group, to express Quakerism in terms of modern thought, to reach, as far as may be, with the help of modern psychology, a philosophical “description” of the doctrine of the “inner light”—a description which is thought to be much more possible to-day than it was at the time of George Fox. This effort, which includes the rewriting in detail and from original documents of the history of the Society of Friends, is embodiedin the work of a little group of Quaker writers, prominent amongst whom are the late John Wilhelm Rowntree, the late Miss Caroline E. Stephen, Dr. Rufus M. Jones, Mr. William C. Braithwaite, Mr. Edward Grubb, and Miss Joan M. Fry. Mr. Edward Grubb,[27]perhaps one of the most illuminating of the Quaker writers upon the doctrine of the Inner Light, realizes with perfect clearness that the dogma of the Infallible Spirit presents at least as many difficulties as that of an infallible Church or Bible; that in the case of either of these infallibilities the question immediately arises as to “who” is the infallible interpreter? Fox, he points out, trusted urgency and unaccountability by mere thought processes for the sign of the higher source. He adds to this that “the spirit in one man must be tested by the spirit in many men. The individual must read his inward state in the light of the social spiritual group,” ... and thus reaches a sort of spiritual democracy. On the whole, however, his appeal is to idealism as the supplanter of materialism; he claimsthought as thepriusof knowledge, and identifies consciousness with thought. He leaves us with the “notional” God of transcendental idealism, who is just as far off as the corresponding matter-and-force God of consistent materialism.
Mr. William C. Braithwaite is, perhaps, happier. “The consciousness,” he says inSpiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience,[28]“that our subjective impression of guidance needs correction to allow for the personal factor, and the sense that truth of all kinds and in all ages is harmoniously related, naturally point to the great advantage of co-ordinating the light that has come to our souls with the light that has come to others in our own day or in past ages. This is not the same thing as merely relying on tradition or accepting an experience second-hand; nor does it mean that we refuse to accept any guidance which goes beyond the experience of others—it means simply that over the country we have to traverse there are many paths already trodden along which we may have safe and speedy passage.”
Professor Rufus Jones, who has done much in relation to the psychology of Quakerism, also voices the corporate idea in declaring that the Friend must test his light by the larger revelation of his co-believers, and they, again, by the larger revelation which has come to prophets and apostles, saints and martyrs; but here, again, we seem to find ourselves within a circle of ideas. In place of the simple homely imagery of Fox, “the seed,” “the light,” the “new birth,” “that which hath convinced you,” we have in these modern descriptions, it is true, all the rich and intricate spatial terminology of modern science; but, so far, the most successful efforts in the direction of “description” of mystical religion in modern terms have not come from the society, where the belief in, and the attempt to live in sole dependence upon, the indwelling spirit is still, for very many of its members, the single aim, where there are still many with whom “knowing” is more important than “knowing about.”
The boldest and clearest sighted, the most comprehensive and lucid descriptions of themystic type, of his distinctive genius, his aim and method, his kinship with his fellows throughout the ages, the world-old record of his search and its justification, are to be found elsewhere.[29]
Side by side with the attempt to rationalize and restate in terms of modern thought the faith that is in them is a movement enrolling growing numbers, particularly of younger Friends, in both continents, in the direction of expressing Quakerism in terms of modern life.
Home life, social life, business life, every modern development, is brought to the test of Quaker principles. There is a spirit abroad declaring that Quakerism has become devitalized; that the religious life is stereotyped and perfunctory; that the joyous, all-conquering zeal of the early Friends was the outcome of a secret unknown to their followers; that the way to the fount at which they were sustained is lost—that it may be found again if the daily life isbrought under Divine control. A call has gone forth to sacrifice, to scale the heights of right living in that purer air, that the sight may grow clear.
Everywhere in Quakerdom we meet this question as to the secret of the early Quakers. Do we read in this outcry an admission of the failure of group mysticism as it has so far been attempted by the Society of Friends? The little church of the spirit seems to be at the turning of the ways.
All barriers are down. The rationale of primitive Quakerism is fully established. The Quakers no longer stand facing an outraged or indifferent Christendom. The principles “discovered” by their founder are conceded in theory by the religious world as a whole.
Will they remain in their present position, which may be described as that of a Protestant Ethical Society, with mystical traditions and methods, part of an organized and nationalized world-church, suffering the necessary limitations of a body thrown open to all, converted and unconverted, committed to the necessity of teaching doctrinal“half-truths,” organizing necessarily in the interest of conduct as an end? or will they constitute themselves an order within, and co-operating with, the church—an order of lay mystics, held together externally by the sane and simple discipline laid down by Fox, and guarded thus from the dangers to which mysticism is perennially open; an order of men and women willing corporately to fulfil, while living in the daily life of the world, the conditions of revelation, and admitting to membership only those similarly willing; a “free” group of mystics ready to pay the price, ready to travel along the way trodden by all their predecessors, by all who have truly yearned for the uncreated Light?
1624.Birth of George Fox.1647.Fox’s public ministry begins.1650.Friends nicknamed Quakers by a Derby magistrate.1652.Acquisition of headquarters at Swarthmoor Hall.1654.Missions to the South and East.1656.First Quakers in America.1657.Fox appeals to Friends on behalf of their slaves.1678.Barclay’s apology published in English.1681.Pennsylvania founded.1689.Toleration Act passed.1691.Death of George Fox.1760.Reform of Society of Friends.1835.Modern Evangelical Revival.
George Fox: Journal. Edited by Norman Penney. Cambridge University Press, 1911.George Fox: Journal. Bi-centenary edition in two volumes. Headley.George Fox: Works. Eight volumes. Philadelphia, 1831.Robert Barclay: An Apology for the True Christian Divinity. In English, 1678.William Penn: No Cross, No Crown.John Woolman: Journal.Caroline E. Stephen: Quaker Strongholds. Headley, 1907.John Wilhelm Rowntree: Essays and Addresses. Headley, 1905.T. Edmund Harvey: The Rise of the Quakers. Headley, 1905.Elizabeth B. Emmott: The Story of Quakerism. Headley, 1908.Allen C. Thomas: The History of the Society of Friends in America.Rufus M. Jones: The Quakers in the American Colonies. Macmillan, 1912.Rufus M. Jones: Social Law in the Spiritual World. Headley, 1905.Rufus M. Jones: Studies in Mystical Religion. Macmillan, 1909.Rufus M. Jones: Children of the Light (Anthology of Quaker Mystics). Headley, 1909.Evelyn Underhill: Mysticism. Macmillan, 1911.William C. Braithwaite: The Beginnings of Quakerism. Macmillan, 1912.William C. Braithwaite: Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience. Headley, 1909.Edward Grubb: Authority and the Light Within. Clarke, 1908.The Book of Discipline. Successive editions from 1783.The Society of Friends. Encyclopædia Britannica. Eleventh edition.
George Fox: Journal. Edited by Norman Penney. Cambridge University Press, 1911.
George Fox: Journal. Bi-centenary edition in two volumes. Headley.
George Fox: Works. Eight volumes. Philadelphia, 1831.
Robert Barclay: An Apology for the True Christian Divinity. In English, 1678.
William Penn: No Cross, No Crown.
John Woolman: Journal.
Caroline E. Stephen: Quaker Strongholds. Headley, 1907.
John Wilhelm Rowntree: Essays and Addresses. Headley, 1905.
T. Edmund Harvey: The Rise of the Quakers. Headley, 1905.
Elizabeth B. Emmott: The Story of Quakerism. Headley, 1908.
Allen C. Thomas: The History of the Society of Friends in America.
Rufus M. Jones: The Quakers in the American Colonies. Macmillan, 1912.
Rufus M. Jones: Social Law in the Spiritual World. Headley, 1905.
Rufus M. Jones: Studies in Mystical Religion. Macmillan, 1909.
Rufus M. Jones: Children of the Light (Anthology of Quaker Mystics). Headley, 1909.
Evelyn Underhill: Mysticism. Macmillan, 1911.
William C. Braithwaite: The Beginnings of Quakerism. Macmillan, 1912.
William C. Braithwaite: Spiritual Guidance in Quaker Experience. Headley, 1909.
Edward Grubb: Authority and the Light Within. Clarke, 1908.
The Book of Discipline. Successive editions from 1783.
The Society of Friends. Encyclopædia Britannica. Eleventh edition.
The bulk of Quaker literature falls into two main groups: (1) The voluminous writings of the early Quakers—journals, epistles, doctrinal works, and controversial matter—most of which were issued under the censorship of a body of Friends meeting in London, while a large mass of unprinted manuscripts and transcripts of manuscripts, admirably classified and indexed, is available at the headquarters of the Society, Devonshire House, Bishopsgate, whose library contains also the largest collection of books relating to the Society; (2) the modern output of history, commentary, expository, apology, and evangelistic writing.
Most of the printed works of George Fox have been collected in the eight volumes of the Philadelphia edition. A considerable quantity is still in manuscript. The Cambridge edition of his Journal is particularly interesting in having been printed unaltered from the original manuscript. It is incomplete, and is best supplemented by the bi-centenary edition (seeBibliography).
[1]The Brownists; now represented in the Congregational Union.
[2]Bunyan was born in 1628, four years later than Fox.
[3]In 1624, at Drayton-in-the-Clay, in Leicestershire.
[4]His father, a weaver by trade, and known as “Righteous Christer,” is described by Fox as a man “with a seed of God in him”; his mother, Mary Lago, as being “of the stock of the martyrs.”
[5]William C. Braithwaite:The Beginnings of Quakerism.(Macmillan, 1912.)
[6]If we except the doomed Port Royalists.
[7]Toleration Act passed 1689. Fox died two years later.
[8]The bulk of the “Fell” correspondence is preserved at the headquarters of the Society of Friends, Devonshire House, Bishopsgate, E.C.
[9]Part of which was spent in a dungeon reserved for witches and murderers, and left uncleansed year after year.
[10]Nicholas Hermann.
[11]1870.
[12]See chapter onQuakerism and Women.
[13]An Apology for the True Christian Divinity.1678.
[14]W. Bromfield:The Faith of the True Christian and the Primitive Quaker’s Faith.1725.
[15]The biographies of Quakers and ex-Quakers amount to about 3 per cent. of the whole of the entries in theDictionary of National Biography(1885-1904), reckoning from 1675.
[16]Ackworth was founded in 1779, Sidcot remodelled on Quaker lines in 1808, the present Saffron Walden School opened in Islington in 1811, and several others since both in England and Ireland, all now open to the general public.
[17]As early as 1657, and before he had come in contact with slavery, Fox addressed a letter of advice from England to all slave-holding Friends. In 1671, seeing for himself the system at work in Barbadoes, he recommended that the holders should free their slaves after a term of service, and should arrange for their welfare when freed. The first documentary protest against slavery put forward by any religious body came from the German Quakers in Philadelphia (Germantown); they had come as settlers from Kirchheim in Germany, where Penn’s teaching had met with an ardent response. John Woolman spent twenty years in ceaseless labour on behalf of the slaves. Throughout the society the work went on; meetings were held, individual protests were made, slave-holding Friends were visited. By 1755 it was generally agreed that negroes should be neither bought nor imported by Friends, and less than thirty years later the society, with the exception of a few isolated and difficult cases, was free of slavery. Many Friends paid their slaves for past services, and in all cases provision was made for their welfare.
[18]The first Quakers to reach America were two women, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher. When they arrived at Boston, their luggage was searched, their books were burned in the market-place by the hangman; they were stripped and examined for signs of witchcraft, and after five weeks’ imprisonment and cruelty were shipped back to Barbadoes. Then followed a series of persecutions too horrible to be detailed, increasing in severity from fines—fireless, bedless, and almost foodless—imprisonment in chains in the Boston winter, floggings (one part alone of the punishment of the aged William Brand consisted of 117 blows on his bare back with a barred rope, while two women were stripped to the waist in the mid-winter snow and lashed at the cart-tail through eleven towns), ear-croppings, and tongue-borings, to the death penalty suffered by three men and one woman. The intervention of Charles II. referred only to the death penalty. Whippings continued until 1677, and imprisonment for tithes until 1724.
[19]It is interesting that Penn did his utmost—even to attempting to bribe the secretaries when the charter was drawn up—to abolish thePennprefixed by James II. to his own originalSylvania.
[20]In 1683.
[21]“According to recent statistics, the membership of the fourteen orthodox bodies is upward of 90,000; of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 4,400; of the Conservative Yearly Meeting, about 4,000; and of seven Hicksite Yearly Meetings, under 19,000—say, 27,500 Friends belonging to Yearly Meetings in America with which we do not correspond” (Facts about Friends.Headley Bros. 1912).
[22]The Perrot Schism, 1661.
[23]The Friend, March, 1912: “Woman in the Church.”
[24]The Beacon Controversy, so named from Isaac Crewdson’s publication in 1835, expressing Evangelical views of an advanced type.
[25]The Friends’ Retreat at York, established in 1796, was the beginning of humane treatment of the insane in this country.
[26]In 1845 by Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham.
[27]Authority and the Light Within.
[28]Swarthmoor Lecture. Headley Bros., 1909.
[29]In the work, for example, of Miss Evelyn Underhill, author ofMysticism(Macmillan, 1911),The Mystic Way(Macmillan, 1913).
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