Produced by Mary Glenn Krause, Jens Sadowski, the University
of Minnesota, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images
made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.
THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
"The Quaker religion ... is something which
it is impossible to overpraise."
WILLIAM JAMES:
_The Varieties of Religious
Experience_
NEW YORK
DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY
214-220 EAST 23RD STREET
FOREWORD
The following chapters are primarily an attempt at showing the position
of the Quakers in the family to which they belong--the family of the
mystics.
In the second place comes a consideration of the method of worship and
of corporate living laid down by the founder of Quakerism, as best
calculated to foster mystical gifts and to strengthen in the community
as a whole that sense of the Divine, indwelling and accessible, to which
some few of his followers had already attained, and of which all those
he had gathered round him had a dawning apprehension.
The famous "peculiarities" of the Quakers fall into place as following
inevitably from their central belief.
The ebb and flow of that belief, as it is found embodied in the history
of the Society of Friends, has been dealt with as fully as space has
allowed.
My thanks are due to Mr. Norman Penney, F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S., Librarian
of the Friends' Reference Library, for a helpful revision of my
manuscript.
D. M. R.
LONDON,
1914.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE BIRTH OF QUAKERISM 1
II. THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS 16
III. THE QUAKER CHURCH 33
IV. THE RETREAT OF QUAKERISM 52
V. QUAKERISM IN AMERICA 61
VI. QUAKERISM AND WOMEN 71
VII. THE PRESENT POSITION 81
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 94
BIBLIOGRAPHY 94
NOTE 96
THE QUAKERS PAST AND PRESENT
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF QUAKERISM
The Quakers appeared about a hundred years after the decentralization of
authority in theological science. The Reformers' dream of a remade
church had ended in a Europe where, over against an alienated parent,
four young Protestant communions disputed together as to the doctrinal
interpretation of the scriptures. Within these communions the goal
towards which the breaking away from the Roman centre had been an
unconscious step was already well in view. It was obvious that the
separated churches were helpless against the demands arising in their
midst for the right of individual interpretation where they themselves
drew such widely differing conclusions. The Bible, abroad amongst the
people for the first time, helped on the loosening of the hold of
stereotyped beliefs. Independent groups appeared in every direction.
In England, the first movement towards the goal of "religious liberty"
was made by a body of believers who declared that a national church was
against the will of God. Catholic in ideal, democratic in form, they set
their hope upon a world-wide Christendom of self-governing
congregations. They increased with great rapidity, suffered persecution,
martyrdom, and temporary dispersal.[1]
Following on this first challenge came the earliest stirring of a more
conservative catholicism. Fed by such minds as that of Nicholas Farrer,
grieving in scholarly seclusion over the ravages of the Protestantisms,
it found expression in Laud's effort to restore the broken continuity of
tradition in the English church, to reintroduce beauty into her
services, and, while preserving her identity as a developing national
body, to keep open a rearward window to the light of accumulated
experience and teaching. But hardly-won freedom saw popery in his every
act, and his final absolutism, his demand for executive power
independent of Parliament, wrecked the effort and cost him his life.
[Footnote 1: The Brownists; now represented in the Congregational
Union.]
These characteristic neo-Protestantisms were obscured at the moment of
the appearance of the Quakers by the opening in this country of the full
blossom of the Genevan theology. The fate of the Presbyterian system,
which covered England like a network, and had threatened during the
shifting policies of Charles's long struggle for absolute monarchy to
become the established church of England, was sealed, it is true, when
Cromwell's Independent army checked the proceedings of a Presbyterian
House of Commons; but the Calvinian reading of the scriptures had
prevailed over the popular imagination, and in the Protectorate Church
where Baptists, Independents, and Presbyterians held livings side by
side with the clergy of the Protestant Establishment, where the use of
the Prayer-Book was forbidden and the scriptures were at last supreme,
the predominant type of religious culture was what we have since learned
to call Puritanism. In 1648 Puritanism had reached its great moment. Its
poet[2] was growing to manhood, tortured by the uncertainty of election,
half-maddened by his vision of the doom hanging over a sin-stained
world.
But far away beneath the institutional confusions and doctrinal dilemmas
of this post-Reformation century fresh life was welling up. The
unsatisfied religious energy of the maturing Germanic peoples, groping
its own way home, had produced Boehme and his followers, and filled the
by-ways of Europe with mystical sects. Outwards from free Holland--whose
republic on a basis of religious toleration had been founded in
1579--spread the Anabaptists, Mennonites, and others. Coming to England,
they reinforced the native groups--the Baptists, Familists, and
Seekers--who were preaching personal religion up and down the country
under the protection of Cromwell's indulgence for "tender" consciences,
and found their characteristically English epitome and spokesman in
George Fox.
[Footnote 2: Bunyan was born in 1628, four years later than Fox.]
Born in an English village[3] of homely pious parents,[4] who were both
in sympathy with their thoughtful boy, his genius developed harmoniously
and early.
Until his twentieth year he worked with a shoemaker, who was also a
dealer in cattle and wool, and proved his capacity for business life.
Then a crisis came, brought about by an incident meeting him as he went
about his master's affairs. He had been sent on business to a fair, and
had come upon two friends, one of them a relative, who tried to draw him
into a bout of health-drinking. George, who had had his one glass, laid
down a groat and went home in a state of great disturbance, for he knew
both these men to be professors of religion. He grappled with the
difficulty at once. He spent the hours of that night in pacing up and
down his room, in prayer and crying out, in sitting still and
reflecting. In the light of the afternoon's incidents he saw and felt
for the first time the average daily life of the world about him, "how
young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth,"
all that gave meaning to life for him had no existence in their lives,
even in the lives of professing Christians. He was thrown in on himself.
If God was not with those who professed him, where was He?
[Footnote 3: In 1624, at Drayton-in-the-Clay, in Leicestershire.]
[Footnote 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."]
The labours and gropings of the night simplified before the dawn came to
the single conviction that he must "forsake all, both young and old, and
keep out of all, and be a stranger unto all." There was no hesitating.
He went forth at once and wandered for four years up and down the
Midland counties seeking for light, for truth, for firm ground in the
quicksands of disintegrating faiths, for a common principle where men
seemed to pull every way at once. He sought all the "professors" of
every shade and listened to all, but would associate with none, shunning
those who sought him out: "I was afraid of them, for I was sensible they
did not possess what they professed." He went to hear the great
preachers of the day in London and elsewhere, but found no light in
them. Now and again amongst obscure groups to which hope drew him one
and another were struck by his sayings, and responded to him, but he
shrank from their approval. The clergy of different denominations in the
neighbourhood of his home, where he returned for a while in response to
the disquietude of his parents, could not understand his difficulties.
How should they? He was perfectly sound in every detail of the Calvinian
doctrine. They could make nothing of a distress so unlike that of other
pious young Puritans. Orthodox as he was, there is no sign in his
outpourings of any concern for his soul, not a word of fear, nor any
sense of sin, though he heartily acknowledges temptations, a divided
nature, "two thirsts." He begs the priests to tell him the meaning of
his troubled state--not as one doubting, but rather with the restiveness
of one under a bondage, keeping him from that which he knows to be
accessible.
One minister advised tobacco and psalm-singing, another physic and
bleeding. His family urged him to marry.
His distress grew, amounting sometimes to acute agony of mind: "As I
cannot declare the great misery I was in, it was so great and heavy upon
me, so neither can I set forth the mercies of God unto me in all my
misery." Brief intermissions there were when he was "brought into such a
joy that I thought I had been in Abraham's bosom."
But on the whole his wretchedness steadily increased. None could help.
The written word had ceased to comfort him. He wandered days and nights
in solitary places taking no food.
Illumination came at last--a series of convictions dawning in the mind
that truth cannot be found in outward things, and, finally, the moment
of release--the sense of which he tries to convey to us under the
symbolism of a voice making his heart leap for joy--leaving him remade
in a new world.
Two striking passages from his Journal may serve to illustrate this
period of his experience: "The Lord did gently lead me along, and did
let me see His love, which was endless and eternal, and surpasseth all
the knowledge that men have in the natural state, or can get by history
or books ... and I was afraid of all company, for I saw them perfectly
where they were, through the love of God which let me see myself"; and,
again, as he struggles to express the change that had taken place for
him: "Now I was come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the
paradise of God. All things were new; and all the creation gave another
smell unto me than before beyond what words can utter."
Two years of intense life followed. He came back to the world with his
message for all men, all churches, with no new creed to preach, but to
call all men to see their creeds in the light of the living experience
which had first produced them, to live themselves in that light shining
pure and original within each one of them, the light which wrote the
scriptures and founded the churches; to refuse to be put off any longer
with "notions," mere doctrines, derivative testimonies obscuring the
immediate communication of life to the man himself.
This message--the message of the inner light of immediate inspiration,
of the existence in every man of some measure of the Spirit of God--the
Quakers laid, as it were, side by side with the doctrines of the
Puritanism amidst which they were born. They did not escape the absolute
dualism of the thought of their day. They believed man to be shut up in
sin, altogether evil, and they declared at the same time that there is
in every man that which will, if he yields to its guidance, lift him
above sin, is able to make him here and now free and sinless. The
essential irreconcilability of the two positions does not appear to have
troubled them.
This belief in the divine light within the individual soul was, of
course, nothing new. The Roman Church had taught it. Instruction as to
the conditions whereby it may have its way with a man was the end of her
less worldly labours.
The Protestants taught it; the acceptance of salvation, the birth of the
light in the darkness of the individual soul was the message of the
Book. But George Fox and his followers claimed that the measure of
divine life, nesting, as it were, within the life of each man, was
universal, was before churches and scriptures, and had always led
mankind. Yet it was not to be confused with the natural light of reason
of the Socinians and Deists, for the first step towards union with it
was a control of all creaturely activities, a total abandonment of each
and every claim of the surface intelligence--"notions," as the Quakers
called them--a process of retirement into the innermost region of being,
into "the light," "the seed," "the ground of the soul," "that which hath
convinced you."
The God of the Quakers, then, was no literary obsession coming to meet
them along the pages of history; no traditional immensity visiting man
once, and silent ever since, to be momentarily invoked from infinite
spatial distance by external means of grace; no "notion," no mere
metaphysical absolute, but a living process, a changing, changeless
absolute, a breath controlling all things, an amazing birth within the
soul. Tradition they valued as a record of God's dealings with man. The
Bible held for them no enfeebling spell. Their controversial writings
have, indeed, anticipated, as has recently been pointed out,[5] the
methods of the higher criticism; they touch on the synoptic problems;
they ask their biblicist opponents whether they are talking of original
autographs, transcribed copies, or translations. They rally them: "Who
was it that said to the Spirit of God, O Spirit, blow no more, inspire
no more men, make no more prophets from Ezra's days downward till
Christ, and from John's days downward for ever? But cease, be silent,
and subject thyself, as well as all evil spirits, to be tried by the
standard that's made up of some of the writings of some of those men
thou hast moved to write already; and let such and such of them as are
bound up in the bibles now used in England be the only means of
measuring all truth for ever."
[Footnote 5: William C. Braithwaite: _The Beginnings of Quakerism._
(Macmillan, 1912.)]
The Incarnation was to them the one instance of a perfect shining of the
light, a perfect realization of the fusion of human and divine, the full
indwelling of the Godhead, which was their goal. The incidents of that
life shone clear to them in the light of what went forward in themselves
in proportion as they struggled to live in the spirit.
But neither was this claim, the assertion of an immediate pathway to
reality within the man himself, anything new in the world. Each nation,
each great period of civilization, has produced individuals, or groups
separated by time and creed, but unanimous in their testimony as to its
existence.
The giants among them stand upon the highest peaks of human
civilization. Their art or method in debased or arrested forms is to be
found in every valley. They have been called "mystics," and it is to the
classical century of European mysticism, to the group (of which Tauler
was the mainstay) calling themselves the "Friends of God," that we must
go for an outbreak of mystical genius akin to that which took place in
seventeenth-century England. Both groups made war on the official
Christianity of their day, and strove to relate Christendom afresh to
its true source of vitality, to re-form the church on a spiritual basis.
The testimony, the end, and the means for the attainment of the end were
the same in both. The immense distinction between them arose from the
difference in the conditions under which the two ventures were made. The
fourteenth-century mystics opened their eyes in a congenial environment,
in a church whose symbolism, teaching, and ordinances, were a coherent
reflection of their own experiences, stood justified by their personal
knowledge of the "law" of spiritual development, the conditions of
advance in the way on which their feet were set.
They owed much to tradition, to their theological studies, to their
familiarity with the recorded experiences of holy men; they recognized
their church as the transmitter of this tradition, as the guardian of
saintly testimony on the subject of their art. They recognized her, not
as an end but as a means, not as a prison, but as a home for all the
human family, keeping open her doors, on the one hand, to the
unconverted, providing, on the other, a suitable medium, the right
atmosphere and opportunities, whereby pilgrims in the spiritual life
might develop, to their full, possibilities in advance of the common
measure of the group. They chid her, they exposed abuses, and called for
reforms; they challenged the "carnal conception" of the sacraments, and
denounced the loose lives of her dignitaries; but they remained in the
church.
The Quakers, on the contrary, appeared when few of those who were in
authority were able to understand what had arisen in their midst. Fox
brought his challenge by the wayside; untrammelled by tradition,
fearless in inexperience, he endowed all men with his own genius, and
called upon the whole world to join him in the venture of faith.