THE RETREAT OF QUAKERISM
But the swing-back for the imitative mass to the easily grasped dogma of
an infallible Scripture did not take place at once. It appears as a
clearly accomplished fact at the time of the mid-eighteenth-century
departure of Quakerism on its second missionary effort. Meanwhile, we
must consider the intervening hundred years--the second period of
Quakerism--generally known as the century of Quietism.
The first generation of Quakers had passed away. The great mission--the
going forth to win mankind to live by the Inner Light--had failed.
Better fitted, apparently, than any since the early Christians to
evangelize the world, catholic to the limit of the term, knowing nothing
of "heathen" nor of any "living in darkness"; a body of devotees culled
from all existing groups, hampered by no official church, unhindered by
luxury, undaunted by distance and difficulty, working in the open under
storms of persecution that had driven their companion groups to hiding
or dissolution, the Friends of Truth had failed to bring even the
churches to the acknowledgment of that on which they all ultimately
rested. Passing through European Christendom and beyond, they gathered
in their fellows, retreated to camp, gave up their original enterprise,
and became a separatist sect. The greater number of them were
flourishing tradespeople, owing their success in business largely to the
fact that, whereas trade as a whole was still subject to those passions
which had called forth in old times the law forbidding any transaction
beyond the sum of twenty pennies to be made without the presence of the
port-reeve or other responsible third person, here were men who required
neither bond nor agreement, who were as good as their word, asking one
price for their goods, and refusing to bargain. Their social life at the
beginning of the second period has been described for us by one of the
last of the earlier generation, coming late in life to English Quaker
circles after twenty years of absence. William Bromfield was a medical
man who had followed James II. to Ireland because of his goodness to the
Quakers, had served him for years in Paris as his secretary, and had
suffered imprisonment in the Bastille for conscience' sake. At one
moment we see him visiting a Trappist monastery, explaining to the
Fathers the Quaker faith and manner of living--the Trappists
acknowledging the Quakers as ripe for sainthood--and then we read of his
bitter disillusionment. He finds[14] "riches, pride, arrogancy, and
falling into parties." He notes with grief that onlookers are saying
"that the Quakers, who might have converted the world had they kept
their first faith, are now become apostates and hypocrites, as vain in
their Conversation, Habits, and Dresses, as any other people." Even the
poor tradesmen and mechanics amongst them wore periwigs: "a wicked
covering of Horse-hair and Goats'-hair." Men were "trick'd out in cock'd
Hats, their fine Cloathes with their Cuts _à la mode_ and long cravats."
Women went about with "bare neck, Hoop'd Petticoats, Lac'd Shoes,
Clock't Hose, Gold-chains, Lockets, Jewels, and fine Silks." Seeing in
these characteristics of the main mass of the second generation nothing
but the ravages of laxity, the faithful nucleus of the society
determined on a measure of reform. A missionary party, with full powers
to this end, went forth in 1760 from London Yearly Meeting. In every
separate meeting throughout the country wayward members were dealt with.
Many were reclaimed; those who showed themselves either stubborn or
indifferent were expelled from the society. Disownment for marriage
outside the group dates from this time, and it has been estimated that
by this means alone the membership was reduced by one-third.
[Footnote 14: W. Bromfield: _The Faith of the True Christian and the
Primitive Quaker's Faith._ 1725.]
Amongst the remnant the Quaker testimonies against extravagance in
dress, unprofitable occupations and amusements, and advices as to
simplicity in manners, were stereotyped into a code, and became matters
of strict observance. It is from this middle period that the popular
picture of Quakerism is borrowed. The Quakers went forward from their
great purgation--a strictly closed sect, carefully guarded from outside
influence, the younger generations forced either to conform to the
traditional pattern or to suffer banishment--depleted and decreasing
until the time of the modern revival taking place about the middle of
the nineteenth century.
The deductions made by modern commentators from these data fall into two
groups.
There is the view held generally by those standing outside the body,
whether enemies or friends, that Quakerism comes to an end with its
heroic period. The first recognize its initial catholicity, rejoice in
its successful tilting with Puritan Protestantism, but see it foredoomed
by its heresies, by its neglect of the outward symbols of the
sanctification of human life, and by the deleterious effect of the
admission of women into the ministry. The sympathizers see the early
Quakers either as the glory of seventeenth-century Christianity or the
left wing of a widespread effort to democratize formal religion--a
shifting of the centre of authority from the official custodian to the
man himself. They come regretfully upon the undisciplined ranks of the
second generation. They have no faith in the movement for reform; for
them the little church of the Spirit dwindles, lit with a faint sunset
glow of romance down towards extinction. All, both enemies and friends,
who see Quakerism end with the seventeenth century, dispose of the
modern revival by placing it within the general movement of Protestant
evangelicalism.
The second group of deductions appears to be shared by the Quakers
themselves in so far as their present literary output is representative
of the feelings and opinions of the body. They appear to attribute their
failure to capture the world, on the one hand, to their exclusion from
the main stream of thought and culture, and, on the other, to the
inability of the early protagonists to present a formulation of their
central doctrine free from contradictions, to their subjection to the
dualistic philosophy of the day, which saddles their teaching of the
Inner Light with a tendency to neglect all external means of
enlightenment.
Beyond these two most usual readings of the early history of Quakerism,
we find the more recent apologists of Christian mysticism, while freely
admitting the Quakers into the fellowship of the mystics, dispose
inferentially of the possibility of the "free" mystical church of which
Friends dreamed on the ground of the rarity of the religious--the still
greater rarity of the mystical temperament. In their opinion the art and
science of religion will always be carried on by specialists; the
torch-bearers will be few, though their light illumine the pathway of
the world. A world-church, therefore--a church which must cast her wings
over all in her striving to turn all towards the light--must organize
primarily in the interest of conduct as an end. In this view the Quaker
system, in so far as it invites every man to be his own church, must
always fail.
We may, perhaps, accept something of all these readings; we may
recognize the unsuitability for the daily need of the world at large of
a church neither primarily institutional nor primarily doctrinal. We may
admit, for many minds in a Christendom generally ignorant of its own
history of an episcopally ordained and invested female clergy, the
handicap of recognized feminine ministry; we may see the full unreason
of birthright membership, and the change of base in the modern revival,
without, perhaps, being driven to conclude that England's attempt to
introduce into field and market-place the hitherto cloistered mystical
faith and practice has entirely failed.
For amidst the stereotyped Puritanism of this middle period, with its
fear of beauty, its suspicion of all pursuits not directly utilitarian
or devotional, saints were born. The century which produced John Woolman
and the men and women who initiated and took the lion's share in the
movement for the abolition of slavery; which supplied to the cause of
science and to the medical profession, in spite of exclusion from the
main streams of learning, eminent men[15] in numbers quite out of
proportion to the size of the group; which saw the blossoming of public
education in the form of the fine Quaker schools where girls and boys
were educated side by side,[16] must have been rich in inarticulate and
unrecorded saintly lives.
[Footnote 15: The biographies of Quakers and ex-Quakers amount to about
3 per cent. of the whole of the entries in the _Dictionary of National
Biography_ (1885-1904), reckoning from 1675.]
There must have been in the sober Quaker homes, where affection ruled
without softness, where love was heroic rather than sentimental, many
who followed, not as imitators, but with all the strength of an original
impulse the pathway chosen by those who have been willing to pay the
price of an enhanced spiritual life; the withdrawal, in varying measure,
from the values and standards accepted by the world at large. They kept
watch. They worked amongst their fellows in a dusk between memory and
anticipation. They felt to the uttermost and fought to the uttermost the
weakness of the self. They were faithful, and in due time the society as
a whole felt the breath of revival.
[Footnote 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.]