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                              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