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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.




                                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 "