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 NEW YORK DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 214-220 EAST 23rd STREET...

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 thos

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

When Fox came back to the world from his lonely wanderings, he had no thought of setting up a church in opposition to, or in any sort of competition with, existing churches. His message was for all, worshipping under whatever name or form; his sole concern to reveal to men their own wealth, to wean them to turn from words and ceremonials, from all merely outward things, to seek first the inner reality. Many of the Puritan leaders were brought by their contact with Fox to a more vital attitude wi

The history of the Quaker experiment reveals in England three main movements: the first corresponding roughly to the life of Fox, and covering the period of expansion, persecution, [7] and establishment; the second, which may be called the retreat of Quakerism, the quiet cultivation of Quaker method; and the third, the modern evangelistic revival. The first rapid spreading in the North of England was materially helped by the establishment, in 1652, of a centre at Swarthmoor Hall, near Ulverston

At the heart of the Quaker church is “meeting”—the silent Quaker meeting so long a source of misunderstanding to those outside the body, so clearly illuminated now for all who care to glance that way, by the light of modern psychology. We have now at our disposal, marked out with all the wealth of spatial terminology characteristic of that science, a rough sketch of what takes place in our minds in moments of silent attention. We are told, for instance, that when in everyday life our attention i

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 l

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 thei

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 Protestantis

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, an

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 Quake

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