THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
“The Quaker religion ... is something whichit is impossible to overpraise.”
William James:
The Varieties of Religious
Experience
NEW YORK
DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY
214-220 EAST 23rd STREET
The following chapters are primarily anattempt at showing the position of theQuakers in the family to which they belong—thefamily of the mystics.
In the second place comes a considerationof the method of worship and of corporateliving laid down by the founder of Quakerism,as best calculated to foster mysticalgifts and to strengthen in the communityas a whole that sense of the Divine, indwellingand accessible, to which some few of hisfollowers had already attained, and ofwhich all those he had gathered round himhad a dawning apprehension.
The famous “peculiarities” of the Quakersfall into place as following inevitably fromtheir central belief.
The ebb and flow of that belief, as it isfound embodied in the history of the Societyof Friends, has been dealt with as fully asspace 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 ofmy manuscript.
D. M. R.
London,
1914.
| 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 |