A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume 3: Taken from a View of the Education and Discipline, Social Manners, Civil and Political Economy, Religious Principles and Character, of the Society of FriendsClarkson, Thomas
Religion
A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume 3: Taken from a View of the Education and Discipline, Social Manners, Civil and Political Economy, Religious Principles and Character, of the Society of Friends
Clarkson, Thomas
Society of Friends
On the first of the original and immediate causes which have been
mentioned, I mean mixed marriages, I shall have but little to say. I do
not see how it is possible, while the society means to keep up a due
subordination among its members, not to disown such as may marry out of
it. In mixed families, such as these marriages produce, it is in vain to
expect that the discipline can be carried on, as has been shewn in the
second volume. And, without this discipline, the society would hardly
keep up, in the extensive manner it does, the character of a moral
people. I think, however, that some good might be done by regulations to
be universally observed. Thus they, who are deputed to inform the
disowned of their exclusion from membership, should be of the most
amiable temper and conciliatory manners. Every unqualified person should
be excluded from these missions. Permission should be solicited for both
the married persons to be present on such occasions. It is difficult to
estimate the good effect which the deputed, if of sweet and tender
dispositions, or the bad effects which the deputed, if of cold and
austere manners, might have upon those they visited, or what bias it
might give the one in particular, who had never been in membership, for
or against the society. Permission also might be solicited, even when
the mission was over for future friendly opportunities or visits, which
would shew in the society itself a tender regard and solicitude for the
welfare of its former members. It is not at all improbable, from the
impression which such apparent regard and solicitude might occasion,
that the children of the visited, though not members, might be brought
up in the rules of membership. And finally it appears to me to be
desirable, that the disowned, if they should give proof by their own
lives and the education of their children, of their attachment to the
principles of the society, and should solicit restoration to membership,
should be admitted into it again without any acknowledgment of past
errors, and wholly as new and convinced members.
With respect to the second of the immediate and original causes, which
is to be found in tithes, I may observe that it is, as for as I can
collect, but a small and an inferior one, few being disowned on this
account, and still fewer now than formerly. It would be desirable,
however, few as these instances may be, to prevent them. But I fear that
no remedy can be pointed out, in which the Quakers would acquiesce,
except it could be shewn, that a distinction might be made between the
payment of ecclesiastical and lay-tithes, which would not interfere with
the great tenets of the society on this subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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