This matter dragged along, a source of constant disturbance, appearing
in perhaps a new form in the Quarterly Meeting of Ministers and Elders
in Eighth month, 1826. The immediate action involved appointing a
committee to assist the Preparative Meeting of Ministers and Elders
of Green Street Monthly Meeting, the assumed necessity in the case
being the reported unsoundness of a Green Street minister, a charge to
this effect having been preferred by one member only. The situation,
however, caused an abatement in answering the query relating to love
and unity. While these transactions were going on among the ministers
and elders, Green Street Monthly Meeting took action which removed
two of its elders from that station in the Society. The two deposed
elders took their grievances to the general quarterly meeting. While
the quarterly meeting would not listen to a statement of grievances,
yet a committee to go over the whole case was appointed. The committee
thus appointed, without waiting any action by the quarterly meeting,
transformed the removal of the aggrieved elders into an appeal, and
then demanded that Green Street Monthly Meeting turn over to that
committee all the minutes relating to the case of the two elders.
This the Green Street Meeting refused to do. Although the case had
never been before the quarterly meeting, the committee of inquiry
reported to the full meeting, that all of the action of Green Street
Monthly Meeting relating to the two elders should be annulled. It was
claimed that, by virtue of the leadership which the Orthodox had in
the quarterly meeting, a precedent had been established which gave
committees the right to exceed the power conferred upon them by the
meeting which appointed them. The committee had not been appointed to
decide a case, but to investigate a complaint.
Following this experience, after much wrangling, and in the midst of
manifest disunity, and against what it was claimed was the manifest
opposition of the major portion of the meeting, the quarterly meeting
in Eleventh month, 1826, appointed a committee to visit the monthly
meetings. This committee was manifestly one-sided, but could have
no possible disciplinary service from extending brotherly care.
Nevertheless at the quarterly meeting in Fifth month, 1827, this
committee, for presumed gospel labor, reported that the large Green
Street Monthly Meeting should be laid down, and its members attached
to the Northern District Monthly Meeting. It is not necessary to enter
into any argument as to the right of a quarterly meeting, under our
system, to lay down an active monthly meeting, without that meeting's
consent. The laying down of Green Street Monthly Meeting followed, the
"separation" in the yearly meeting. It should be said that in Second
month, 1827, Green Street Monthly Meeting, attempted to secure consent
from the quarterly meeting to transfer itself to Abington Quarterly
Meeting, and subsequently this was done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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