In 1827 a large group--now known as Hicksites--separated under Elias Hicks, whose repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and insistence on right living, resulted, in the opinion of "orthodox" Friends, in a wrong attitude towards Christ and the scriptures. The evangelical reaction in England, which was, in part, a result of the Hicksite controversy, brought about a further division in America under John Wilbur, who protested against Evangelical biblicism, and reasserted the doctrine of the Inner Light, insisted on plainness of speech and dress, and looked with suspicion upon "art." The orthodox group, deeply tinged with Protestant evangelicalism, have largely adopted the pastoral system. There are now at least four distinct groups in America.[21] [Footnote 21: "According to recent statistics, the membership of the fourteen orthodox bodies is upward of 90,000; of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 4,400; of the Conservative Yearly Meeting, about 4,000; and of seven Hicksite Yearly Meetings, under 19,000--say, 27,500 Friends belonging to Yearly Meetings in America with which we do not correspond" (_Facts about Friends._ Headley Bros. 1912).] CHAPTER VI QUAKERISM AND WOMEN 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 Protestantism, has this been so. Amongst the first Christians, it is true, women preached and prophesied. There is, moreover, in the history of the early centuries sound evidence of an ordained and invested female clergy. Taking that history as a whole, however, women have been, and are still, excluded from the councils of the churches and from the responsibilities and privileges of priesthood. Devout churchwomen, and, in particular, devout Protestants, are nourished on literal interpretation of records, which assure them of an essential inferiority to their male companions, and enjoin subjection in all things. At marriage, they sacramentally renounce individuality. Quakerism stands as the first form of Christian belief, which has, even in reaching its doctrinized and institutionized levels, escaped regarding woman as primarily an appendage to be controlled, guided, and managed by man. This escape was the result, not of any kind of feminism, any sort of special solicitude for or belief in women as a class. Nor was it the result of a protest against any definitely recognized existing attitude. Such unstable and fluctuating emotions could not have carried through the Quaker reformation of the relations of the sexes. The recognition of