The Quakers, Past and Present — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Quakers, Past and Present
John Stuart Mill · en
Produced by Mary Glenn Krause, Jens Sadowski, the University
of Minnesota, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net. This book was produced from images
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THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
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
FOREWORD
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 those
he had gathered round him had a dawning apprehension.
The famous "peculiarities" of the Quakers fall into place as following
inevitably from their central belief.
The ebb and flow of that belief, as it is found embodied in the history
of the Society of Friends, has been dealt with as fully as space 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 of my
manuscript.
D. M. R.
LONDON,
1914.
CONTENTS
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
THE QUAKERS PAST AND PRESENT
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF QUAKERISM