Simple easy intercourse between family and family, meeting and meeting, is part of the fabric of Quaker home-life. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps just because amongst the Quakers, in a very true and deep sense, the world is home and home is the world, because, in other words, the inner is able without obstruction to flow out and realize itself in the outer, the sense of family-life, of home, and fireside, is particularly sweet and strong. The breaking of family ties is rare. The failure that leads to the divorce court is practically unknown. We may look with wonder and admiration at the great figures amongst Quaker women, upon those who built their lives into the first spreadings of the message; upon those who went, under the urgency of their faith, alone into strange lands, where means of communication were the scantiest; upon the persecuted and martyred women, the women of initiative and organizing genius; upon Anne Knight of Chelmsford pioneering female suffrage in England, founding the first political association for women; upon Elizabeth Fry, after a full career as house-keeper, mother, and social worker, turning, late in life, to the prisons of England, and transforming them, so to say, with her own hands. But, perhaps, it is in the daily home-life of the society that the distinctively feminine side of doctrinized and organized Quakerism reaches its fairest development. CHAPTER VII THE PRESENT POSITION The counter-agitation[24] brought forth in England by the American Hicksite movement, ended, after prolonged discussion and stress, in a decisive readjustment of the Society of Friends. There were numerous secessions into the Evangelical church and the Plymouth Brotherhood. There were separations of those who followed Elias Hicks in his repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and of those who favoured Wilbur in protesting against "book religion," reasserting the doctrines of the Quaker fathers, and insisting on simplicity of life; but the society as a whole was swept forward, under the leadership of Joseph John Gurney (brother of Elizabeth Fry), by the invading wave of Protestant evangelicalism. Gurney, coming of old Quaker stock, though religious and pious and full of zeal for the salvation of the world, never grasped the essentials of Quakerism. He had no touch of the intuitive genius which makes the mystic. Every line he has written betrays the Protestant biblicist, the man who puts the verbal revelation before any other whatsoever. He did not repudiate the Fathers, but he denied that they had ever questioned the supreme authority of the scriptures as the guide of mankind. [Footnote 24: The Beacon Controversy, so named from Isaac Crewdson's publication in 1835, expressing Evangelical views of an advanced type.]