The Quakers, Past and Present — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
The Quakers, Past and Present
John Stuart Mill · en
His strong persuasive personality revived the enthusiasm of the
imitative mass of the society, and once more the Quakers faced the
world. It was a new world. The religious liberty Friends had prophesied
and worked towards had come at last. The Test Act had been repealed.
Nonconformists were admitted to Parliament and to the Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge. The London University had been established. The
emerging Quakers, on their side, began to break down the barriers they
had erected between themselves and the world by their peculiarities of
speech and of dress, and showed a tendency to relax their hostility
towards "art."
They were a little band, tempered and disciplined by their century of
quiet cultivation of the Quaker faith and method, and they were at once
available for a share, strikingly disproportionate to their numbers, in
the evangelical work of an awakening Christendom. From the time of their
emergence their missionary labours have been unremitting. They engaged
in prison reform and the reform of the penal code. They initiated the
reform of the lunacy laws, working for the substitution of kindly
treatment in special institutions[25] for the orthodox method of chains
and imprisonment. They began to educate the poor. The foundation of
their Foreign Missions dates from this period of revival.
They have widening centres of missionary work in India, Madagascar,
Syria, China, and Ceylon. They have been the main movers in the work of
abolishing the opium traffic, and are engaged, both at home and abroad,
in all the many well-known efforts towards social amelioration, amongst
which, perhaps, the leading part they have taken in experimental
philanthropy, in educational method (their co-education schools
scattered over the country are models of method, standing for common
sense, humanity, and a wise use of modern resources), in the housing and
betterment of the lot of the working classes, and in the establishment
of garden suburbs, are particularly worthy of mention.
[Footnote 25: The Friends' Retreat at York, established in 1796, was the
beginning of humane treatment of the insane in this country.]