Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/160

Rh 148 QUAKERS sometimes in barns, sometimes at market-crosses. There is some evidence to show that the arrangement of this mis- sion, as it would now be called, rested mainly with Fox, and that the expenses of it and of the foreign missions were borne out of a common fund. Margaret Fell, the wife and afterwards the widow of Judge Fell who sub- sequently married George Fox opened her house at Swarthmore Hall, near Ulverston, to these preachers, and probably contributed largely to the common fund from which the expenses were paid. Fox's teaching was primarily a preaching of repentance ; and he and his friends addressed vast congregations much as Wesley and Whitefield did at a later date. But his teaching had certain marked peculiarities especially his insistence on the universality and sufficiency of the light of God's Spirit. He regarded the work in which he was engaged as in no wise the founding of a new sect or society, but, to use his own words, as " the appearance of the Lord's everlasting truth, and breaking forth again in His eternal power in this our day and age in England." Such teaching and such views necessarily brought Fox and his friends into direct conflict with all the religious bodies of England, and they were continually engaged in strife with the Pres- byterian ministers who then filled the pulpits of English churches, with the Independents, with the Baptists, with the Episcopal Church, and with the wilder sectaries, like the Fifth Monarchy men, the Ranters, the Seekers, and the Muggletonians. This strife was conducted on both sides with a zeal and an acerbity of language not consonant with our present notions of decorum. The movement was accompanied, too, by most of those physical symptoms which usually go with vehement appeals to the conscience and the emotions of a rude multitude. The trembling amongst the listening crowd caused or confirmed the name of Quakers given to the body: men and women some- times fell down and lay grovelling on the earth and struggling as if for life. But the Quaker preachers seem not to have encouraged these manifestations, but rather to have sought to assuage them by such reasonable means as carrying the affected to bed or administering a cordial or medicine. Some of the early Quakers indulged in eccentricities and extravagances of no measured kind. Some travelled and preached naked or barefoot or dressed in sackcloth ; others imitated the Hebrew prophets in the performance of symbolical acts of denunciation or warning ; even the women in some cases distinguished themselves by the impropriety and folly of their conduct. In some cases religious excitement seems to have produced or been attended by insanity, and the aberrations of Naylor and Ibbit can only be attributed to that cause. For, though not altogether free from acts of fanaticism, the Quaker leaders discouraged and disowned the grosser acts of enthusiasm. The activity and zeal of the early Quakers were not con- fined to England ; they passed into Scotland and Ireland. Fox and others travelled to America and the West Indian Islands ; another reached Jerusalem, and testified against the superstition of the monks ; Mary Fisher, " a religious maiden," visited Smyrna, the Morea, and the court of Mohammed IV. at Adrianople ; others made their way to Rome; two women suffered imprisonment from the In- quisition in Malta; two men passed into Austria and Hungary ; and William Penn, George Fox, and others preached Quakerism in Holland and Germany. As early as 1652 meetings of the followers of Fox, calling themselves at first the Children of Light, gathered together in various places in England, and were soon established in considerable numbers. The meetings at Bristol were often attended by from three to four thousand people. 2. The second period in the history of Quakerism is marked by the introduction into the body, hitherto unor- ganized, of an organization and a discipline principally due to the mind and energy of Fox, by a more scholarly and learned air given to the Quaker productions by the writings of William Penn and Robert Barclay, and by the part which the Quakers played in the colonization of New Jersey and of Pennsylvania. It is not wonderful that the introduction of an organization and a discipline met with great opposition amongst a people taught to believe that the inward light of each individual man was the only true guide for his conduct. The project met with some oppo- sition at the time, and at a later period (1683), from persons of considerable reputation in the body. Wilkin- son, Rogers, Story, and others raised a party against Fox as regards the management of the affairs of the society, and asserted that the meetings for discipline which had been established were useless, and that every man ought to be guided by the Spirit of God in his own mind, and not to be governed by rules of man. They drew a consider- able following away with them, but the greater number adhered to their original leader. Robert BARCLAY (q.v.), a Scotsman of family, who had received a polite education, principally in France, joined the Quakers about 1666, and William PENN (q.v.) joined the body about two years later. The Quakers had always been active controversialists, and a great body of tracts and papers was issued by them ; but hitherto they had not been of much account in a literary point of view. Now the writings of Barclay, especially his celebrated Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1675), published by him in Latin and English, and the works of William Penn /amongst which his No Cross no Crown was one of the best known) gave to the Quaker literature a more logical and a more scholarly aspect. One peculiarity of the conduct of the Friends down to the Revolution of 1688, and more or less down to the present time, must not be overlooked. They were essenti- ally non-political. They opposed the most dogged per- sonal and individual resistance to what they thought wrong ; but they never attempted by combination or otherwise to exert political influence. " Keep out of the powers of the earth" was Fox's exhortation j and, when in 1688 a discussion was introduced into the yearly gathering of the body on the choice of parliament men, Fox strenuously opposed the introduction of politics into the meetings of his followers. During the whole time between the rise of the Quakers and the passing of the Toleration Act they were the objects of an almost continuous persecution, which they endured with extraordinary constancy and patience. In 1656 Fox computed that there were seldom less than a thousand in prison, and it has been asserted that between 1661 and 1697 13,562 Quakers were imprisoned, 152 were transported, and 338 died in prison or of their wounds. Having come into being after the death of Charles I., the Quakers first endured persecution under the Parliament and then under Cromwell. In 1645 an ordinance of the Parliament had made the directory of the Westminster divines obligatory ; and ordinances of the years 1646 and 1648 were passed for the preventing of blasphemies and heresies, which comprehended under these hard names some doctrines afterwards promulgated by the Quakers, as that the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord's supper are not commanded by the word of God, and that the use of arms for defence, be the cause ever so just, is unlawful. Furthermore these or other ordinances of the Parliament placed the decision of questions as to tithes in the hands of the justices of the peace. The instrument of government under which Cromwell assumed power as the Lord Protector had held out a promise of protection in the exercise of their religion to " such as professed faith in God by Jesus Christ " (art. 37) ; and the Protector himself, in a speech addressed to Parliament on the 12th September 1654, had declared liberty of conscience to be a natural right ; nevertheless the Quakers found that they were still the subjects of bitter per- secution. They were sometimes dealt with under the ordinances already referred to, sometimes as Sabbath-breakers because they