[1] The Brownists; now represented in the Congregational Union.
[2] Bunyan was born in 1628, four years later than Fox.
[3] In 1624, at Drayton-in-the-Clay, in Leicestershire.
[4] His father, a weaver by trade, and known as “Righteous Christer,” is described by Fox as a man “with a seed of God in him”; his mother, Mary Lago, as being “of the stock of the martyrs.”
[5] William C. Braithwaite: The Beginnings of Quakerism. (Macmillan, 1912.)
[6] If we except the doomed Port Royalists.
[7] Toleration Act passed 1689. Fox died two years later.
[8] The bulk of the “Fell” correspondence is preserved at the headquarters of the Society of Friends, Devonshire House, Bishopsgate, E.C.
[9] Part of which was spent in a dungeon reserved for witches and murderers, and left uncleansed year after year.
[10] Nicholas Hermann.
[11] 1870.
[12] See chapter onQuakerism and Women.
[13] An Apology for the True Christian Divinity. 1678.
[14] W. Bromfield: The Faith of the True Christian and the Primitive Quaker’s Faith. 1725.
[15] The biographies of Quakers and ex-Quakers amount to about 3 per cent. of the whole of the entries in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885-1904), reckoning from 1675.
[16] Ackworth was founded in 1779, Sidcot remodelled on Quaker lines in 1808, the present Saffron Walden School opened in Islington in 1811, and several others since both in England and Ireland, all now open to the general public.
[17] As early as 1657, and before he had come in contact with slavery, Fox addressed a letter of advice from England to all slave-holding Friends. In 1671, seeing for himself the system at work in Barbadoes, he recommended that the holders should free their slaves after a term of service, and should arrange for their welfare when freed. The first documentary protest against slavery put forward by any religious body came from the German Quakers in Philadelphia (Germantown); they had come as settlers from Kirchheim in Germany, where Penn’s teaching had met with an ardent response. John Woolman spent twenty years in ceaseless labour on behalf of the slaves. Throughout the society the work went on; meetings were held, individual protests were made, slave-holding Friends were visited. By 1755 it was generally agreed that negroes should be neither bought nor imported by Friends, and less than thirty years later the society, with the exception of a few isolated and difficult cases, was free of slavery. Many Friends paid their slaves for past services, and in all cases provision was made for their welfare.
[18] The first Quakers to reach America were two women, Anne Austin and Mary Fisher. When they arrived at Boston, their luggage was searched, their books were burned in the market-place by the hangman; they were stripped and examined for signs of witchcraft, and after five weeks’ imprisonment and cruelty were shipped back to Barbadoes. Then followed a series of persecutions too horrible to be detailed, increasing in severity from fines—fireless, bedless, and almost foodless—imprisonment in chains in the Boston winter, floggings (one part alone of the punishment of the aged William Brand consisted of 117 blows on his bare back with a barred rope, while two women were stripped to the waist in the mid-winter snow and lashed at the cart-tail through eleven towns), ear-croppings, and tongue-borings, to the death penalty suffered by three men and one woman. The intervention of Charles II. referred only to the death penalty. Whippings continued until 1677, and imprisonment for tithes until 1724.
[19] It is interesting that Penn did his utmost—even to attempting to bribe the secretaries when the charter was drawn up—to abolish the Penn prefixed by James II. to his own original Sylvania.
[20] In 1683.
[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).
[22] The Perrot Schism, 1661.
[23] The Friend, March, 1912: “Woman in the Church.”
[24] The Beacon Controversy, so named from Isaac Crewdson’s publication in 1835, expressing Evangelical views of an advanced type.
[25] The Friends’ Retreat at York, established in 1796, was the beginning of humane treatment of the insane in this country.
[26] In 1845 by Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham.
[27] Authority and the Light Within.
[28] Swarthmoor Lecture. Headley Bros., 1909.
[29] In the work, for example, of Miss Evelyn Underhill, author of Mysticism (Macmillan, 1911), The Mystic Way (Macmillan, 1913).