Quakers

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The Quakers, formally the Religious Society of Friends, are a Christian movement that arose in the upheaval of mid-seventeenth-century England on a single radical claim: that the living God speaks directly within every human being, and that this inner light needs no priest, no creed, and no sacrament to reach it. The name began as mockery — tradition traces it to a magistrate who, after Fox bade him tremble at the word of the Lord, jeered back that it was Fox and his followers who were the quakers — and the Friends, in time, kept it. Their own name for themselves was plainer and pointed the other way: Friends of Truth, then simply Friends, after the saying in John’s gospel that those who keep the word are called friends and no longer servants.

A people gathered out of the silence

The movement crystallized around George Fox, an itinerant preacher who in the 1650s gathered scattered seekers across northern England into a recognizable body. Fox, a Leicestershire weaver’s son apprenticed to a shoemaker, recorded in his Journal a sequence of openings beginning in 1647, the controlling one a voice telling him there was one, even Christ Jesus, who could speak to his condition. The English Civil War had broken the authority of the established church, and into that opening came a wave of radical groups — Seekers, Ranters, Familists, Fifth Monarchists, the soldiers and tradesfolk and serving-women who had stopped expecting God to be found in a steeple-house. The Friends outlasted nearly all of them. The decisive moment of the founding decade came in 1652, when Fox climbed Pendle Hill in Lancashire and saw, in vision, a great people to be gathered; within weeks came the convincements at Firbank Fell and at Swarthmoor Hall, the Westmorland house of Judge Thomas Fell and his wife Margaret Fell, who became the movement’s organizing center and the keeper of its correspondence and its purse. From the northwest the preachers known later as the Valiant Sixty fanned out — to London, Bristol, Ireland, the Netherlands, the West Indies, the American colonies, and the eastern Mediterranean. Four of them were hanged on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661 for returning to a colony that had banished them.

What set the Friends apart was not a doctrine so much as a practice. They held that worship meant waiting together in silence until someone was moved to speak, that any person so moved — woman or man, learned or not — might minister, and that the forms of ordinary deference were a kind of falsehood. The silence is not a pause before worship; it is the worship — a gathered company centering down together, attentive, until the Light prompts a word. When it does, the one prompted stands and offers it — a prayer, a passage, a leading — and then the silence closes over it again. Decisions in the affairs of the meeting follow the same grammar. There is no vote. The clerk listens through the speaking and the waiting for the sense of the meeting — the point at which the Friends present have been gathered into one mind — and records it, and where that unity is not yet found, the matter waits. Margaret Fell’s Womens Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (1666) gave this open ministry its first sustained scriptural defense, against the long weight of texts read to silence women in church.

The light, the seed, the refusals

Friends understood the inner light as the same Christ attested in scripture, encountered now and from within rather than read about from without. They called it many things in the first generation — the Light Within, the Seed, the Inward Christ, the Truth, and the phrase that has carried furthest, that of God in every one. The claim is exact and consequential: this is not a faculty of conscience or a poetic figure but the present, teaching presence of the risen Christ, given to every person who comes into the world, sufficient to save even those who never heard the gospel preached. From it the rest unfolds with a kind of logical pressure. If the Light is given to all and met in silence, the trained clergy become hirelings, the prepared sermon a creaturely interposition, the read prayer an obstacle. The outward sacraments — water baptism, the bread and cup — are honored as first-century practices but classed as types now fulfilled by an inward baptism of the Spirit and an inward feeding on Christ, so that Friends have been described as keeping no sacraments, or as keeping every meal and every silence sacramentally. To the Reformation’s competing schools the Friends gave a flat refusal across the board: against Calvinist predestination they held the Light universally offered and resistible; against sacramental grace they held the signs superseded; against the establishment they refused tithes, oaths, steeple, and hireling priest alike.

This position the movement’s critics found dangerously close to setting private experience above the Bible, and the charge was not idle: a Light held sufficient in itself can subordinate the written word to the inward Word, and the radical fringe of the 1650s had already shown where unchecked inner authority could run. The most notorious case was James Nayler, a gifted early preacher who in 1656 rode into Bristol on a donkey with women strewing garments before him, in a sign-act of Christ’s entry that Parliament read as blasphemy and punished by branding, boring the tongue, and the pillory — a crisis that drove Fox to build the discipline of meetings and elders that would keep the Light corporate rather than leave it to the solitary enthusiast. Friends themselves spent generations refining the balance, honoring scripture as the true and faithful record while denying it the last word that belonged to the Spirit that gave it. The inner Light is sometimes described from the outside as panentheist — God present in every person and so, in some sense, in all things — but the Friends never made it the all-is-God of pantheism; the Light is Christ teaching from within, a presence one may resist and grieve, not the substance of the world. The refusals that followed from the Light were not abstract. Friends would not swear oaths, on the ground that a double standard of truth-telling is itself a lie; they would not remove their hats before magistrates or use the flattering plural you to a single person, addressing everyone, high or low, with the plain thee; and they would not take up arms. For these refusals thousands were jailed in the movement’s first decades — perhaps fifteen thousand over a quarter-century under the Quaker Act, the Conventicle Acts, and the Five Mile Act, with some hundreds dying in custody. The conviction hardened into the peace testimony in a single founding text: in the first weeks of 1661, to distinguish Friends from the Fifth Monarchists who had just risen in arms, Fox and eleven others issued A Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, called Quakers, renouncing all outward wars and weapons for any end whatsoever. The 1660 Declaration’s renunciation of all outward weapons has anchored Quaker pacifism ever since.

Systematizers and the holy experiment

The second generation gave the movement a settled shape. Robert Barclay of Ury, a Scottish laird schooled in part at the Scots College in Paris, furnished its theology: the Apology for the True Christian Divinity, published first in Latin at Amsterdam in 1676 and in his own English in 1678, a defense in fifteen scholastic propositions that remained the standard systematic statement of Quaker doctrine into the twentieth century. Barclay called the Light a real spiritual substance, the saving manifestation of Christ given to every person, distinct from but speaking with the conscience. He kept the Reformation language of justification by faith but moved its instrument inward — Christ formed in the believer rather than an alien righteousness reckoned to his account — and he taught, with care, a doctrine of perfectibility: that one who yields to the Light may, occasionally and revocably, be kept from sinning, a claim he was at pains to distinguish from later confident perfectionisms. The full text of Barclay’s Apology survives in the complete fifteen-proposition argument as the movement’s most rigorous self-account.

William Penn carried the movement into government. A convinced gentleman, son of an admiral, jailed more than once for his preaching, Penn wrote the apologetic-devotional No Cross, No Crown — first in 1669, expanded in 1682 — arguing that there is no crown of the spirit without the cross of self-denial, that the plain life is the disciplined life; the library holds Penn’s No Cross, No Crown in its expanded 1682 form. In 1681 the Crown granted him a vast American tract in settlement of a debt owed his father, and Penn made of Pennsylvania a holy experiment — a colony founded on religious liberty, government by consent, and a pacifist dealing with the Lenape and other nations that held, for two generations, where the other colonies warred. A century on, the New Jersey tailor John Woolman made the Society one of the first religious bodies to turn decisively against slavery. His Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes (1754, 1762) and his patient, meeting-by-meeting traveling pressed the Philadelphia and London yearly meetings to forbid slaveholding among their members between 1758 and 1776; his Journal, published in 1774, became a classic of the plain conscience at work, read far outside the Society. The Journal of John Woolman traces a single tender conscience refusing, item by item — the dyed cloth, the stagecoach driven on worn-out horses, the bill of sale he was asked to write — to profit from another’s suffering.

Divisions over the original light

The Society is small — never more than a few hundred thousand worldwide — yet its weight in the history of reform is out of all proportion to its numbers: in the long campaigns against slavery, in prison and asylum reform, in pacifism and relief work and the founding of schools. The eighteenth century turned the movement inward into a Quietism of plain dress and plain speech and the suppression of all “creaturely activity” in worship, a discipline of waiting so severe that some meetings sat for years in near-total silence. The nineteenth century then fractured it over how literally to read the original Christianity. The American Hicksite separation of 1827–28 split yearly meeting after yearly meeting between Orthodox Friends, who stressed the historical Christ and the authority of the Bible, and the rural followers of Elias Hicks, who stressed the Inner Light and the universality of revelation. The Wilburite–Gurneyite separation of 1845 divided the Orthodox again, between John Wilbur’s conservative Quietism and Joseph John Gurney’s evangelical revivalism; from the 1870s, under the influence of the Holiness movement, Gurneyite Friends in the American Midwest took up programmed worship with paid pastors, hymns, and prepared sermons. Out of these come the four streams that share the name today — Liberal, Pastoral, Evangelical, and Conservative — each a defensible continuation of the first generation, and no two agreeing on what that generation most essentially was. They are united less by shared belief than by the testimonies that organize a life: simplicity, peace, integrity, equality, and, since the mid-twentieth century, stewardship of the earth. These are not commandments handed down but corporate discoveries — the practical fruit of a Light tested, in the Friends’ understanding, by what it leads a people to do together.

The texts and their scholarship

The first generation wrote constantly — tracts, epistles, journals, broadsides — and the primary corpus is largely in the public domain and digitized. Fox’s Journal, dictated late in life and edited for the press by Thomas Ellwood in 1694, is the founding narrative; the Journal of George Fox in its two-volume Friends’ Tract Association recension carries the openings, the Pendle Hill vision, and the years in jail. The modern scholarly standard is the two-volume Cambridge edition of 1911 prepared by Norman Penney from the original manuscript, which strips away Ellwood’s smoothing. Barclay’s Apology (Latin 1676; English 1678) is the systematic spine; Penn’s No Cross, No Crown (1669, 1682) and Woolman’s Journal (1774) are the devotional classics. Margaret Fell’s Womens Speaking Justified (1666) and the 1661 peace Declaration are the load-bearing short texts.

The historiography divides along the fault line the entry has traced. The foundational modern accounts are William Charles Braithwaite’s The Beginnings of Quakerism (Macmillan, 1912) and The Second Period of Quakerism (1919), written within the circle around Rufus Jones and reflecting his framing; Braithwaite’s Beginnings of Quakerism remains a quarried source for the first decade. Jones’s own Studies in Mystical Religion (1909) and Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (1914) built the mystical genealogy. Against it stand the revisionist studies: Geoffrey Nuttall’s The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Blackwell, 1946) and Hugh Barbour’s The Quakers in Puritan England (Yale, 1964), which relocated the movement within radical Puritanism; H. Larry Ingle’s First Among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism (Oxford, 1994), the leading critical biography, which displaces several of Jones’s idealizations; Rosemary Moore’s The Light in Their Consciences (Penn State, 2000) on the first generation; and Carole Dale Spencer’s Holiness: The Soul of Quakerism (Paternoster, 2007), which argues for a Holiness rather than a mystical reading. The current standard reference is the Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies, edited by Stephen W. Angell and Ben Pink Dandelion (Oxford, 2013).

Reading the Friends as mystics

The Quakers are often grouped with the era’s mystics for that insistence on unmediated inner knowing, and the kinship with older currents of contemplative Christianity is felt across the literature. That reading, however, is itself a twentieth-century achievement, and a contested one. It belongs largely to Rufus Jones, the Haverford philosopher who, after the death of his collaborator John Wilhelm Rowntree in 1905, conceived a multi-volume history that would set Quakerism not within the genealogy of radical Puritanism but within a long mysticism running from the Rhineland through Jakob Boehme to the Friends. Drawing on William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Jones placed Fox alongside Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and the Spanish Carmelites, and named the broader stream the Spiritual Reformation. The framing shaped Liberal Quaker self-understanding for a century and fed back, through Evelyn Underhill and others, into the mainstream histories of Christian mysticism themselves.

Whether it captures the seventeenth century is another matter. Later scholars — relocating early Quakerism in radical Puritanism, or reading it as apocalyptic prophecy, plain-speech protest, or a Holiness movement avant la lettre — have treated Jones’s mysticism as an overlay rather than a recovery. Fox and Barclay associated the very word mystic with Catholic monastic spirituality and would almost certainly have refused it; their vocabulary was the Light, the Seed, the Truth, the Power, not the via negativa of the apophatic writers or the ascent of The Cloud of Unknowing. And the characteristic Quaker move runs the other way from the cloistered ascent. Where the contemplative tradition often climbs inward toward a private union, the Friends press the inward Light back outward — into plain dress, plain speech, the refusal of the oath, the freed slave, the unsworn testimony in court. The peace testimony was not deduced from a creed; it was found, in 1661, under the pressure of suspicion and prison, and then held. The testimony against slaveholding was not legislated; it was reached, meeting by meeting, over decades, as one conscience after another came under the same weight. Each of the great Quaker testimonies is a thing the gathered silence discovered and the gathered body then could not unknow — a Light known, in the end, by the work it will not let a person leave undone.

→ In the library: Penn — No Cross, No Crown (1682) · The Journal of John Woolman (1774)

→ Related: Christian Science · Emmanuel Swedenborg · Gnosis · Christianity · Bible · Mysticism · Quietism · Christian Theosophy Boehmean · Meister Eckhart · Johannes Tauler · Rhineland Mysticism · Apophatic Theology · The Cloud Of Unknowing · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · William James · Evelyn Underhill · Christian Mysticism · Pantheism