Protestantism
HISTORY
The rise of Quakerism.
|
| There were meetings of the kind later associated with the
Quakers before there was a group by that name. Small groups of
Seekers gathered during the Puritan Revolution against Charles I
to wait upon the Lord because they despaired of spiritual help
either from the established Anglican Church or the existing
Puritan bodies--Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and
Baptists--through which most of them had already passed. To these
Seekers came a band of preachers, mostly from the north of
England, proclaiming the powers of direct contact with God. Fox
and James Nayler were perhaps the most eminent of these, but
Edward Burrough, William Dewsbury, and Richard Farnworth also
were active. The cradle of the movement was Swarthmore
(Swarthmoor) Hall in northwestern Lancashire, which after 1652
became the centre of an evangelistic campaign by traveling
ministers. Within a decade perhaps 20,000 to 60,000 had been
converted from all social classes except the aristocracy and
totally unskilled labourers. Heaviest concentrations were in the
north, Bristol, the counties around London, and London itself.
Traveling Friends and Cromwellian soldiers brought Quakerism to
the new English settlements in Ireland; Wales and especially
Scotland were less affected. |
| The Puritan clergy, in England and New England, greeted the
rise of Quakerism with the fury that an old left often reserves
for a new. Friends' religious style was impulsive and
nonideological; Quakers seemed to ignore the orthodox views of
the Puritans and pervert their heterodox ones. Though most
Friends had passed through varieties of Puritanism, they carried
the emphasis on a direct relationship between the believer and
God far beyond what Puritans deemed tolerable. The Restoration of
Charles II in 1660 was only a change of persecutors for the
Quakers, with their former tormentors now sharing some of their
sufferings. From the Quaker Act of 1662 until the de facto
toleration of James II in 1686 (de jure toleration came in the
Toleration Act of 1689), Friends were hounded by penal laws for
not swearing oaths, for not going to the services of the Church
of England, for going to Quaker meetings, and for refusing
tithes. Some 15,000 suffered under these laws, and almost 500
died in or shortly after being in prison, but they continued to
grow in numbers until the turn of the century. |
| At the same time Quakers were converting and peopling
America. In 1656 Quaker women preachers began work in Maryland
and in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The magistrates of Boston
savagely persecuted the visitors and in 1659 and 1661 put four of
them to death. Despite this, Quakerism took root in Massachusetts
and flourished in Rhode Island, where Friends for a long time
were in the majority. There were also many Friends in New Jersey,
where English Quakers early secured a patent for settlement, and
in North Carolina. Yearly meetings were established for New
England (1661), Maryland (1672), Virginia (1673), Philadelphia
(1681), New York (1695), and North Carolina (1698). The most
famous Quaker colony was Pennsylvania, for which Charles II
issued a charter to William Penn in 1681. Penn's "Holy
Experiment" tested how far a state could be governed consistently
with Friends' principles, especially pacifism and religious
toleration. Toleration would allow colonists of other faiths to
settle freely and perhaps become a majority; consistent pacifism
would leave the colony without military defenses against enemies
who might have been provoked by the other settlers. Penn,
entangled in English affairs, spent little time in Pennsylvania
and showed erratic judgment in selecting his non-Quaker deputies,
who were almost always at odds with the Quaker-dominated
legislature. Penn also went bankrupt through mismanagement; but
the Quaker influence in Pennsylvania politics remained paramount
until 1756, when legislators who were Friends could no longer
find a saving formula allowing them to vote support for military
operations against the French and Indians fighting settlers in
western Pennsylvania. Voltaire's description of Penn's agreements
with the Indians as the only treaties never sworn to and never
violated was exaggerated; but Friends' relations with the Indians
were more peaceful than those of other settlers. |
This page was borrowed from encyclopæaedia
Britannica
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