USA > Rhode Island > Providence County > Providence > Two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, held at Moses Brown School, Providence, R.I., sixth month, 24th, 1911 > Part 2
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Until 1695 this yearly meeting included all Friends on Long Island and on "the mainland" of New York, as the early records call it, so that from far away Piscataqua in the East to * Journal II, pp. 168-169.
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the little metropolis on Manhattan Island in the West, Friends came up to the great annual feast. Almost every year there were visiting ministers present from England and also from the new and wonderful Philadelphia, from Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas and occasionally from Barbadoes and the other West Indies to which we now send missionaries! In 1695 the following minute was adopted, which set off for the first time in history one yearly meeting from its parent body: "It is agreed that ve meeting at Long Island shall be from this time a Yearly Meeting, and that John Boune and John Rodman shall receive all such as come to ye Yearly Meeting in Long Island and correspond with friends in London."
Four years later, in 1699, this yearly meeting adopted the plan of having representatives attend from the subordinate meetings, as the following minute indicates: "It is agreed by order and consent of this Meeting, that the second day of the week be for the business and service of the meeting for the future, according to ye ancient order of Truth amongst us, and not for public worship, and that two friends from each Quar- terly Meeting, and where no Quarterly Meeting, two from each Monthly Meeting, to attend ye service of ye Yearly Meet- ing, till business is ended, and as many other sober friends as hath freedom." The following year, in 1700, the meeting of ministers and elders was first organized, though at that date the term "elder" was not used. The minute reads: "It is agreed upon by this meeting that ye sixth day morning of ve Yearly Meeting, before ye public meeting for worship begins, shall be for ye future for Friends of ye ministry to meet to- gether, and such other sober Friends as hath freedom." These "sober Friends" later came to be known as "elders." In 1701 twelve "Queries" were adopted to discover the state of society and to form a sort of silent confessional for the individual members. The custom of preparing formal answers to these "Queries, " however, did not begin until 1755.
In spite of the fact that travel was slow and difficult in those quiet days before the railroad. or even before the stage coach, great multitudes of Friends flocked to yearly meeting. John Fothergill attended it in 1722 and he reports that there were two thousand present, and, what is more important still, he says
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that "there was a demonstration of the eternal power of God and a confirmation of many souls." Edmund Packover, an interesting English Friend, was in attendance of the yearly meeting in 1743 and he says that there were not less than five thousand persons present. He writes in his Journal: "I never was at so large a meeting before-a most solemn weighty awful (i. e. awe-inspiring) time. People from 150 miles to the East- ward came to it." That means that Maine was already begin- ning to be heard from!
The next great visit in the ministry was that of Samuel Fothergill. His "concern" for this visit had been upon his mind for ten years and he came just after New England had been swept by what is still known as the "Great Religious Awaken- ing," led by George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. Samuel Fothergill was a man of great culture and refinement, but also of marked humility and simplicity. He had passed through a deep experience, his religion was of the first-hand kind, and when he spoke he carried conviction with his message. He says that New England yearly meeting at the time of his visit (1755) had the largest attendance of any yearly meeting in the world, and that the power of it brought the deepest reverence upon his soul and tears of joy and comfort to his eyes, and he makes this comment upon the yearly meeting of 1755: "The Great Name spread afresh."
One of the most memorable sessions of this body was that held in 1760. John Woolman, a beloved disciple of liberty, and one of the most consummate flowers of Quaker sainthood, was present, "in bowedness of spirit," to use his quaint words, and "measurably bapitzed into a feeling of the state of Society." These were days when Friends of wealth and station in Newport and along the Narragansett shore held slaves and even traded in them. As the meeting was about to begin, John Woolman heard that a cargo of Africans had just arrived at the Newport dock and that they were being sold by a member of the meeting. When he heard this fact he could not eat or sleep and his whole sensitive being felt the shock. Finally, "under deep exercise," he opened his mind in the meeting and pointed out how the deep- seated malady of slave-holding was affecting the spirit of life among Friends and how there was no healing possible without 2
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the removing of the evil. His words, weighted, as they were, with the power of a blameless and consecreted spirit, reached the quick of the meeting and wrought a silent revolution, so that within fifteen years from that date the skirts of New England Friends were clean of this ancient stain.
I shall mention only one more event out of the far past-and that shall be a victorious mission of love. When the storm of war broke between the colonies and the mother country-for a brief period a misguided "mother"-Friends of this yearly meeting, under the direction of the Meeting for Sufferings which was established in 1775, undertook to relieve the sufferings occasioned by the siege of Boston. The committee gathered what was for that time an enormous sum-nineteen hundred and sixty-eight pounds sterling-and went out as a kind of eight- eenth century Red Cross Society to supply victuals and wood and clothes to those who were in a state of want in and about. Boston. In Salem, for instance, these Friends in company with the selectmen of the town went from house to house and distri- buted relief through the very streets along which Quakers had been whipped at the cart's tail a century before and Salem twice gave Friends "a vote of thanks" for their generous help. So does love conquer and open the way for truth.
Time does not allow today for me to review the modern period of our history with its checkered story. Here we are a little band of four thousand Friends, on the narrow ridge between the past and the future.
"No mortal ever dreams
That the scant isthmus he encamps upon Between two oceans, one, the Stormy, passed. And one, the Peaceful, yet to venture on, Has been that future whereto prophets yearned For the fulfilment of earth's cheated hope; Shall be that past which nerveless poets moan As the lost opportunity of song."
It is for us to highly resolve that this "scant isthmus" of a present shall not be looked back upon as a "lost opportunity." Twelve young men and women-the argonauts of the Wood- house"-planted the seed here in great faith; and in vision
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saw it spreading as the sand of the sea in multitude. They came to their task expecting to suffer for their consecration to the truth, and ready to endure whatever might be laid upon them in the line of their mission. The tale of their suffering and endur- ance and that of their converts is almost beyond belief in this easy and comfortable generation. They lay in unspeakably + bad jails, they were beaten with tarred ropes and knotted cords, they were kept without food or warmth, they were despoiled of their goods, they were branded with hot irons, they had their ears cropped off, they were banished on pain of death, they were whipped upon the bare back at the cart's tail through town after town, and four of them went to a martyr's death on the scaffold. One of them, whose martyr dust still mingles with the soil of Boston Common, wrote from his prison: "The Lord filled me with living strength and power from His heavenly Presence, which did mightily overshadow me."
Let that spirit and that experience once more arise among us and once again the seed will spread. It is no wonder that great things happened when a spectator could write of a yearly meeting: "There was a demonstration of the eternal power of God and a confirmation of many souls." We can "take the future" only if once more there comes in our lives and in our meetings "a demonstration of the eternal power of God." There is little to be expected from a religion which has fallen to the level of habit and routine, which runs only by the waning momentum of the past. Power, promise, and prophesy of the future belong only to movements which are dynamic with first- hand experience and conviction. What we need is not more machinery, but better contact with the living current.
We must feel the burdens of suffering humanity, we must be deeply touched by the problems of sin and poverty, we must realize anew that upon us is laid the task of carrying to this world about our door the gospel of redemption and recon- struction. And with that call and a dedication to it must come, too, a new and fresh revelation in our souls of the present Christ, still revealing the amazing love and patience of God, the Love that will not let go, still exhibiting the transforming energy of Grace, and still demonstrating that all things are possible when the Divine Power finds a good human organ to work through.
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THE MISSION OF A MESSAGE
The mission of a message is to accomplish the will of the sender. This means that it shall not only reach the intended destination, but that it shall produce the desired result.
"For as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth and maketh it bring forth and bud, and giveth seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth : it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." (Isaiah 55: 10-11.) This Scripture has been often quoted as applying to the message of Quakerism, and in the rise of our Society the word was verified and thousands accepted the mes- sage and proved their loyalty thereto by devoted lives and triumphant deaths. There is a very general feeling that we of this generation are not meeting our obligations as messengers to the world about us, as those pioneers in our faith met theirs; and this fact gives rise to many questions which are perfectly legitimate and which it is our duty to answer.
Only recently my husband received a letter of the following import from a member of a Friends' meeting in a western state: "The young people of our meeting are asking why it is neces- sary for us to maintain a separate organization? Why not unite with some of the larger and more influential churches and thus make our lives count for more in the Christianization of the world? The Y. M. C. A and its mission appeals to them and they argue that work in it is as truly Christian service as that done in our own church. What answer can be made to these things? I want help."
This condition is not confined to the West, but is a quite prevalent consideration in the minds of young people who wish to make their lives count for as much as is possible. They have a perfect right to ask such questions if there is no answer for them in their own minds. The time was when the weight of Friendly Authority would have suppressed such queries as a kind of heresy. The subject was not open for discussion, the
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questioners would have been regarded as subjects for disci- pline. That day is past and we must meet such issues squarely or back down and give up the battle. It seems to me that there is a very grave fault back of this condition, not in the questioners but in the comprehension by the church itself as to the nature and the development of our gospel message.
A study of the early days of our denomination fills one with wonder and admiration at the results of the preaching and the teaching of those devoted men and women. The word did not return void, but accomplished that whereunto it was sent, and thousands were added to the church.
I do not know that a comparison of periods is any less odious than a comparison of persons, and I do not believe that in the truest sense it is a profitable undertaking; but the contrast of this ingathering with the very slow increase, and in some instances the steady decrease, of the denomination in our day has a discouraging effect upon the bouyant, enthusiastic spirit of youth. Again and again I hear the remark that the Friends have had their day and done their work, fulfilled their mission; that their work has been great, but that it is now superseded and that the work today can be better done by other churches. This arises from the same want of comprehension of the mean- ing of our message, resulting from the static, expansionless inter- pretation too often placed upon the message by the church itself. The occasional comments in the public press upon the decline of the Society and the allusions of the ministers of other churches to this same fact have also a discouraging effect. A few years ago Sam Jones while preaching in High Point, North Carolina, was discussing the methods of different churches, and when he came to the Friends, said: "There is the Society of Friends. They have built a nice church here. My, but isn't that a pretty house! But what do they do? They are fine people; no better people, but they do nothing."
This was cer- tainly not true of that particular meeting; for it has done more for the civic improvement of that rapidly growing town than almost any other church in it. Its members are alive to every public issue and always on the side of better conditions.
I give this instance to show the general opinion and at the same time to show that sometimes these judgments which irri-
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tate and discourage are in reality without foundation and are made at random, because the methods of Friends are quiet and undemonstrative. Other instances of a like nature might be cited. The stubborn fact remains, however, that we are not adding thousands to our membership; that we are not effect- ively carrying our message. Those early Friends would not be satisfied with our results.
In a careful study of the mission of a message three things are to be considered-the sender, the message, and the people to whom the message is to be carried; and it will help us in this consideration to look carefully at all three in the two periods to which I have alluded,-the time of Fox and our own day, and then, if we can, probe to the cause of our failure to reach our own time as he and his coadjutors reached their time. We may say that in both the sender is the same, God the same yesterday, today, forever. Doubtless this is true, and yet is our idea of God the same? To different peoples God has been almost every kind of a being. To the Jews he was a tribal divinity delighting in the slaughter of their enemies; and to the men of Fox's time a God of vengeance and wrath in whose name heretics were burned at the stake and witches tortured. Fox himself believed in witches and wizards and a God who could and would by fiat change the order of his universe. If I am not mistaken, our ideas of God are not the same as those of George Fox. At any rate, we now recognize the fact that God's revelation of his will is a progressive revelation, and that what was once considered the word of his mouth would not now be recognized as a message from Him, not because of change in Him, but because of change in our conception of Him;
"For humanity sweeps onward. Where today the martyr stands On the morrow crouches Judas With the silver in his hands."
This development in the mind of man can but be the result of the operations of God's own Spirit drawing humanity onward toward that "One far off divine event to which the whole crea- tion moves," under the operation of which Spirit still greater changes may be confidently expected.
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Any message which is to abide these changes and still prove itself a minister to growth and not a shell in which truth is repressed must have within itself the God-given power of perennial expansion. The creed of one generation becomes the chrysalis of the next, and unless the old outer husk is broken and left behind, the living creature there enshrouded must per- ish. The chrysalis is not the sacred thing: the sacred thing is the living creature within. Our God is the same eternal power as our father's God, but His message to us is not conveyed in the same manner as it was to them three hundred years ago.
The people of the seventeenth century were in bondage not only to their own sins, but to the civil and ecclesiastical author- ity. They were ignorant; they were hemmed in by supersti- tion, and the church was intolerant. That most awful doctrine -- the doctrine of election, the salvation of the few and the hopeless damnation of the many-was promulgated by the followers of Calvin. Politically the common man was a nonentity, and religiously, a sheep without a shepherd. The clergy was largely composed of men unqualified for the situa- tion who were given the position for their own sake to provide them a living; often immoral, teaching by rote and relying upon the ritual, the ceremonial and the ordinances of the church, without spiritual light or knowledge, blind leaders of the blind, incapable of giving a struggling soul assistance because they knew nothing of spiritual exercise.
We cannot imagine what a burst of light and gladness would come through such a message as that of Fox to people thus kept from their birthright. He says, "When the Lord God and his Son Jesus Christ sent me forth into the world to preach his everlasting gospel and kingdom, I was glad that I was com- manded to turn people to that inward light, spirit and grace by which all might know their salvation and their way to God, even that Divine Spirit which would lead them into all truth and which I infallibly knew would never deceive any." In this Fox had the germ of perennial expansion, but he had also the microbe of human infallibility which was destined to take a prodigious growth and work much damage and has resulted too often in that most deplorable and deadening thing, separation. He called them away from rite and ceremony, from priest and
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prelate, to the life of Christ in the soul of man. He showed them that the doctrine of election was a theologian's decree and was not God's order. He turned them from a reliance on the outward to the cherishing and development of the inward and opened anew for every one the glorious possibility of that Son- ship for which the Christ had lived and labored, suffered and died, and which the church had buried beneath its corrupt hierarchy and soulless ceremonial.
The message of Fox was a message of life and light, a message of the worth and boundless possibilities of every human soul. It was a message of deliverance from sin and of the power to withstand temptation. It made the struggle of life worth while, and the trials of life stepping stones to greater things.
In that day this doctrine led to certain customs which were exponents of the central truth ( I know of no place where these are more clearly and concisely set forth than in the preface to George Fox's Journal, by William Penn), such as their forms of dress and address, their non-observance of ordinances, refusal to pay tithes or bear arms, their way of marriage, their method of preaching the gospel, etc., things familiar to us all from our childhood. Penn says that "The purport of their ministry and doctrine was for the most part what other professors of Chris- tianity pretend to hold in words and forms, but not in Godliness"; and one of the great contrasts was that "They were changed men themselves before they went about to change others. Their hearts were rent as well as their garments changed, and they knew the power and work of God upon them. This was seen by the great alteration it made and the stricter course of life and more Godly conversation that immediately followed it." "The bent and stress of their ministry was conversion to God, regeneration and holiness, not schemes of doctrines and verbal creeds or new forms of worship; but a leaving off in religion the superfluous and reducing the ceremonious and formal part and pressing earnestly the substantial, the necessary and profitable part. And truly they waxed strong and bold through failthful- ness and by the power and Spirit of the Lord Jesus became very fruitful: thousands in a short time being turned to the truth through their testimony in ministry and sufferings in so much as in most counties and many considerable towns of England
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meetings were settled, and daily there were added such as should be saved."
Because of its relation to their message and its significance to our own time, it is also necessary to speak of their attitude towards the Holy Scriptures.
Concerning this I find the most concise statement in Bar- clay's "Apology." It is rather a long quotation, but as it is all needed to define their position, I give it :-
"From these revelations of the Spirit of God to the saints have proceeded the Scriptures of truth, which contain,
"I. A faithful historical account of the actings of God's people in divers ages; with many singular and remarkable providences attending them.
"II. A prophetical account of several things, whereof some are already past, and some yet to come.
: "III. A full and ample account of all the chief principles of the doctrine of Christ, held forth in divers precious declarations, exhortations and sentences, which, by the movings of God's Spirit, were at several times, and upon sundry occasions, spoken and written unto some churches and their pastors.
"Nevertheless, because they are only a declaration of the foun- tain, and not the fountain itself, therefore they are not to be esteemed the principal ground of all truth and knowledge, nor yet the adequate primary rule of faith and manners. Yet because they give a true and faithful testimony of the first foun- dation, they are and may be esteemed a secondary rule, sub- ordinate to the Spirit, from which they have all their excellency and certainty: for as by the inward testimony of the Spirit we do alone truly know them, so they testify, That the Spirit is that Guide by which the saints are led into all Truth; therefore, according to the Scriptures, the Spirit is the first and principal leader. Seeing then that we do therefore receive and believe the scriptures because they proceeded from the Spirit, for the very same reason is the Spirit more originally and principally the rule, according to the received maxim in the schools: That for which a thing is such, that thing itself is more such."
I have quoted this to show that in the original position of Friends there was a foundation which remains unmolested by modern Biblical study.
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Contrast with the age of King Charles and Oliver Cromwell, Bishop Laud and George Fox our own day. The learning which was confined to the clergy and the scholar in that day is the possession of the ordinary schoolboy in our own time. Public education is everywhere insisted upon, and scientific investiga- tion has brought to light and explained many facts which were sealed with seven or more seals to Fox and Penn. The science of the human mind and soul has opened vast fields of knowledge and more of speculation, and the laws of the subconscious life have made people more careful in claiming infallible divine guidance than they once were. People care little for creeds and formulas and more for their fellow men. We have no faith in witches or wraiths and no patience for witch hunters, and little belief in visions. Even the unchurched masses of whom we hear so much would not listen to sermons upon election. And yet there are millions of slaves in our free land, millions who are so bound down.by toil and greed and sin that they have little hope in this life and care less for that which is to come. There are sweat-shops and factories of every kind where men and women and children are trampled underfoot by the car of material wealth. Man's inhumanity to man denies the bond of Sonship of God and brotherhood of men. On the other hand, personal salvation is no longer the ultimate aim of any life which is worth living. The salvation of society is the watch- word, and the individualistic characteristics of the Friends must be expanded if the work of freedom is to be carried on. There is a grand field for Christian effort and philanthropic zeal, and we of all people ought to be the ones to carry it forward, and reach the people, fortunate and unfortunate, with messages of brotherhood. Are we ready? And if not, what hinders us?
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