THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
THE QUAKERS
PAST AND PRESENT
BY
DOROTHY M. RICHARDSON
“The Quaker religion ... is something which it is impossible to overpraise.”
William James:
The Varieties of Religious
Experience
NEW YORK
DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY
214-220 EAST 23rd STREET
FOREWORD
The following chapters are primarily an attempt at showing the position of the Quakers in the family to which they belong—the family of the mystics.
In the second place comes a consideration of the method of worship and of corporate living laid down by the founder of Quakerism, as best calculated to foster mystical gifts and to strengthen in the community as a whole that sense of the Divine, indwelling and accessible, to which some few of his followers had already attained, and of which all those he had gathered round him had a dawning apprehension.