Up to the time of this occurrence it had seemed as if America were on the way to becoming an autonomous province of the British Empire, steered by Quaker principles. Privilege after privilege had been quietly secured by Penn from the home government, and it is not difficult to believe that if on the eve of the Revolution negotiations had been left in Friendly hands, the war of separation need not have taken place. When it broke out, the Quakers retired decisively from legislative and municipal positions. A Quakerized liberty party carried on the traditions of civil liberty up to the last moment. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who despised the Quakers, and treated the Indians as heathen to be exterminated, formed the main body of the Pennsylvanian revolutionary party.
Friends suffered under English taxation, and their principles prevented them from smuggling, yet they opposed not merely warfare, but revolution, disowning those who supported it, and reiterated their loyalty to England. They were arrested and imprisoned as friends of the British, their goodly farms and their meeting-houses were placed at the mercy of troopers and foragers, whose pay they would not accept. Their decent streets were demoralized. They went quietly about their business as best they might, pursuing, even while the war was in progress, their labours in the aid of drunkards and slaves, their succour of the uneducated.
They built schools for the negroes, and when, after the revolution was at an end (whereupon they duly suffered at the hands of the rejoicing multitude), there came the scandal of the “walking purchase” of land from the Indians and the fear of a serious outbreak, they formed a private association and pacified the Indians, preventing warfare at the cost to themselves of weeks of negotiation and the sum of five thousand pounds paid by them. Incidents of this type occur again and again in Quaker history, and are practical proof of the fact that their avoidance of the spirit of strife, so often present in political life, was no kind of timidity, of passive resistance, or comfortable retirement from the business of the world. Least of all was it indifference to what went forward in the public affairs of the nation.
Apart from its temporary dominion of “affairs,” American Quakerism follows much the same line of development as does the movement at home. The original impulse tends to be superseded for the imitative mass by a doctrine embodied in an institution; the dogma of the Inner Light becomes dangerously absolutist. There is a corresponding return to the steadying refuge of an infallible scripture, and the modern church, while still united and distinguishable by the marks of Quaker culture, of faith and practice, kindling here and there to the older insight and vision, shows a divided front.
In 1827 a large group—now known as Hicksites—separated under Elias Hicks, whose repudiation of doctrines and creeds, and insistence on right living, resulted, in the opinion of “orthodox” Friends, in a wrong attitude towards Christ and the scriptures. The evangelical reaction in England, which was, in part, a result of the Hicksite controversy, brought about a further division in America under John Wilbur, who protested against Evangelical biblicism, and reasserted the doctrine of the Inner Light, insisted on plainness of speech and dress, and looked with suspicion upon “art.” The orthodox group, deeply tinged with Protestant evangelicalism, have largely adopted the pastoral system. There are now at least four distinct groups in America.[21]
CHAPTER VI
QUAKERISM AND WOMEN
Watching pilgrims who pass one by one along the mystic way, we see both women and men. Teresa, Catharine, Elizabeth, Mechthild, no less than Francis, Tauler, Boehme, stand as high peaks of human achievement in entering into direct relationship with the transcendental life. But when we reach the humbler levels of institution and doctrine, the religious genius of womanhood tends to be pushed, so to say, into an oblique relationship. Under organized Christianity, and particularly under Protestantism, has this been so. Amongst the first Christians, it is true, women preached and prophesied. There is, moreover, in the history of the early centuries sound evidence of an ordained and invested female clergy. Taking that history as a whole, however, women have been, and are still, excluded from the councils of the churches and from the responsibilities and privileges of priesthood. Devout churchwomen, and, in particular, devout Protestants, are nourished on literal interpretation of records, which assure them of an essential inferiority to their male companions, and enjoin subjection in all things. At marriage, they sacramentally renounce individuality. Quakerism stands as the first form of Christian belief, which has, even in reaching its doctrinized and institutionized levels, escaped regarding woman as primarily an appendage to be controlled, guided, and managed by man. This escape was the result, not of any kind of feminism, any sort of special solicitude for or belief in women as a class. Nor was it the result of a protest against any definitely recognized existing attitude. Such unstable and fluctuating emotions could not have carried through the Quaker reformation of the relations of the sexes. The recognition of the public ministry of women was an act of faith. It was a step that followed from a central belief in the universality of the inner light. It was taken in the face of difficulties. It hampered the Quakers enormously in relation to the outside world. It was the occasion of profound disturbance within the body. Heart-searching and hesitation rose here and there to an opposition so convinced as to form part of the programme of the first schismatics.[22] Fox had to fight valiantly. His central belief once clear, he cut clean through the Pauline tangle of irreconcilable propositions, and forged from the depths of his conviction phrases that would, were they but known, do yeoman service in the present agitation for the release of the artificially inhibited responsibilities of women. He is never tired of reminding those who cling to the story of the Fall that the restoration of humanity in the appearance of Christ took the reproach from woman. He rallies men, often with delicious humour, on their desire to rule over women, and exhorts those who despise “the spirit of prophecy in the daughters” to be “ashamed for ever.” But although faith won, it is probable that the majority took the step only under the urgency of deep-seated consciousness, the surface intelligence still loudly asserting the necessary pre-eminence of masculine standards. Even amongst the most determined advocates of the recognition of a woman’s spiritual identity, amongst those who condemned its suppression as blasphemous, we meet the suggestion that this recognition need not in any way interfere with her proper subjection to her husband. Nevertheless, Fox succeeded in equalizing the marriage covenant.
The government of the society, therefore, was for many years carried on by men alone, a women’s meeting coming into existence, as we have seen, only when obviously imperative—in relation to the care of the women and children suffering under persecution—and persisting only for special purposes quite apart from the business of the society as a whole. Men and women, however, occasionally visited each other’s meetings, and joint sittings were sometimes held.
It was the experience coming to the support of dawning theory, of the superior working of these joint meetings, that finally enfranchised Quaker womanhood.
It is interesting to note that one of the most striking features of the technique of Quaker meetings, whether for business or worship, is the working out of the distinctive characteristics of the sexes. Their contradiction, and the tendency psychology has roughly summarized of women, as a class, to control thought by feeling, and of men, as a class, to allow “reason” the first place, is here at its height.