There is evidence that Elias Hicks had not only a hungering mind, but that he had in marked degree the open mind, and that he accorded to others liberty of opinion. It is said that he was unwilling that his discourses be printed, lest they become a bondage to other minds. He wrote to his friend, William Poole: "Therefore every generation must have more light than the preceding one; otherwise, they must sit down in ease in the labour and works of their predecessors." And he left a word of caution to approaching age, when he said in a meeting in New York: "The old folks think they have got far enough, they are settling on the lees, they are blocking up the way." It does not disturb my thought of him that my own mother remembered a mild rebuke from him for the modest flower-bed that brightened the door-yard of her country home. For I discover in him rudiments of the love for beauty. A minister among Friends was once his guest during the harvest season on Long Island, and recalled long after that, when the hour arrived for the mid-week meeting, he came in from the harvest field, and not only exchanged his working for his meeting garments, but added his gloves, although it was hot, midsummer weather. There was certainly the rudimentary love for beauty in this scrupulous regard for the proprieties; but it was kept in such severe check that he could not justify the spending of time upon a flower-border. The poet had not then expressed for us the sweet garden prayer that might have brought to his sensitive mind a new view of the purpose and value of the flower-border:
"That we were earthlings and of earth must live,
Thou knowest, Allah, and did'st give us bread;
Yea, and remembering of our souls, didst give
Us food of flowers; thy name be hallowed!"
From the days in which he preferred his hours of solitude in fishing as opportunities for "divine meditations" we can trace his steady spiritual growth. While his business life was henceforth subordinated to his labors among men to promote the life of the spirit, he was never indifferent to the exact discharge of his own financial obligations; nor was he indifferent to the needs of others. One incident surely marks him as belonging to the School of Christ: "Once when harvests were light and provisions scarce and high, his own wheat fields yielded abundantly. Foreseeing the scarcity and consequent rise in prices, speculators sought early to buy his wheat. He declined to sell. They offered him large prices, and renewed their visits repeatedly, increasing the price each time. Still he refused to sell, even for the unprecedented sum of three dollars a bushel. But by and by, when his poorer neighbors, whose crops were light, began to need, he invited them to come and get as much wheat as they required for use, at the usual price of one dollar a bushel."
He entered into the life of his community and of his times, anticipating by nearly a century the work of Friends' Philanthropic Committees of the present day. It is related that he was much opposed to an attempt to establish a liquor-selling tavern in the Jericho neighborhood—that when he saw strangers approaching he would invite them to accept his own hospitality, thus making unnecessary the tavern-keeping business in the sparsely settled country town.
We would expect that, with his sense of justice and his appreciation of values, Elias Hicks would place men and women side by side, not only in the home, but also in the larger household of faith, and in the affairs of the world. It is remembered that his face was set in this direction—that, strict Society-disciplinarian as he was, he advocated a change in the Discipline to allow women a consulting voice in making and amending the Discipline.
It must be borne in mind that he lived through the Revolutionary period of 1776, and through the War of 1812. So true was he to his convictions against war that he would not allow himself to benefit by the advanced prices in foodstuffs; and we are told that the records of his monthly meeting show that he sacrificed much of his property by adherence to his peace principles.
Neither can we forget the testing that came to him in the institution of slavery. For, according to the custom of the times, his own father was the owner of slaves. His open mind responded to the labors of a committee of the New York Yearly Meeting; and upon the freeing of his father's slaves, he ever after considered their welfare, making such restitution as he could for past injustice.