To his daughter, Martha Hicks, he wrote: "My dear love to thee, to thy dear mother, who next to the Divine Blesser has been the joy of my youth, and who, I trust and hope, will be the comfort of my declining years. O dear child, cherish and help her, for she hath done abundance for thee."
These fruits of the religious faith of Elias Hicks are offered as the test given us by the Great Teacher himself, by which to know the life of a man. They mark a life rooted in the life of God. Imperishable as the root whence they grew, may they feed the souls of men from generation to generation, satisfying the hungry, strengthening the weak, and making all glad in the joy of each! Thus it is permitted to be "still praising Him."
Elizabeth Powell Bond.
CHAPTER I.
Ancestry and Boyhood.
The Hicks family is English in its origin, authentic history tracing it clearly back to the fourteenth century. By a sort of genealogical paradox, a far-away ancestor of the apostle of peace in the eighteenth century was a man of war, for we are told that Sir Ellis Hicks was knighted on the battlefield of Poitiers in 1356, nearly four hundred years before the birth of his distinguished descendant on Long Island, in America.
From the best available data, it is believed that the progenitor of the Hicks family on Long Island arrived in America in 1638, and came over from the New England mainland about 1645, settling in the town of Hempstead. A relative, Robert by name, came over with the body of Pilgrims arriving in Massachusetts in 1621.