During all the periods of war the Quakers showed their separateness by refusing to pay taxes, lest they contribute to the support of armies. In the Revolution, the Meeting exercised unflinching discipline, for the purpose of keeping members out of the patriot armies, and punished with equal vigor those who paid for the privilege of exemption from military duty and those who enlisted in the ranks. In every act of the discipline of the Quaker Community appears the purpose of the Meeting, namely, to keep its members to itself and away from all other moral and spiritual control. This will appear in definite illustrations below.
The standard of morals which the Meeting thus upheld with jealous care was a simple one, and logically derived from the distinctive doctrine of the Society of Friends. That the Spirit of God dwells in every man was their belief,[11] and from 1650, when Fox was called "a Quaker" before Justice Bennett at Derby, England, to the Division in 1830, they applied this doctrine in practical, rather than in metaphysical ways. They were a moral, rather than a theological people. It will appear in this chapter that only when the moral grip of the Meeting was broken in a division did doctrinal questions come to discussion on the Hill.
The moral bearing of the one cardinal doctrine of Quakerism is well expressed in the following quotation from a Friend qualified to speak with authority:
"The Friends have been consistent in all their peculiarities with one central principle, the presence and inspiration of the Divine Spirit in the human soul. This has been the reason for their opposition to slavery. They felt, You cannot hold in slavery GOD! And God is in this black man's life, therefore you cannot enslave God in him. So you must not inflict capital punishment upon this man in whom is God.
"The same argument dignified woman, who was made the equal of man. The same argument applies to the impossibility of war. You cannot think of God fighting against God. The Quaker had no sentimental idea of suffering; but he believed that you cannot take life, in which is God.
"The same argument applied to weights and measures; the Quakers early demanded that they be officially sealed. So they believed in only one standard of truth, rather than one for conversation and one for a court of justice. No oaths were necessary for those who spoke for God all the time."[12]
In this belief one sees the principle on which were selected the reforms in which the Quaker Preacher was interested. "He appears to have had ... his mind strongly influenced to an active protest against the evils of slavery, war, capital punishment and intemperance."[13] Each of these reforms was inspired by reverence for human life, which was thought to be desecrated or abused.
This simple code expressed itself in abstinence from practices
believed to defile the body. Members of the Meeting
early adopted a strict rule against the use of intoxicating liquors. It is said of the ancestors of Richard Osborn that: "Of these six generations not a man has ever been known to use spirituous liquors, or tobacco, to indulge in profanity, or to be guilty of a dishonest action."[14]
A sense of personal degradation underlay their opposition to poverty among members. There is record of an order of the Meeting, in 1775, for the purchase of a cow "to loan to Joseph ——." The practice thus early observed has since then been unbroken. The member of the community who comes to want is at this day taken care of by popular subscription. Through the early century the Meeting accomplished this end, sometimes by formal, sometimes by informal methods. In the later years of the nineteenth century it was accomplished by special funds to which everybody gave. Thus simply was poverty forestalled. The family assisted soon came to self-support again. No debt was incurred, and no obligation remained to be discharged; but every member of the Meeting and of the community felt obliged to give and was glad to give to this anti-poverty fund. The basis of it seems to have been respect for human embodiments of the Divine Spirit.
This ideal of personality, divinely indwelt, created a sense of personal duty, even in opposition to all men. In the years of anti-slavery agitation David Irish and his sister "made their protest against slavery by abstaining as far as possible from slave-made products; and together they made maple, to take the place of cane sugar, and used nothing but linen and woolen clothing (largely homespun)."[15] This later Quaker, possessed of the spirit of the community of his fathers, shows his inner conflict with the ideals of a competitive age in the expression "so far as possible." It was not as practicable in 1855 to "abstain from slave-made products," as it would have been in the year 1755.