“The Society of Friends has always regarded inward experience of God as the only true religion and has always sought to distinguish the reality of the experience from its outward form of expression,” p. 133.
John Punshon, Portrait In Grey: A Short History of the Quakers, Quaker Home Service, London, 1991.
A major attraction for me to Quakerism is our insistence upon – from the very beginning – the role of women. Here is an illustration:
“. . . in the period 1652–55, during which Friends emerge on to the national stage. Clausewitz [a Prussian general] says that the first rule of successful strategy is to secure your base, and Margaret Fell [George Fox’s wife] achieved this as efficiently as any Prussian general. She began to maintain contact with the itinerant Quaker preachers by letter and by personal contact, keeping open house of them at Swarthmoor Hall, and much of her correspondence survives. At the same time, she took a leading part in building up the ‘Kendal Fund’ which was intended to meet the hosts of the ministry and to support Friends in prison. At first the Quaker mission was concentrated on the northern counties but in 1654 the Friends emerged determinedly into the other parts of the nation,” p. 63. — Punshon, Portrait In Grey
And one more long quote from Punshon. It’s interesting to me how little has changed with Quakers:
In Fox’s time, “Among friends, worship was based on a period of silent waiting that usually lasted several hours. Other meetings were punctuated by personal testimony and lengthy extempore sermons known as ‘ministry’, as such speeches are still known to this day. . . . The Quakers ejected all sacramental observance as a corruption of the new covenant, which they understood in purely inward and spiritual terms. To others they appeared to devalue the Bible by emphasizing the continuing revelation of truth by the Holy Spirit as a present reality. In fact, this was far less radical than it appeared, for the doctrine merely provided a way of correcting that false interpretation that the false church was bound to produce. In no sense was it understood as providing a corrective for the ‘errors’ of scripture,” p. 61. — John Punshon, Portrait In Grey
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