Historical News

HISTORICAL NEWS Some 300 Friends gathered at George School on September 29, 1974 for the dedication of the Meetinghouse which had been moved, brick by brick and beam by beam, from its former location at 20 South Twelfth Street in Philadelphia, where it had stood since 1812. Henry J. Cadbury spoke on "The Heritage of the Meetinghouse." Gwynedd Monthly Meeting, Gwynedd, Pennsylvania, celebrated the 275th anniversary of its beginnings in 1699 on October 19 and 20, 1974. On Saturday afternoon Lowell Wright spoke on "To Be a Friend." A meeting for worship on Sunday was preceded by historic tableaux and followed by an anniversary tree-planting. The Friends Historical Association held its annual meeting on November 25, 1974, at the Arch Street Meetinghouse in Philadelphia. After dinner, Edwin B. Bronner, President of the Association, welcomed members and their guests, and the election of directors was held. The death of Henry J. Cadbury on October 7, 1974 was noted with deep regret, and a memorial minute prepared by the board of directors was adopted. The text of this minute is given below. The principal speaker of the evening was J. William Frost, Associate Professor of Religion and Director of the Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College. Dr. Frost's address on "Unlikely Controversialists: Caleb Pusey and George Keith" is printed in this issue. We also present the first part of an important Caleb Pusey document recently discovered in the archives of the Department of Records, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. It is expected that the rest of this document will be published in a later issue of Quaker History. Henry J. Cadbury 1883-1974 Last year at this time the Friends Historical Association took special notice of Henry J. Cadbury's ninetieth birthday by presenting him with a birthday cake at our annual meeting. This year we note with sadness that his death on October 7 means his presence will no longer add a special zest to occasions such as this. At the same time we wish to record our profound gratitude for his long, useful life, and for his many contributions to the study of Quaker history. Henry Cadbury's international reputation as a distinguished scholar rested primarily upon his work in New Testament studies. From the time he was awarded a Ph.D. degree by Harvard University in 1914 until long after his retirement from Harvard in 1954, he contributed many important books to the study of Jesus, and to the books of Luke and Acts. He was the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard for two decades, and served on the committee which prepared the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. However, it is as a Quaker historian that we remember him on this occasion. He began to publish articles on Quaker history fifty years ago when he wrote about "A Disputed Paper of George Fox," and the following year, in 1925, he published an article concerning Norwegian Quakers in the Friends Quarterly Examiner. In 1947 the Friends Historical Society in London honored Henry Cadbury 58 HISTORICAL NEWS59 by electing him president of that body, and from 1953 through 1955 he served as president of the Friends Historical Association. He served as chairman of the "Historical Research Committee" of the latter body for the last thirty years of his life, and edited two departments of the journal Quaker History for most of that period. He has had a long and close association with both the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, where he was an Honorary Curator, and with the Quaker Collection at Haverford. For the past two decades he appeared in the Quaker Collection several times a week whenever he and Lydia Cadbury were in residence on Millbrook Lane. For nearly a decade he taught the course in Quakerism at Haverford. He was also a familiar figure in other Quaker libraries in England and the United States, and built up a respectable Quaker collection in the Andover-Harvard Library which he headed for sixteen years. Henry Cadbury was a master detective who loved to fit what appeared t& be disparate pieces together to form a coherent and useful picture. His first major work in Quaker history was that sort of a project...