"New Light on Old Ways": Gurneyites, Wilburites, and the Early Friends

"New Light on Old Ways": Gurneyites, Wilburites, and the Early Friends by Thomas D. Hamm Early in 1 897 a Friend in Mount Pleasant, Ohio, sent an unusual letter to the publishing firm of John C. Winston and Company in Philadelphia, which passed it on to Rufus Jones. Very likely when Jones saw the postmark he groaned; few compliments for Jones and his American Friend came from Mount Pleasant, the home ofDavid B. Updegraff and a stronghold of second-experience holiness, pastoral Quakerism, and water baptism . And the writer of the letter, Asahel H. Hussey, was one of the most fervent of what Joel Bean called Updegraffs "lesser satellites." A New Englander by birth, Hussey had emerged in the second rank ofthe leaders ofthe "Great Revival" in the 1 870s, as radical as Updegraff, but apparently not as compelling a preacher. Hussey's contributions to the American Friend invariably emphasized complete depravity of human nature and premillennialism.' Hussey, however, was not writing to belabor Jones for any shortcomings . Instead, he had a business proposition. He wanted to dispose of a collection ofbooks. "I sent to Joseph Smith ofLondon some years ago for a lot ofFriends books ofthe oldest writings or books, and he sent me quite near 100 copies large and small," Hussey wrote. The collection was impressive: numerous seventeenth-century volumes including first editions ofthe collected works ofEdward Burrough, Isaac Penington, Francis Howgill, and Robert Barclay; a 1678 edition of Barclay's Apology; the 1716 edition ofJames Nayler's writings. "I do not care for them now. . . so I have concluded to sell them provided I can get their value." He thought that a Philadelphia Friend would be most likely to know "those who desire this kind ofreading."2 Hussey's discarding of his library exemplifies a particular Quaker mindset at the end of the nineteenth century, one that the Gurneyite Ohio Yearly Meeting exemplified. It was historically Quaker. But it found the writings of early Friends largely irrelevant to the needs of the world as it perceived them. These Friends believed that they were carrying on the spirit and Christian commitment ofGeorge Fox and the First Publishers of Truth. But they found that, by and large, other, non-Quaker voices better spoke to their condition. And in this they were not alone. The nineteenth century saw what amounted to a kind of divorce from their past on the part of most American Friends. The separation of 18271 828 had left about sixty percent ofthem identified with Orthodox Friends. A new series of separations in the 1840s and 1850s divided Orthodox Friends into groups that were usually called Gurneyite and Wilburite. The Wilburite minority was distinguished by, among other characteristics, its 54Quaker History interest in and reliance on early Quaker writings. Indeed, Friends of Wilburite sympathies put into print again many early Friends' works. And Wilburites read and relied on them. Gurneyite Friends, in contrast, who were the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Friends after 1860, and probably three quarters of all American Friends by 1 900, showed considerably less interest in early Quaker authors, indeed, in historic Quaker literature generally. Their reliance was first and foremost on the Bible, augmented by contemporary non-Quaker evangelical literature. They did not entirely ignore them, but they were highly selective in the early Quaker writings that they embraced. In their re-drawing ofQuaker history, George Fox became the "red-hot Quaker," whose real spiritual heirs were not John Woolman and Thomas Chalkley but George Whitefield and John Wesley. Their view of the Tightness of their cause was strengthened, however, by the work of at least one Quaker historian, the English Friend Robert Barclay, whose 1876 Inner Life ofthe Religious Societies ofthe Commonwealth was a seminal work. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the rise ofthe first generation ofGurneyite modernist Friends, such as Rufus Jones, Elbert Russell, and Allen C. Thomas, that Friends in the Gurneyite tradition came to read the works of the first generation of Friends systematically, convinced that they held important truths that the last two generations of Friends had lost sight of. One must keep in mind, moreover, that both Gurneyites and Wilburites were...