Quaker Encounters: Volume 2, Vines on the Mountains (review)

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES Edited by Edwin B. Bronner Quaker Encounters: Volume 2, Vines on the Mountains. By John Ormerod Greenwood. York, England: William Sessions, Ltd. 1977. 320 pp. £5.50 ($12.50 approx.) Ormerod Greenwood has now given us the second volume of three, which together cover most of the activities, major and minor, that have taken Friends from Britain and America to many parts of the globe. The first volume told of the many efforts to relieve suffering, both in war-time and following natural disasters. The present volume takes the reader with many concerned Friends, some of them famous, others forgotten, on errands of religious duty, some short, some very long, to almost all parts of the globe. Ormerod Greenwood is an excellent writer, and he knows how to bring people to life by quoting all manner of improbable incidents or letters or reports. If anyone has assumed that in Rufus Jones's two substantial volumes on The Later Periods of Quakerism, everything has been told that is worth remembering about the Quaker story from 1750 to 1900, let him read this book. Especially let those take note who have thought the long period of Quietism meant a complete withdrawal from the world. It is true that the Society of Friends, or at any rate London Yearly Meeting , nearly died in the middle of the nineteenth century. This book throws fresh light on the factors that led to its revival. The book is written, inevitably, from a British standpoint; but plenty of active American Friends come into the story, such as Eli -and Sybil Jones (Sybil Jones must have been one of the most powerful woman preachers of all time); Elkanah and Irena Beard, the first Quaker missionaries to India; and the remarkable Lindley Murray Hoag whose "strange drawing to Norway" in the mid-nineteenth century led to the discovery in a remote Norwegian mountain valley of a people who had broken from the official Lutheran church of Norway, and were meeting together after the manner of Friends, without priest or ritual. And this brings us to the heart of Ormerod Greenwood's special contribution to Quaker history. He shows how the initiative for Quaker activity in several countries of Europe and Asia came, not simply or mainly because some western Friend had a "strange drawing" to some distant land, but because of some spontaneous outburst of spiritual religion, which again and again, partly because of the wide distribution of Barclay's Apology in many languages, was called "Quaker," and these groups sometimes appealed to the Anglo-Saxon Quaker Yearly Meetings to come and help them. In the case of Norway, such help was especially valuable, as the Lutheran Church of that day persecuted the Quakers as fiercely as they were persecuted in England in the seventeenth century. Greenwood has told us the Norwegian story at some length; but there may well be more yet to be revealed. Even in the case of India, something of the same sort happened. In 1861, 122 BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES123 two Indians from Calcutta, with Portuguese names, suggesting that they were descendants of early Roman Catholic converts, presented themselves at the headquarters of London Yearly Meeting, and begged English Friends to send someone to help the "Hindu-Quaker" group that had grown up spontaneously, with the help of Barclay's Apology, in that city. They were finally allowed to attend the Yearly Meeting sessions, but not to speak. Three British Friends, including Henry Hipsley, whose name appears in several chapters of this book, then visited India, and stayed for no less than eighteen months, and two Australian Friends preceded them. But when, within a few years, a mission was established in India with the support of English Friends, it was far from Calcutta. The Calcutta group did not long survive. Ormerod Greenwood tells the fascinating story of Daniel Wheeler and other Friends' work in Russia in the early nineteenth century. The last section tells of the widespread foreign mission activity which came to its full flowering at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of powerful evangelical forces connected with early "ecumenism." He sees this mission activity as...