The Standard of the Lord Lifted Up (review)

Book Reviews113 The quotations from our older writers deal mainly with religious experience ; from the more recent with information and advice. Modern writers, in an attempt to be inspirational, sometimes search for strong words such as "amazing," "radiant," "dynamic." The older writers with their simpler diction express what they feel more naturally and spontaneously. Friends formerly had a query about "simplicity in dress, speech and behavior ." Simplicity in speech sometimes gave Quaker writing a drab quality resulting from under-statement and perhaps too much caution in the interest of telling no more than the truth. Today religious writing sometimes misses the mark by being "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." A more elaborate education with its inevitable verbalism may have disqualified us for the earlier terseness. The 677 entries, each of which is dated, with carefully prepared tables of sources and references and indexes of names and subjects, present a wider and clearer panorama of Quaker thought than can be found anywhere else. This is an indispensable book for both Quakers and others who wish to know what Quakers have believed and do believe. The reader must assume that a religion based primarily not on outward authority but on inward experience is bound to be expressed in a variety of ways and that it goes through a process of development as the Spirit gradually leads into more Truth. But this collection emphasizes the fact that Friends, while having no formal creed as a basis of membership, do hold important, positive beliefs which have not changed through the years. Pendle HillHoward H. Brinton The Standard of the Lord Lifted Up. By Mary Hoxie Jones. Freeport, Maine: New England Yearly Meeting Office. 1961. xiv, 161 pages. $2.25. This valuable study, commissioned by New England Yearly Meeting and printed in a limited paperback edition, is in commemoration of the first Yearly Meeting held in New England in 1661. It is a fitting memorial of three hundred years of Quakerism. And it is especially fitting that the author should be Mary Hoxie Jones. Her father, Rufus M. Jones, had a deep affection for this Yearly Meeting, of which he was a lifelong member, and his Quakers in the American Colonies appeared just fifty years ago. The author's own qualifications for this task are well exemplified by this volume. It is probably fortunate that the author found her task such a large one that she could only carry the story up to the year 1700. She has chosen to bring together the source material with "the slight recent additions to our factual knowledge" in a most useful way. There are more than three hundred references to primary and secondary sources with many brief quotations. It must be admitted that this detracts to some extent from smooth reading but enhances the permanent value of the book. The alternative must have been to write a more superficial survey of the three centuries. 114Bulletin of Friends Historical Association The book has a certain imbalance which Henry Cadbury notes in his Foreword. This is not the fault of the author but is inherent in the imbalance of her sources. These are persecution writings, "controversial and partisan" in nature. Henry Cadbury adds, "The conflicting parties had from our present perspective much in common with each other — more than with ourselves." He is referring to the fact that both sides regarded sickness, calamity, death as "judgments" marking the divine displeasure with the opposition. He concludes, "The present day has its own instances of fanaticism , intolerance, and mutual misunderstanding. The ancient story should call our attention to these contemporary parallels rather than arouse partisan animosity or an uneasy conscience directed only to a remoter past." One could wish that the sources shed more light on the issues raised in this study of the beginnings. To what extent, if any, were these early Friends extreme individualists, subversive of all government ? Was there any justification for the Puritan charge that the Quakers minimized, if they did not negate, the historic basis of the Christian faith ? Some modern historians with an inadequate grasp of the radical Quaker concept of Unity and the inward roads to its achievement tend to repeat...