Then and Now: Quaker Essays: Historical and Contemporary (review)

Book Reviews Then and Now: Quaker Essays: Historical and Contemporary. Edited by Anna Brinton. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. I960. 352 pages. $5.00. It is fitting that Anna Brinton should have undertaken the task of gathering and editing the material for this book in honor of Henry Joel Cadbury, who recently resigned as Chairman of the American Friends Service Committee after twenty-two years of service. The Society of Friends is greatly indebted to Henry Cadbury for many contributions. He is an able interpreter of Quaker history. His lectures on the Bible combine mature scholarship with insight and the gift of humorous imagination. His loyalty to the peace testimony and his service to the American Friends Service Committee carry his teachings into action. Friends unite with other Christians in acknowledging his contribution as one of the translators of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and the Apocrypha, and as author of several books illuminating the field of Biblical scholarship. They were gratified that, following academic connections with several Quaker colleges, Henry Cadbury was appointed by Harvard University as Hollis Professor of Divinity, the oldest and perhaps most famous chair of divinity in the United States. Twenty-one Friends from England, Ireland, Sweden, and the United States have contributed to this Festschrift. Appropriately, the longest article, one of seventy pages, is a detailed and understanding biographical sketch of the honorée by Mary Hoxie Jones, his niece. Howard Brinton, long associated with Henry Cadbury at Pendle Hill, contributes an article containing new information on "Quakers and Animals." Frederick B. Tolles, Swarthmore College historian, in "1652 in History: Changing Perspectives on the Founding of Quakerism," traces the various interpretations of Quaker history in the stream of Christianity which have been set forth from the days when the early Friends considered their faith a revival of primitive Christianity to 1957 when Henry Cadbury himself, following Howard Brinton, concluded that from the beginning Quakerism combined the mystical, the evangelical, the rational, and the social. WUlia.m Hubben, Editor of the Friends Journal, to which Henry Cadbury has contributed more than one hundred and seventy-five "Letters from the Past," produces a delightful chapter on Quaker writing. Elizabeth Gray Vining recaptures a long-lost side of William Penn's character in her "Penn and the Poets" ; and Janet Payne Whitney brings to the attention of American readers a Quaker little known on this side of the Atlantic, Philip Noel-Baker, who in 1959 received the Nobel prize for his outstanding work on behalf of world peace. D. Elton Trueblood, in writing of two of the few outstanding Quaker 56 Book Reviews57 theologians, Robert Barclay and his great-great-grandson Joseph John Gurney, presents one line of Quaker thinking, Maurice A. Creasey another, and Alexander C. Purdy pleads for unity within the Society by way of the Divine Light. Horace A. Alexander rounds out these presentations by discussing the place of the Society of Friends among world religions. Students of the future will surely turn to the admirable pages contributed by Muriel A. Hicks, Mary Ogilvie, Dorothy G. Harris, and Thomas E. Drake describing the resources—books, magazines, pamphlets, and manuscript material — found in the Quaker collections in London, Dublin, Philadelphia, Swarthmore College, and Haverford College. Space does not permit comment on the interesting articles of Kenneth L. Carroll, Olive Goodbody, Emily Fogelklou Norlind, Douglas V. Steere, Richard Ullmann, and Elizabeth Yarnall. Anna Brinton has again placed us in her debt. Pendle HillBliss Forbush Ackworth School. By Elfrida Vipont. London: Lutterworth Press. 1959. 216 pages. Illustrations. 15s. This welcome history of the oldest English Quaker boarding school is more than a parochial account; by means of her description of this microcosm , Elfrida Vipont has managed to present the outlines of Quaker history during the last 250 years. The task was made easier because Ackwordi has always been a Yearly Meeting school; it has tended to reflect in its private affairs the course of fortune of the Yearly Meeting as a whole. The author shows us the continuity of the Ackworth tradition: the school conceived as a family. She shows how the Christian impulse which formed the original school around the principle of a guarded...