Three Biographies of Significant American Quakers

82 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION BOOK REVIEWS Three Biographies of Significant American Quakers George Keith (1638-1716), by Ethyn Williams Kirby. New York, D. Appleton-Century Co., [1942]. vii + 177 pp.; $3.00. John Woolman, American Quaker, by Janet Whitney. Boston, Little, Brown and Co., 1942. xi + 490 pp.; decorations by George Gillet Whitney, and five illustrations; $3.00. Stephen Greilet, 1773-1855, by William Wistar Comfort. New York, Macmillan, 1942. xi + 202 pp.; portrait; $2.00. THE YEAR 1942 has seen notable additions to Quaker hagiography— full-length biographies of three men who have had a profound influence upon Quaker life and thought. The three lives were so spaced that their stories covered the years 1638 to 1855 in an almost continuous span—Woolman was born four years after Keith's death, and died the year before Grellet was born. But though the span is almost continuous, the individual stories are strikingly individual, and the styles of narration interestingly different. George Keith is a detailed factual presentation ; John Woolman is a spiritual portrait ; Stephen Grellet is a scholarly, spirited narrative, based partly on sources not heretofore utilized, which achieves portraiture by showing its subject in action. 1T1HE STORY of George Keith has never before been told with the completeness with which Professor Kirby presents it to us in George Keith (1638-1716). The general histories of Quakerism, both of England and of America, mention him as one of the significant figures of the first generation of Quakers; and the great British and American dictionaries of biography give him a page or so ; but here we have a full and documented life, supplied with a full bibliography and an index. Her book, based upon primary sources, and with full references to them, will in effect be itself a source book for later students of Keith's interesting life. Its substantial quality is in some measure vouched for by the fact that it was "Prepared and published under the direction of the American Historical Association from the income of the Albert J. Beveridge Memorial Fund." Keith was a vigorous and able man, and if in his later years he had not turned against Quakerism he would have ranked among the greatest of the founding fathers. Born in 1638, fourteen years later than Fox and six years before Penn, and converted to Quakerism in 1650, he belonged with the first generation of Quakers; and as he was educated for the Scotch Presbyterian ministry and well trained in the classical and theological learning of the day, he was an influential figure among them, and traveled and preached and wrote and suffered imprisonment as they did, accompanying Fox, Penn, Barclay, and Benjamin BOOK REVIEWS83 Furly, the leading Quakers of the day, on their great missionary journey in Holland and Germany in 1677. He was an effective preacher, and active as a writer on Quaker themes. Indeed, his theological training, affording a sort of contrast to Fox's mystical bent, made him rather a systematizer and organizer of the upsurging new faith than an exemplar of a new way of life. In 1785 Keith went to America as surveyor-general of the colony of East Jersey, and at once assumed a position of prominence in the Quaker community. But the vague and simple theology of the colonial Quakers disturbed his precise mind; and being of a positive and somewhat contentious character he found himself at odds with his associates; and in 1692, as many substantial Friends agreed with Keith, the so-called Keithian schism occurred, Keith's sympathizers being called "Christian Quakers." Rejected by Philadelphia, Keith returned to England to seek for support from the London Yearly Meeting; but in vain. Here too he set up a rival meeting, and attacked and "exposed" Quakerism in pamphlets and public addresses. It was his earnest wish to save the Quakers from the charges of heresy which were often leveled at them. But the Quakers would not be saved ; and Keith gradually turned from them. In 1699 he became an agent of the Society for the Promotion of Christian knowledge, an organization of the Established Church filled with missionary zeal; and in 1702 he was sent back...