Apology for Quaker History—An Editorial

THE BULLETIN OF Friends Historical Association Vol. 38Spring Number, 1949No. 1 APOLOGY FOR QUAKER HISTORY—AN EDITORIAL By Frederick B. Tolles WITH the present number a new incumbent assumes the Editorial chair. Looking back over the roster of former Editors—a list which includes the names of Allen C. Thomas, Rayner W. Kelsey, Thomas K. Brown, Jr., and Thomas E. Drake—he is conscious of the high standards of editorial responsibility and imagination which have been set for him. He wishes particularly to express his admiration of the level of scholarship and readability which the Bulletin reached under the Editorship of his immediate predecessor, Thomas E. Drake. The besetting temptation of editors is to editorialize. The new Editor does not propose to give way often to this temptation. From time to time, however, as observations occur to him on the present status or the pressing needs of Quaker historical writing, he may take advantage of the opportunity which is his and commit them to print. A few such observations are offered herewith as a sort of inaugural discourse. I A distinguished American historian has recorded his amusement at recalling the disapproval of some of his colleagues when he proposed to devote himself to what they regarded as a "narrow" subject—the history of Harvard College. Actually, 3 4 Bulletin of Friends Historical Association he writes, this "narrow" subject proved to be "the most difficult, but at the same time the most stimulating and broadening task" he had ever undertaken.1 The Society of Friends, past and present, with all its branches and twigs, forms but a tiny part of the Universal Church. At the present moment Friends represent a little less than .08 of one percent of the population of the United States, .027 of one percent of the total number of people who call themselves Christians in the world, and .007 of one percent of the globe's population. What excuse is there for occupying oneself with the history of so infinitesimal a body? In an age of mass movements and global thinking, an age in which historians are dealing with whole "civilizations" and "cultures," is it not a piece of irrelevant antiquarianism to devote oneself to the study of Quaker history? There is, of course, a familiar answer to these questions. It is a good answer and in some respects it is a sufficient answer. It runs thus: as Friends, called to perpetuate and enrich a precious tradition, we need to know and understand what that tradition is; in other words, we must be aware of "the pit whence we were digged." Accepting this without argument as a valid proposition, I want to go on to suggest some further reasons for working in the "narrow" field of Quaker history—reasons which should and do appeal (witness our periodic notes on research in progress) to non-Friends as well as to Friends. II The early Quakers, as has often been pointed out, did not regard their experiment as a new form of religion: it was nothing more or less than "primitive Christianity revived." History to them was a long and, for the most part, a gloomy corridor into the past, lighted up at the far end by the Pentecostal glory that surrounded the primitive Christian community. The coming of the "children of the Light" in the middle of the seventeenth century represented a rekindling of that primitive glory after the "dark night of apostasy" fifteen centuries long. A naïve view 1 Samuel E. Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), v. Apology for Quaker History5 of history, no doubt, and one which admittedly does scant justice to brilliant periods like the thirteenth century or the Renaissance. But in a sense the early Friends were right. The Christian Church had long departed from the simplicity of that blessed community of the first century with its directness of religious experience and its radical ethic of love drawn from the Sermon on the Mount. It was the mission of George Fox and his co-workers to bring back into the life of Christianity that simplicity, that directness of experience, that radical ethic of love. "If loving one another and...