Books of Interest to Friends

BOOKS OF INTEREST TO FRIENDS.87 BOOKS OF INTEREST TO FRIENDS. Quaker Women, 1650-1690. By Mabel Richmond Brailsford. London , Duckworth & Co., 1915. Pp. xii, 340. Sy2XS1A in. 7s. 6d. This book, by a non-Friend, is a distinct contribution to Quaker literature. While warmly sympathetic with her subject, the author does not hesitate to record the failings, frailties and even the excesses of these early " Publishers of Truth." In fact, it is likely that she gives quite as truthful picture as an average Friend would. The author has studied her subject carefully and thoroughly, making ample use of the unequalled collections of the Library at Devonshire House, where she had the invaluable help of Norman Penney and his skilled assistants. Manuscript sources as well as printed have been freely consulted. Elizabeth Hooton, Margaret Fell, Mary Fisher and Barbara Blaugdone have naturally been extensively dwelt upon. Especially well brought out are the lives, travels and experiences of Mary Fisher and Barbara Blaugdone. The story of Elizabeth Fletcher, of Kendal, who began her service in the ministry before she was fifteen, and died, probably as the result of hard usage, before she was twenty, is a pathetic one. No one can read this book without a deep sense of what an important place women held in the early days of the Society, and how fully their importance was recognized by Fox and the other leaders, notably so in comparison with other denominations of the same day, and even those of a very much later date. The wonder is such a theme has waited so long for a narrator. Very few slips have been noticed. In speaking of Mary Fisher's visit to New England, the author writes : " She . . . tasted the first fruits of the persecution which was meted out to her fellow-believers, even to the extremes of mutilation and death, by those who were themselves the survivors of the Mayflower." It was the Puritans who settled Boston and Massachusetts Bay; neither the Pilgrims, who came in the Mayflower and established the Plymouth Colony, nor their descendants , had any hand in the tragedies enacted in Boston, though it is sad to relate that they did make the Quakers suffer severely in almost every way except by death. Again, the writer is hardly fair to Fox, where, in quoting his tribute to Ann Whitehead, she remarks: " Incidentally, the wild eccentricity of its spelling is a proof of the contempt which he frequently expressed for 'carnal learning'" (p. 261). Fox did not have a contempt for "carnal learning," except as a basis for what claimed to be spiritual teaching. This the author herself admits , where, in speaking of the founding of Ackworth School (1779), she says (p. 332) : " This was a recurrence to the policy of Fox, who, in strange contrast to his distrust of college training, had established schools 88BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL SOCIETY. for boys and girls at Waltham and Shacklewell, desiring that they should be instructed 'in whatsever thinges was civili and usefull in ye creation .'" More than this, Fox himself was responsible for "An Instruction for Right Spelling, Reading and Writing, 1673." It is to be regretted that the index is wofully deficient. But these are minor blemishes in a work highly to be praised. The Fellowship of Silence; Being Experiences in the Common Use of Prayer Without Words. Narrated and interpreted by Thomas Hodgkin , Percy Dearmer, L. V. Hodgkin, J. C. Fitzgerald, together with the Editor, Cyril Hepher. Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London, 1915. Pp. vi, 241. 7^x5 in. Of the authors of this attractive volume, two, the late Thomas Hodgkin and his daughter, L. Violet Hodgkin, are Friends; the others are High Church Anglicans or Catholics, as they call themselves. All meet on the common platform of recognition of the Inward Voice and Inward Communion of the Spirit. It is a remarkable book, and one which could hardly have been issued fifty years ago, or even less. " No one of us," says the Editor, " has sought to write as from some common ground, but solely on the basis of his own full convictions. Not even the Editor takes responsibility for the opinions of his different contributors . ... It is some...