Early Friends and the Historical Imagination

Volume 15, No. 1 Spring Number, 1926 Bulletin of Friends' Historical Association EARLY FRIENDS AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION.1 By John W. Graham, M. A. Professor of Quaker History and Research at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. The only unity of subject in this paper is that it deals with matters so far from current practices and from the modern world that we need some clear effort of the imagination to realize them. 1. George Fox's Environment. When George Fox began his mission in 1647, there were only about five million Englishmen, fewer than in Greater London today , living either in the country or in small towns, if not in London. The roads were bad, often pack-horse tracks only. There were no newspapers. The first, the London Mercury, was founded under Charles II. There were no magazines and no novels. There were plays, by Shakespeare and others, but the Puritans lived in another world, and knew nothing of playhouses. There was no British Empire. The little colony of Puritans in New England, the Virginia and Maryland plantations, and three factories permitted by native potentates in India were its nucleus. The Empire of conquest began with Admiral Penn's capture of Jamaica in 1655-1656. The world of sport—of test matches—did not exist. Sport was a local affair of the village green and the local hunt. The world of finance was represented by the private banking practised by goldsmiths in London, and by a few struggling Companies of Merchant Adventurers. 'The substance of a paper read at the annual meeting of Friends' Historical Association held at Friends' Meeting House, 15th and Race Streets, Philadelphia, 11 mo. 30, 1925. 4 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION. There was no popular Science to occupy men's intellects. The Royal Society was not founded till 1662. Travel abroad was almost confined to the nobility. With so much absent which now occupies our attention and furnishes our talk, with none of the pervading interests of today, what was there to interest people beyond just working for their living ? There was Religion. This took the place of football and racing, of newspapers and novels, of science and invention, of imperial politics and foreign travel, in the restless and excitable society of today. Sermons were events as important as baseball matches. The presence of George Fox in a district, after he became a public man, was as exciting as a visit of a distinguished European Opera Company. Children were named, not Arthur and Eric, but Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Praise-God Barebone was a real character ; a friend of mine has an ancestor named Maher-shalalhash -baz,2 and Macaulay's character "Bind-their-Kings-in-chainsand -their-nobles-in-fetters-of-iron Johnson, Sergeant in Ireton's Regiment," was a not too absurd satire. There was a historical reason for this great difference between our neurotic and pleasure loving generation, and the weighty solid mind, the narrow and fierce fanaticism of the early 17th century. The Reformation was only a hundred years old in England. This had ploughed deep furrows in the soil of men's minds and filled them with the blood of martyrs. The Elizabethan compromise, the current Anglicanism, though probably giving average satisfaction, had set a current of controversy going which we know as the Puritan movement. Elaborate systems of thought had been worked out to compete with the system of Rome. Arminianism and Calvinism fought for men's souls ; and the debate was not less keen than it is now on Tariffs or Prohibition . Every point in faith or practice had to be deduced from the Bible, uncritically used. There had been translations into English before the Authorized Version of 1611, but at that date there must have occurred a large increase in popular circulation. That year was only as far from the young George Fox as the latest 2Isaiah VIII, 1-3. EARLY FRIENDS AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION 5 work of Ruskin, Tennyson and Browning is from us. It was, as books went then, a new book; it was part of, indeed nearly the whole of, current literature, and it was eagerly read. Oliver once took Lambert into one of...