The Flight to Pennsylvania: Affirmation or Denial of Quakerism?

THE FLIGHT TO PENNSYLVANIA: AFFIRMATION OR DENIAL OF QUAKERISM? By Joseph E. Illick* For two decades, from 1640 to 1660, Englishmen had experienced the throes of civil war and the experiment of republican government. Armies had clashed in the field, Parliament had been purged, and a king had been executed. Out of this turmoil was born extraordinary constitutional debate and the excesses of political and religious sectarianism . Judging by the prophecies and preachments of men wandering through the English countryside, considering the vigor of Oliver Cromwell's partisans, the church and the monarchy seemed obsolete. Yet in 1660 both were restored. The regicides were executed and fanatics were seized and jailed. Chaos was turned into order, and English society froze into place. Men recalled with a shudder what had happened in the middle years of the century, and this shudder was a key to their conservatism. The turmoil had died down, but the anxieties it produced were still active. Any signs of unorthodoxy which disturbed the status quo were dealt with accordingly. From this perspective it is not difficult to see why Quakers were the target of persecution, even though their enthusiasm in the 1660's was less obvious than in the previous decade. For Quakerism still leveled a challenge at English society, as it had from its beginnings. George Fox had looked for meaning within the Church of England, and he drew only ridicule from its curates. Forced back on his own resources, Fox discovered God: "I found that there were two thirsts in me, the one after creatures, to have gotten help and strength there, and the other after the Lord the creator. . . . The Lord did stay my desires on himself." Thereafter he wandered through the countryside preaching about the holy spirit: how it was revealed to and acted through man. Gathering to himself followers who shared the zeal born of cosmic discovery, Fox at first imposed no discipline on them. After all, if the Inner Light transformed men into vessels of God's * Associate Professor of History, San Francisco State College. Dr. Illick delivered this paper at the Annual Meeting of Friends Historical Association, November, 1969. THE FLIGHT TO PENNSYLVANIA99 will, then rules, ministers, even the church as an institution might be done away with. But the Quakers did not stop at the rejection of church tradition. The Puritans had gone that far, and there can be little doubt that Quakers inherited such Puritan attitudes as the attachment of primary importance to personal experience, especially the conversion to a godly life; the concept of man as a pilgrim, a stranger to the world, yet a voyager determined to remake the world for the Lord; and, consequently , a capacity for moral protest against the world's wicked ways. Thus, Puritans had outraged Anglicans by denying man-made church tradition, citing the Bible as their only guide. But Quakers infuriated Puritans by claiming that the Scriptures alone were not guidance enough. Robert Barclay declared that the Bible was "a declaration of the fountain, but not the fountain itself." The written word was not to be a restraint on the Inner Light. Where Puritans were literal, Quakers were mystical. The meaning of the contrast is more than theological. George Fox was the son of a weaver, Christopher Fox, whose neighbors referred to him as "Righteous Christer." His mother, too, was deeply religious. Fox's preaching attracted men and women like himself, of humble origins and spiritually thirsty. Puritans could count among their numbers members of the gentry, and they accepted the social stratification of seventeenth-century England. Indeed, their belief in predestination and election, the restriction of salvation to a chosen few, reflected an elitist attitude. Conversely, Quakers believed that any man could discover the Inner Light. And if any man could achieve this spiritual condition, then every man could. Quaker zeal was fired with a belief in the possibility of achieving earthly perfection. A zealous perfectionism demanded the elimination of man-made obstacles on the road to attainment. No time, no place, no condition was inappropriate for the preaching of the Word, even if church services must be disrupted or bizarre behavior was necessary to attract attention. Fox wrote...