But the swing-back for the imitative mass to the easily grasped dogma of an infallible Scripture did not take place at once. It appears as a clearly accomplished fact at the time of the mid-eighteenth-century departure of Quakerism on its second missionary effort. Meanwhile, we must consider the intervening hundred years—the second period of Quakerism—generally known as the century of Quietism.

The first generation of Quakers had passed away. The great mission—the going forth to win mankind to live by the Inner Light—had failed. Better fitted, apparently, than any since the early Christians to evangelize the world, catholic to the limit of the term, knowing nothing of “heathen” nor of any “living in darkness”; a body of devotees culled from all existing groups, hampered by no official church, unhindered by luxury, undaunted by distance and difficulty, working in the open under storms of persecution that had driven their companion groups to hiding or dissolution, the Friends of Truth had failed to bring even the churches to the acknowledgment of that on which they all ultimately rested. Passing through European Christendom and beyond, they gathered in their fellows, retreated to camp, gave up their original enterprise, and became a separatist sect. The greater number of them were flourishing tradespeople, owing their success in business largely to the fact that, whereas trade as a whole was still subject to those passions which had called forth in old times the law forbidding any transaction beyond the sum of twenty pennies to be made without the presence of the port-reeve or other responsible third person, here were men who required neither bond nor agreement, who were as good as their word, asking one price for their goods, and refusing to bargain. Their social life at the beginning of the second period has been described for us by one of the last of the earlier generation, coming late in life to English Quaker circles after twenty years of absence. William Bromfield was a medical man who had followed James II. to Ireland because of his goodness to the Quakers, had served him for years in Paris as his secretary, and had suffered imprisonment in the Bastille for conscience’ sake. At one moment we see him visiting a Trappist monastery, explaining to the Fathers the Quaker faith and manner of living—the Trappists acknowledging the Quakers as ripe for sainthood—and then we read of his bitter disillusionment. He finds[14] “riches, pride, arrogancy, and falling into parties.” He notes with grief that onlookers are saying “that the Quakers, who might have converted the world had they kept their first faith, are now become apostates and hypocrites, as vain in their Conversation, Habits, and Dresses, as any other people.” Even the poor tradesmen and mechanics amongst them wore periwigs: “a wicked covering of Horse-hair and Goats’-hair.” Men were “trick’d out in cock’d Hats, their fine Cloathes with their Cuts À la mode and long cravats.” Women went about with “bare neck, Hoop’d Petticoats, Lac’d Shoes, Clock’t Hose, Gold-chains, Lockets, Jewels, and fine Silks.” Seeing in these characteristics of the main mass of the second generation nothing but the ravages of laxity, the faithful nucleus of the society determined on a measure of reform. A missionary party, with full powers to this end, went forth in 1760 from London Yearly Meeting. In every separate meeting throughout the country wayward members were dealt with. Many were reclaimed; those who showed themselves either stubborn or indifferent were expelled from the society. Disownment for marriage outside the group dates from this time, and it has been estimated that by this means alone the membership was reduced by one-third.

Amongst the remnant the Quaker testimonies against extravagance in dress, unprofitable occupations and amusements, and advices as to simplicity in manners, were stereotyped into a code, and became matters of strict observance. It is from this middle period that the popular picture of Quakerism is borrowed. The Quakers went forward from their great purgation—a strictly closed sect, carefully guarded from outside influence, the younger generations forced either to conform to the traditional pattern or to suffer banishment—depleted and decreasing until the time of the modern revival taking place about the middle of the nineteenth century.

The deductions made by modern commentators from these data fall into two groups.

There is the view held generally by those standing outside the body, whether enemies or friends, that Quakerism comes to an end with its heroic period. The first recognize its initial catholicity, rejoice in its successful tilting with Puritan Protestantism, but see it foredoomed by its heresies, by its neglect of the outward symbols of the sanctification of human life, and by the deleterious effect of the admission of women into the ministry. The sympathizers see the early Quakers either as the glory of seventeenth-century Christianity or the left wing of a widespread effort to democratize formal religion—a shifting of the centre of authority from the official custodian to the man himself. They come regretfully upon the undisciplined ranks of the second generation. They have no faith in the movement for reform; for them the little church of the Spirit dwindles, lit with a faint sunset glow of romance down towards extinction. All, both enemies and friends, who see Quakerism end with the seventeenth century, dispose of the modern revival by placing it within the general movement of Protestant evangelicalism.

The second group of deductions appears to be shared by the Quakers themselves in so far as their present literary output is representative of the feelings and opinions of the body. They appear to attribute their failure to capture the world, on the one hand, to their exclusion from the main stream of thought and culture, and, on the other, to the inability of the early protagonists to present a formulation of their central doctrine free from contradictions, to their subjection to the dualistic philosophy of the day, which saddles their teaching of the Inner Light with a tendency to neglect all external means of enlightenment.

Beyond these two most usual readings of the early history of Quakerism, we find the more recent apologists of Christian mysticism, while freely admitting the Quakers into the fellowship of the mystics, dispose inferentially of the possibility of the “free” mystical church of which Friends dreamed on the ground of the rarity of the religious—the still greater rarity of the mystical temperament. In their opinion the art and science of religion will always be carried on by specialists; the torch-bearers will be few, though their light illumine the pathway of the world. A world-church, therefore—a church which must cast her wings over all in her striving to turn all towards the light—must organize primarily in the interest of conduct as an end. In this view the Quaker system, in so far as it invites every man to be his own church, must always fail.

We may, perhaps, accept something of all these readings; we may recognize the unsuitability for the daily need of the world at large of a church neither primarily institutional nor primarily doctrinal. We may admit, for many minds in a Christendom generally ignorant of its own history of an episcopally ordained and invested female clergy, the handicap of recognized feminine ministry; we may see the full unreason of birthright membership, and the change of base in the modern revival, without, perhaps, being driven to conclude that England’s attempt to introduce into field and market-place the hitherto cloistered mystical faith and practice has entirely failed.

For amidst the stereotyped Puritanism of this middle period, with its fear of beauty, its suspicion of all pursuits not directly utilitarian or devotional, saints were born. The century which produced John Woolman and the men and women who initiated and took the lion’s share in the movement for the abolition of slavery; which supplied to the cause of science and to the medical profession, in spite of exclusion from the main streams of learning, eminent men[15] in numbers quite out of proportion to the size of the group; which saw the blossoming of public education in the form of the fine Quaker schools where girls and boys were educated side by side,[16] must have been rich in inarticulate and unrecorded saintly lives.

There must have been in the sober Quaker homes, where affection ruled without softness, where love was heroic rather than sentimental, many who followed, not as imitators, but with all the strength of an original impulse the pathway chosen by those who have been willing to pay the price of an enhanced spiritual life; the withdrawal, in varying measure, from the values and standards accepted by the world at large. They kept watch. They worked amongst their fellows in a dusk between memory and anticipation. They felt to the uttermost and fought to the uttermost the weakness of the self. They were faithful, and in due time the society as a whole felt the breath of revival.