In religion the solidarity of this country place has been best shown in the fact that, during most of its history, it has had but one church at a time. For one hundred years there was the undivided meeting. From 1828 to 1885 the Hicksite—Unitarian, branch of the Friends held the Old Meeting House, with diminishing numbers. The Orthodox had their smaller meeting house around the corner, attended by decreasing gatherings. In 1880 was organized Akin Hall, in which till 1892 were held religious services in the summer only. Since that time religious services have been held there all the year round. The early united meeting had a membership of probably two hundred, and audiences of three hundred were not uncommon.

The church in Akin Hall, named "Christ's Church, Quaker Hill," had in 1898 a membership of sixty-five, and audiences of fifty to two hundred and fifty, according to the occasion and the time of year. In the past the general attitude of the community toward religion has been reverent and sympathetic. It is no less so to-day.

Of religious ceremonies the Quakers claim to have none. But they are fond of ceremoniousness beyond most men. The very processes by which they abolish forms are made formal processes. They have ceremonies the intent of which is to free them from ceremony. The meeting is called to order by acts ever so simple, and dismissed by two old persons shaking hands; but these are invariable and formal as a doxology and a benediction. They receive a stranger in their own way. A visiting minister is honored with fixed propriety. An expelled member is read out of meeting with stated excommunicatory maledictions.

Worship has had on Quaker Hill a large place in characterizing the social complexion of the people. By this, I mean that the peculiarities of the Quaker worship, now a thing of the past, have engraved themselves upon character. Those peculiarities are four: the custom of silence; the non-employment of music, or conspicuous color or form; the separate place provided for women; the assertion and practice of individualism.

The silence of the Quaker meeting is far from negative. It is not a mere absence of words. It is a discipline enforced upon the lower elements of human nature, and a reserve upon the intellectual elements, in order that God may speak. I think that in this silence of the meeting we discover the working of the force that has moulded individual character on Quaker Hill and organized the social life. For this silence is a vivid experience, "a silence that may be felt." The presence and influence of men are upon one, even if that of God be not. The motionless figures about one subtly penetrate one's consciousness, though not through the senses. They testify to their belief in God when they do not speak better than they could with rhetoric or eloquence. It is the influence of many, not of one; yet of certain leaders who are the organs of this impression, and of the human entity made of many who in communion become one. The self-control of it breathes power, and principle, and courage. One would expect a Quaker meeting to exert an imperious rule upon the community. It is an expression of the majesty of an ideal. I believe that the Quaker Hill meeting has been able to accomplish whatever it has put its hand to do. The only pity is that the meeting tried to do so little.

The original religious influence of Quakerism, carried through all changes and transformation, was a pure and relentless individualism. It was the doctrine that the Spirit of God is in every heart of man, absolutely every one; resisted indeed by some, but given to each and all. With honest consistency it must be said, the Quakers applied this—and this it was they did apply—to the status of women, to the question of slavery, to the civic relations of men. This it was that made Fox and Penn refuse to doff their hats before judge, or titled lord, or the king himself.

The character of the common mind of the community has been much influenced by the fact that the Quakers made no use of color, form and music either in worship or in private life; that they also idealized the absence of these. They made it a matter of noble devotion. In nothing do local traditions abound more than in stories of the stern repression of the aesthetic instincts. One ancient Quakeress, coming to the well-set table at a wedding, in the old days, beheld there a bunch of flowers of gay colors, and would not sit down until they were removed. Nor could the feast go on until the change was effected. So great was the power of authority, working in the grooves of "making believe," that those who might have tolerated the bouquet in silence, as well as those who had sensations of pleasure in it, supported her opposition.

I have spoken elsewhere of the effect of this century-long repression and ignoring of the aesthetic movements of the human spirit, in banking the fires of literary culture in this population. The present generation, all inheriting the examples of ancestors ruled in such unflinching rigor, has in none of its social grouping any true sense of color or of the beauty of color. Neither in the garments of those who have laid off the Quaker garb, nor in the decorations of the houses is there a lively sense of the beauty of color. None of the women of Quaker extraction has a sense of color in dress; nor can any of them match or harmonize colors. I except, of course, those whose clothing is directly under the control of the city tailor or milliner. The general effect of costume and of the decorations of a room, in the population who get their living on the Hill, is that of gray tones, and drab effects; not mere severity is the effect, but poverty and want of color.

In forms of beauty they know and feel little more. I do not refer to the lack of appreciation of the elevations and slopes of this Hill itself—a constant delight to the artistic eye. Farmers and laborers might fail to appreciate a scene known to them since childhood. But there is in the Quaker breeding, which gives on certain sides of character so true and fine a culture a conspicuous lack in this one particular.

As to music, even that of simplest melody, it has come to the Hill, but it "knows not Joseph." An elderly son of Quakerism said: "You will find no Quaker or son of the Quakers who can sing; if you do find one who can sing a little, it will be a limited talent, and you will unfailingly discover that he is partly descended from the world's people."

The effect of this aesthetic negation appears, it seems to the present writer, in a certain rudeness or more precisely a certain lack in the domain of manners, outside of the interests in which Quakerism has given so fine a culture. This appears to be keenly felt by the descendants of Friends. Not in business matters; for they are made directors of savings banks and corporations, and trustees, and referees, and executors of estates, in all which places they find themselves at home. Nor is it a lack of dignity and composure in the parlor or at the table. Nor is it a lack of sense of propriety in meetings of worship. But it is in matters ethical, civic and deliberate, and in the free and discursive meetings of men, in which new and intricate questions are to arise; in positions of trust, in which the highest considerations of social responsibility constitute the trust; in these, the men and women trained in Quakerism are lacking throughout whole areas of the mind, and lacking, too, in ethical standards, which can only appeal to those whose experience has fed on a rich diversity of sources and distinctions.

In this I speak only of the Quaker group and of those who have been under its full influence. It does not apply to the Irish Catholics, nor to the incomers from the city. The Quakers and their children lack precisely those elements of aesthetic breeding which would be legitimately derived from contemplation and enjoyment of beauty aside from ethical values. Ethical beauty, divorced from pure beauty, a stern, bare, grim beauty they have, and their children and employees have. But they have little sense of order in matters that do not proceed to the ends of money-making, housekeeping and worship. They do not seem to possess instinctive fertility of moral resource. It may be due to other sources as well, but it seems to the present writer that the moral density shown by some of these birthright Quakers, upon matters outside of their wonted and trodden ethical territories, is due to their long refusal to recognize aesthetic values, and to see discriminations in the field in which ethics and aesthetics are interwoven.

They made red and purple to be morally wrong, idealizing the plainness of their uncultured ancestry, and sweet sounds they excluded from their ears, declaring them to be evil noises, because they would set up the boorishness of simple folk of old time as something noble and exalted, "making believe" that such aesthetic lack was real self-denial and unworldliness. It is not surprising that in a riper age of the world, after lifetimes of this idealization of peasant states of mind, their children find themselves morally and mentally unprepared for the responsibilities of citizenship, of high ethical trust and of the varied ways of a moral world, whose existence their fathers made believe to ignore and deny.

Women have always occupied in Quakerism a place theoretically equal to that of the men, in business and religious affairs. George Fox and his successors declared men and women equal, inasmuch as the Divine Spirit is in every human soul.

After the influence of the early Friends ceased, the place of woman began to be circumscribed by new rules, and crystallized in a reaction under the influence of purely social forces; so that this most sensible people made women equal to men in meetings and in religious legislation through a form of sexual taboo.

Following the custom of many early English meeting houses, the men and women sat apart, the men on one side of the middle aisle, and the women on the other, so that men and women were not equals in the individualist sense, as they are for instance, in the practice and theory of Socialism, but were equals in separate group-life; to each sex, grouped apart from the other, equal functions were supposed to be delegated. Oblong Meeting House, on Quaker Hill, had seats for two hundred and fifty people on the ground floor, and in the gallery for one hundred and fifty more. The men's side was separated from the women's, of equal size and extent, by wooden curtains, which could be raised or lowered; so that the whole building could be one auditorium, with galleries; or the curtains could be so lowered that no man on the ground floor could see any woman unless she be a speaker on the "facing seats"; nor could any young person in the gallery see any one of the opposite sex; yet a speaker could be heard in all parts. The curtains could be so fixed, also, that two independent meetings could be held, each in a separate auditorium, even the speakers being separated from one another.

It was the custom for women to have delegated to them certain religious functions, at Monthly Meeting and Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, on which they deliberated, before submitting them to the whole meeting. This old Oblong Meeting House is a mute record and symbol of the century-old contest of the Puritan spirit among the old Quakers, striving for an inflexibly right relation between the sexes. They attained their ends through the creation of a community, but not until the community dissolved.

The position of woman among Friends is another eloquent tribute to the two-fold "dealing" of Quakerism with women. She is man's equal, but she is man's greatest source of danger. She must be on a par with him, but she must be apart from him. The relations of men and women are therefore very interesting. In doctrinal matters, in discussion, in preaching and "testifying," men and women are equal, and the respect that a man has for his wife or sister or neighbor woman, in these functions of a devout sort is like that he has for another man. Generally the men of the Quaker school of influence believe as a matter of course in the intellectual and juristic equality of women with men; and in the religious equality of the individual woman with the individual man. But in the practical arts and in business a woman is a woman and a man is a man. Here the women are restricted by convention to housekeeping, which on large farms is quite enough for them; and the men have the outdoor life, the "trading," and the gainful occupations—except the boarding of city people. There is no especial respect for the "managing woman" who "runs a farm"; the community expects such a woman to fail.

Moreover, between the sexes there is no camaraderie, no companionship of an intellectual sort between husband and wife, no free exchange of ideas except in circles made up of the members of one sex. In any public meeting the men habitually sit apart from their wives and from the women members of their families, even though the audiences be not bilaterally halved.

The orbits of man's and woman's lives are separate, though each ascribes to the individuals of the other sex an ethical and religious parity. The effect is seen in the diminishing of the numbers of men on the Hill, in the group-life of the women, and in the type of woman. It may be well to consider these in reverse order.

The individual Quaker Hill woman, so far as she differs from women generally, may be described as a woman almost perfectly conformed to type, presenting fewer variations than elsewhere, either in the form of youthful prettinesses and follies, or in the strenuous opinion of mature years. She is neither a flirt as a girl, nor a radical as a woman. Color has not yet come into her maidenly days, nor violence of opinion into her womanly years. She affects neither fashion nor intellectual eccentricity. Yet she attains to a better average of reasonable, sensible action than she could otherwise do. She knows less of the impulsive, emotional prettiness of adolescence than women of other country communities, and in later years gives herself less to intellectual vagaries. Women's rights are established on the Hill; it is impossible to be strenuous about them.

The numerous groupings and associations of women are especially interesting in view of the fact that the men of the Hill have no associations whatever, now that the stores are closed; and are assembled in no fixed groupings. It has never been possible, so far as records go, to maintain a society of men on the Hill. In the early part of the period under study a literary and debating society was organized, with social attractions; but it was feeble and short-lived. There are not enough leaders among the men to make such group-life possible. They are related by ties of labor, rather than of class-fraternity; and they have never acquired any interest common to their sex to assemble them in groups and companies; the discipline of the religion known to the Hill has discouraged and outlawed it.

This contrast may have something to do with the departure of men from the Hill. So long as the stores were in operation, at Toffey's, Akin's, and Merritt's places, the men could meet there, and had in their assembling a natural group-life, which satisfied many with life in the country. But with the closing of the stores after the coming of the railroad in 1849, this also failed, and the men having no capacity for general association with one another, and few interests possessed in common with the women, have been the more impelled to leave the Hill. Economic advantage had only to be as good elsewhere, and the man emigrated. I have not known those who have left the place, in my knowledge of it, to give as a reason inability to make a good living there; but always they have spoken most emphatically of the bareness and lack of interest in the social life of the Hill as their reason for emigrating to the city or large town.