Gerrard Winstanley and the Early Quakers

1943 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Winthrop S. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Religious Thinking ◽  
George Fox ◽  
Gerrard Winstanley ◽  
Careful Investigation

Considerable mystery has long surrounded the antecedents of the Society of Friends. George Fox, an unlettered country lad, has been pictured as having gathered the Society after receiving, through a series of direct revelations, a full-blown message of redemption. Quaker historians have sought to confirm this portrayal by emphasizing that it was “in communion with his deepest self” that he made his “great spiritual discovery,” and that it came to him from no outward source. This explanation seemed rather naive to the more sophisticated mind of Rufus M. Jones, and he set himself to the task of uncovering the actual source from which Fox's religious thinking was derived. His two volumes—Studies in Mystical Religion and Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries —are sufficient testimony of the thoroughness and scholarship with which he tackled the problem. Nevertheless, after long and careful investigation, he felt obliged to confess that nothing more positive could be affirmed than that the possible influences in Fox's environment, for the most part, “worked upon him in subconscious ways, as an atmosphere and climate of his spirit, rather than a clearly conceived body of truth.” This conclusion was tenable so long as Fox was regarded as the founder of the Quakers. It now seems evident, however, by his own admissions, that he was not the founder but simply joined a sect already in existence. This fact necessitates an attempt to identify the group with which Fox became affiliated.

Baptists

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Randall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Higher Criticism ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
George Fox

Early in the nineteenth century, British Quakers broke through a century-long hedge of Quietism which had gripped their Religious Society since the death of their founding prophet, George Fox. After 1800, the majority of Friends in England and Ireland gradually embraced the evangelical revival, based on the biblical principle of Jesus Christ’s atoning sacrifice as the effective source of salvation. This evangelical vision contradicted early Quakerism’s central religious principle, the saving quality of the Light of Christ Within (Inward Light) which led human beings from sinful darkness into saving Light. The subsequent, sometimes bitter struggles among British Quakers turned on the question of whether the infallible Bible or leadings from the Light should be the primary means for guiding Friends to eternal salvation. Three of the most significant upheavals originated in Manchester. In 1835 Isaac Crewdson, a weighty Manchester Friend, published A Beacon to the Society of Friends which questioned the authority of the Inward Light and the entire content of traditional Quaker ministry as devoid of biblical truth. The ensuing row ended with Crewdson and his followers separating from the Friends. Following this Beacon Separation, however, British Quakerism was increasingly dominated by evangelical principles. Although influenced by J.S. Rowntree’s Quakerism, Past and Present, Friends agreed to modify their Discipline, a cautious compromise with the modern world. During the 1860s a new encounter with modernity brought a second upheaval in Manchester. An influential thinker as well as a Friend by marriage, David Duncan embraced, among other advanced ideas, higher criticism of biblical texts. Evangelical Friends were not pleased and Duncan was disowned by a special committee investigating his views. Duncan died suddenly before he could take his fight to London Yearly Meeting, but his message had been heard by younger British Friends. The anti-intellectual atmosphere of British Quakerism, presided over by evangelical leader J.B. Braithwaite, seemed to be steering Friends towards mainstream Protestantism. This tendency was challenged in a widely read tract entitled A Reasonable Faith, which replaced the angry God of the atonement with a kinder, gentler, more loving Deity. A clear sign of changing sentiments among British Friends was London Yearly Meeting’s rejection of the Richmond Declaration (1887), an American evangelical manifesto mainly written by J.B. Braithwaite. But the decisive blow against evangelical dominance among Friends was the Manchester Conference of 1895 during which John Wilhelm Rowntree emerged as leader of a Quaker Renaissance emphasizing the centrality of the Inward Light, the value of social action, and the revival of long-dormant Friends’ Peace Testimony. Before his premature death in 1905, J.W. Rowntree and his associates began a transformation of British Quakerism, opening its collective mind to modern religious, social, and scientific thought as the means of fulfilling Friends’ historic mission to work for the Kingdom of God on earth. During the course of the nineteenth century, British Quakerism was gradually transformed from a tiny, self-isolated body of peculiar people into a spiritually riven, socially active community of believers. This still Dissenting Society entered the twentieth century strongly liberal in its religious practices and passionately confident of its mission ‘to make all humanity a society of Friends’.

Shattered Expectations? George Fox, the Quakers, and the Restoration State, 1660-1685

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Greaves
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
George Fox ◽  
Prevailing View

The prevailing view of Quakers in the Restoration era depicts them as a defeated movement no longer on the attack but henceforth under siege. They institutionalized, in the words of Richard Bauman, a strategy “of disengagement from the world's affairs” and embraced “a social policy founded on quietism.” Defeated politically, they were forced, according to this view, to relinquish their efforts to advance the cause of liberty “by militant, political means.” Thus the adoption of the peace principle as a hallmark of the Society of Friends emerged, according to Barry Reay, as a response to political defeat and as a stratagem for survival. This interpretation of Restoration Quakerism is similar in many respects to the stereotypical depiction of the Friends in terms of withdrawal and quiescence. I would like to suggest some modifications in this view by reexamining Quaker expectations at the Restoration, the Friends' involvement in political and legal matters, and the emergence and enforcement of the peace principle. The dominant characteristics of Restoration Quakerism are not withdrawal and quiescence but engagement and vigor.

Muggletonians and Quakers: A Study in the Interaction of Seventeenth-Century Dissent

1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas G. Greene
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
William Penn ◽  
The Difference ◽  
George Fox ◽  
The Devil

One of the most bitter pamphlet wars of the later seventeenth century was fought between the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who by 1689 had perhaps fifty-thousand followers, and the Muggletonians, a tiny sect which probably had fewer than one-thousand members. Despite the difference in the number of their adherents, the Quakers believed that the dispute with the Muggletonians was so significant that George Fox, William Penn, Edward Burrough, Isaac Penington, and other Quaker leaders attacked the Muggletonians in print. The Muggletonian prophets, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, believed that the Quakers were the greatest enemies of true religion, and they produced a steady stream of anti-Quaker tracts. Some of the accusations on both sides, such as being Antichrist or being worse than the Pope, were common in sectarian arguments, but the conflict reached a sustained height of invective which was rare even in such a contentious age. In Fox's opinion, Muggleton was a “heathen” whose “foul breath … comes from the foul spirit of thy father.” Another Quaker, Thomas Loe, addressed Muggleton as “thou son of perdition and child of the Devil … seed of the serpent and old sorcerer … ignorant sot.” Quaker attacks on the Muggletonians culminated in Penn's assertion that “from the most primitive times there has not appeared … a more complete monster … than John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, brethren and associates in the blackest work that ever fallen men or angels could probably have set themselves upon.”

Margaret Fell Fox

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Her Family ◽  
George Fox ◽  
Set Up

Margaret Fell (nee Askew, b. 1614– d. 1702), Quaker leader, was born in 1614 in Furness, Lancashire (now Cumbria). Her father was John Askew, and little is known of her mother, although she is presumed to be Margaret Pyper because of an extant marriage certificate. At the age of seventeen, Margaret married Judge Thomas Fell (bap. 1599, d. 1658) and moved to Swarthmoor Hall, where she would live for most of the rest of her life. In 1652, the itinerant Quaker preacher George Fox called on the hospitality of Swarthmoor and while there subsequently “converted” Fell, in a process Quakers term “convincement.” Most of her family, and many of the servants, also became Quakers at this point. In the years that followed, Fell’s husband remained an attender at the nearby Ulverston church until his death in 1658, while Swarthmoor hosted local Quaker meetings. Fell was important because of the energy with which she galvanized the wider Quaker body. She set up the Kendal Fund, and a very extensive epistolary network operated because of her commitment to keeping news and communication flowing. She was certainly a leader of the early Quakers, based on her administrative capabilities alone. Marriage to Fox, in 1669, further cemented this position as the “mother” of Quakerism. She was an active polemicist who periodically gained access to England’s rulers and tried to use these audiences to effect greater understanding of the Quaker cause; she also wrote over twenty pamphlets. In common with many Quakers of the period, Fell was imprisoned, in her case due to holding meetings at her house; she served over four years in the 1660s, then another year in the 1670s. Her marriage to Fox was to prove to be unconventional, and it certainly made an already strained relationship to her son, George, who was not a Quaker, worse. Fox and Fell spent very little time together between their marriage and Fox’s death in 1691, though their relationship is presumed to be affectionate. Fell died in 1702. She had composed A Relation of Margaret Fell (1690), and “A Testimony Concerning [her] . . . Late Husband George Fox” (1694), both of which are important accounts of her life. Her letters and published pamphlets were collected together, alongside testimonies of praise, in A Brief Collection of the Remarkable Passages . . . of Margaret Fell (1710). The Fell manuscripts are now held primarily in the Society of Friends’ library, London, and they serve as the basis for many of the studies of the Fell family.

Edward Haistwell, F. R. S

1970 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-187
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Library Collection ◽  
Medical College ◽  
Hospital Medical ◽  
London Hospital ◽  
George Fox

In a letter addressed from London Hospital Medical College, 3 October 1932, William Bulloch, Fellow of the Royal Society, and compiler of ‘The Roll of the Fellows of the Royal Society’ now in the library collection of that Society, replied to an enquiry from John Nickalls the Librarian of the Society of Friends in London. Nickalls’ letter of enquiry has not been preserved, but he apparently asked whether there might be a connexion between the Edward Haistwell who had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1698, and the Quaker Edward Haistwell who had served for a time as the amanuensis of George Fox the founder of the Quaker movement. Bulloch’s reply was two-fold.

The Short Journals and Itinerary Journals of George Fox

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Fox ◽  
Thomas Edmund Harvey
Keyword(s):  
George Fox

Implications of Religious Thinking in Therapeutic Compliance

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (12) ◽  
pp. 4432-4435
Keyword(s):  
Organic Chemistry ◽  
T Test ◽  
P Value ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Psychological Reactions ◽  
Psychology And Religion ◽  
Psychophysiological Reactivity ◽  
Specific Objective ◽  
Religious Cult ◽  
Religious Thinking

Presenting specialty literature background in: organic chemistry, neurology, theology and clinical psychology, in order to conceptualize and bring to the forefront the interdependency between organic chemistry, neurology, psychology and religion in describing the implications of religious thinking in therapeutic compliance is a first objective of the present paper. As such, we addressed the importance of neurotransmitters in the neurophysiology of spiritual interventions. Another specific objective was defined as measuring psychological reactions, components of the moral and religious structure of human personality, with the help of psychophysiological involved factors, in rapport with therapeutic compliance. According to the descriptive statistic of data, we found that those who do not adhere to any religious cult have greater chances of being diagnosed with a disease that necessitates daily treatment and monitoring (the percentage found was 20%), in comparison with those who are part of a religious cult (6.67 %). The estimated non-linear regression model to confirm the interdependency between the medial psychophysiological reactivity to religious stimulus and the medial score obtained in the compliance questionnaire was validated by the values of R = 0.99 and p-value=0.00≈10-10<0.05). As such, we can accept the hypothesis that “there is a statistically significant association between religious thinking and compliance”. On the other hand, the hypothesis “there is a statistically significant association between religious thinking and compliance” was validated, using the t test, only at 40%, as the results of the t test were only considered on significant components of the applied MARS questionnaire. The results given by approaching the two hypotheses through the mixture of psychophysiological and application of the MARS questionnaire consistently highlighted an image of importance of religious thinking in therapeutic compliance. The current study is useful in motivating adherents of any religion, in our study, the Christian belief, to improve their compliance. Keywords: oxcytocin, vassopressin, MARS scale, therapeutic compliance, religious experience

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