QUAKERS, The, Sylvester Hassell The Friends or Quakers originated in 1647. They were, in some respects, the successors of the Mystics of the Middle Ages, and the predecessors of the Methodists of the Eighteenth century. George Fox (1624-1690), a moral, meek, odd, uneducated, bold and poor man, was their founder; Robert Barclay (1648-1690) their apologist and theologian; and William Penn (1644-1718) their statesman and politician. They claimed, not to be founders of a new sect, but revivers of primitive Christianity. They taught the spirituality of true religion; the indispensable need of “the inner light” or the Spirit of Christ for the understanding of the Scriptures; the privilege of direct access to God without the intervention of human priest or ceremony; entire freedom of conscience and worship for all men; that the ministry need no human education or theological training, but only the preparation afforded by the Holy Spirit, and that they ought to preach without hire or bargaining, though they may receive voluntary contributions from those to whom they administer in spiritual things. They steadfastly opposed tithes, oaths, infant baptism, war, slavery, intemperance, vain fashions, corrupting amusements and flattering titles; and these eccentricities brought upon them the terrible vengeance of the “State Church.”
It is said that, from 1650 to 1689, 13,258 Quakers suffered fine, imprisonment, torture and mutilation in the British Isles, 219 were banished, and 360 perished in prisons, some almost literally rotting in pestilential cells; and, in New England, 170 cases of hard usage are enumerated, 47 were banished, and four (including one woman) were hanged. These sufferings they bore with exemplary patience and heroism, leaving their enemies to the correction of the Lord, and meekly saying that it was better than to do wrong.
But, with their wonderful light, they had much spiritual darkness. They taught that the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper were not designed by Christ and his Apostles to be observed outwardly by the church, but only inwardly; that Christ died for every individual of the human race, and that the inner light or grace of his Spirit is given in sufficient measure to every human being, in all ages and countries of the world, to save all if they obey it, and condemn them if they reject it (the Quakers thus being the most Arminian of Arminians, and surpassing all other denominations in their latitudinarian view of the Spirit’s influence); that men are justified in their works, though not on account of their works; and that it is possible, in the present world, to reach a state of sinless perfection.
Their four grades of meetings for discipline—the preparative, the monthly, the quarterly and the yearly, the latter exercising exclusive legislative and finally appellate power over a large collection of Societies—somewhat resemble the polity of Presbyterianism; the system has too much worldly wisdom, and too little New Testament authority. Some of their writers, even in the seventeenth century, approached very near to Socinianism, denying the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the vicarious nature of the atonement, and imputed righteousness.
And in 1827 a schism took place among the American Quakers, Elias Hicks, of New York (1768-1830), openly advocating Socinianism, and drawing off into a separate body (called Hicksite Quakers) the most of the Quakers in the Atlantic States; while this movement caused those called the Orthodox Quakers to adhere more closely to the Scriptures. Each party professes to hold the view of the founders of the Society in the seventeenth century—the name which they have given themselves not being the church, but “The Religious Society of Friends.” (Hassell’s History ppg 519, 520)