The Later Periods of Quakerism

The Later Periods of Quakerism is the second part of a two-volume history of the Religious Society of Friends written by Rufus M. Jones, the Haverford College philosopher and Quaker minister. It carries the story forward from the point at which his earlier The Beginnings of Quakerism, written with the Quaker historian William C. Braithwaite, had stopped. It was published in London in 1921 as part of a larger project to give the Society of Friends a scholarly account of its own past, drawn from the surviving journals, minutes, letters, and printed controversies of the movement. Jones wrote at a moment when Quaker history was still largely told in the language of the founders' heroic age, and when the later centuries were remembered chiefly through a few famous names and a sense of decline.

His work runs from the 1690s through the nineteenth century, and its central claim is that the long middle period of Quakerism was neither a mere falling away from George Fox's fire nor a story of mere preservation. Jones traces the Quietist era, when Friends withdrew into a protected, plain-living, carefully disciplined community, and he credits that withdrawal with deepening the inward life even as it narrowed the Society's reach. He follows the evangelical currents that entered Quaker life in the nineteenth century, the separations that split American Friends into rival bodies, and the Quaker contributions that carried beyond the meeting house: John Woolman's witness against slavery, the work of Elizabeth Fry and others in prison and social reform, and the Society's missionary and educational activity. Throughout, Jones reads Quaker history as the working-out of one conviction, that God speaks immediately to the human soul, and he asks of each period how faithfully that conviction was lived and what it cost. He writes as an interpreter with a view, not a neutral compiler, and the book's value lies partly in watching a major twentieth-century Quaker thinker read his own tradition.

The book has continued to matter because it remains the fullest early attempt to tell the whole arc of Quaker experience rather than only its origins, and because later Quaker historians have both relied on it and argued with it. It shows how a tradition built on direct spiritual experience handles the pressures of institutions, doctrine, and division, questions that reach well beyond Friends.

Who should read this: readers who already know something of early Quakerism and want to follow its fortunes through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and anyone interested in how a mystical, experience-centered tradition sustains itself over time. It is a century-old interpretive history, so those wanting a current, critically updated survey, or a first introduction to Quaker faith and practice, should begin elsewhere.