What do they have to say to us?

What did the suffering show?

By going into the cold, dark, gloom of a large police holding cell, beneath the vacant Magistrates’ Courts, we were expressing our respect and gratitude to our forebears in faith. The city’s Quaker population has never been greater than during the 1660s-80s. They looked out for each other, and it’s probably fair to say that they thrived under repression, imprisonment and huge fines.

What do they have to say to us today, those children and adults? How can we reach them? What has the Quaker movement lost and gained since those early days?

It’s a deceptively simple question to ask:  What motivated the Quaker 1682 children to keep the flame of the community alive when their parents and a large proportion of the adult Quakers were imprisoned in appalling conditions? Not just imprisoned, but routinely humiliated and vilified. We know the names of the Quaker 1682 children, their parents, the walks of life they entered, who they married, and what became of them. We heard some of their testimonies, all based upon factual sources. Samuel Gibbon, Patience Hearne, Rachel Mears, Elias Osborne, William Fry, Joseph Kippen, Benjamin Wall.

The internal strength they summoned up in order to meet such external pressures must have been huge. Without exception from modest families, many of them worked in the cloth trade: we’re talking about silk and wool weavers, humble tradespeople, the odd merchant: anything grander was prohibited by law. There was considerable discipline within this group, a commitment to self-help and mutual support.

By the time these children had grown up, married, had children, grown old and then died – most of them in their sixties in the 1730s – Quakerism had become respectable, quietist, grey. The movement had entered its Age of Anxiety. A far cry from what Samuel, Patience, Rachel and Elias grew up with, and what they themselves had manifested as children, bearing faith with the values of their parents and their community.

I think it’s a crying shame that for hundreds of years since then the Quaker movement has often times repressed and disavowed its radical early energy. It began life questioning, noisy, passionate, argumentative, democratic and highly egalitarian. It’s still democratic and egalitarian, but what about those other qualities? What can we learn from these forebears in faith?

Maybe this is best answered by looking at what are called George Fox’s 59 Particulars. These were written in 1659, in the face of the restoration of the monarchy. George Fox tried to codify what this organisation stood for, these Children of the Light, these Friends of the Truth, so derogatorily referred to as Quakers.

His words still speak to us today:

• Let all the laws of England be brought into a known tongue, that every Countryman may plead his own cause, without Attorney or Counsellor, or for money. Let men that fear God and hate covetousness decide and end things among People in all places, and let none do it for money and reward.

• Let all the poor people, blinde and lame, and cripples be provided for in the Nation, that there may not be a beggar in England nor England’s Dominions, that you may say you come to be equal with the Jewes, that had the law that made provision for widows, strangers and fatherless. He that turns his ears from hearing the poor, turns his ears from the Law, which says to provide for them, for ye have read the practice of the Church, the Saints which were in the Gospel, which doth condemn this Nation’s practice.

• Let no one be prisoned, and their money be taken away, for going to visit prisoners, and to relieve them in what they wanted.

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