From the archive: Absent Friends
Janet Scott, in her series on the Friend and the first world war, tells of an especially poignant and moving Yearly Meeting in 1917
In the weeks leading up to Yearly Meeting the Friend published articles to help Friends come with ‘hearts and minds prepared’. These extracts are from a piece written by W Blair Neatby, published on 11 May:
The Christian Church was born in a prayer-meeting. The meeting was gathered by Christ’s promise and was crowned by the act that redeemed that promise. The promise was a gift of power that should enable a singularly ill-qualified company, armed with only their message to spread religion from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth; and the power came in an overwhelming visitation of the Spirit of God that constituted a new fact in human experience, and “endowed” those simple souls with “an authority and impressiveness which made them irresistible”.
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