Individuals are arranged chronologically by birth year. I think it is interesting how the slope changes at various points in history. You can also see very graphically how many Quakers did not make it through the 1660s.

Like most Friends nowadays, I have never heard the sing-song in person, so I can’t speak about it from personal experience. The only recording of it I have ever heard is in a sound file on the Haverford College Library website.  Unfortunately, the recording consists of two Friends reading or reciting historical Quaker sermons in sing-song style for demonstration purposes, not of authentic examples of sing-song occurring spontaneously in worship. The text accompanying the sound file states that “this practice has now died out, though a few examples have been recorded in sound,” which would seem to imply that other recordings exist — do readers know of any?

To my ear, the Haverford recordings sound surprisingly “high church,” reminiscent of the chanted prayer I’ve heard delivered by Catholic and Orthodox priests (though the performers do not have very polished singing voices, in contrast to some of the priests I have heard). In fact, 19th century author James Rush suspected that the Quaker sing-song actually derived historically from Catholic chant:

The use of the minor third … seems to be a vocal tradition, still kept up among the English. The Quakers, particularly their women, in public preaching, employ it to an extravagant degree; and, from the incorrigible character of all sectarianism, probably had it in the time of Fox; whose followers may have derived it through the earlier Protestants, from some awkward imitation of chanting, in the Catholic service.

The Philosophy of the Human Voice, p. 539 (1867)

Whether there is any likelihood this account of the origins of the sing-song might be correct, I do not know. It seems at least as likely that chanting while modulating the voice by minor thirds has some sort of innate or natural basis. This was, in fact, suggested by Robert de Valcourt, a contemporary of Rush:

The Quakers, Methodists, &c., in their religious exercises, run into a sing-song monotony, changing the pitch by minor thirds. This is, probably, the simplest and rudest form of chanting; and seems to be the spontaneous expression of certain kinds of excitement or fervor of feeling.

The Illustrated Manners Book, p. 177 (1855)

The actual word sing-song as a name for Quaker intoned preaching does not appear in writing, as far as I have been able to discover, until well into the 19th century. Most early uses of this term are by former Quakers or non-Quakers, and often seem to carry a disrespectful or even derogatory tone:

 Some of the most ignorant simpletons in civilized society get inspired to preach among them; and “shear [sic] nonsense” indeed do they deliver : while tremulous gesticulation, groaning, drawling, whining, grimace, and most unearthly tunes of vocal sing-song, are the relief, and the accompaniment, and the compensation.

Samuel Hanson Cox, Quakerism not Christianity,  p. 604 (1833)

Cox was a former Quaker who became a Presbyterian minister. He was well-known as an orator, and was a leading abolitionist.

I did listen with surprise to a short, but energetic exhortation, in good language and devoid of the ordinary whine and sing-song accompaniments; though still characterised by the intermittent and passionate style of delivery common to all the Quaker-preachers male and female, whom I had heard before.

The Quakers’ Carnival in Dublin, The Metropolitan vol. 1, p. 167 (1831)

The author of this last article goes on to describe how the preacher he was describing was held in low regard by her meeting, since her unintoned ministry seemed too well thought-out to be authentically inspired!

Even when Quakers themselves begin to use the term sing-song in print, in the second half of the 19th century, it is used mainly in a critical or even mocking fashion:

At present, we are not, at our school, initiated into the mysteries of do, re,  me, &c.; so I cannot in the text give any idea of this (to me) most revolting sing-song. It is astonishing that persons of fair intellectual attainments, who everywhere else, and at all times beside, speak with a natural tone, and in a simple and unaffected manner, should, the moment they open their lips on the rising-seat ignore all the laws of elocution and common sense.

James Bunker Congdon, Quaker Quiddities, or Friends in Council, p. 41 (1860)

Congdon’s book, consisting of a satirical poem with explanatory notes, was published when he was an undergraduate. He notes in the introduction that he was acting contrary to discipline by not first gaining the approval of the Meeting for Sufferings, but says he is too young to be subject to disownment.

Elizabeth Coale was an elder in Benjaminville Monthly Meeting, near Bloomington, Illinois

The local meeting has six or seven preachers. Some of these were gifted (?) in a remarkable degree with the old-time sing-song of the Quaker ministry, and so intensified that the words were often drowned in the music (?) so that their sound and meaning were obscured to a great extent; but a deep solemnity and earnestness pervaded the assembly…

Elizabeth Coale, ‘A Conservative Yearly Meeting in Iowa’, Friends Intelligencer vol. 63, no. 47, pp. 711–712 (1906)

Coale’s parenthesized question marks make  her opinion of the sing-song clear.

But as the sing-song began to wane, the term also began to be used without apparent negative connotations. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it often appears as a sentimental  term expressing nostalgia for disappearing Quaker ways:

Where is gone the dignity that marked the “Friends’ Meetings” of other days? The thoughtful silence, the long patience, the gentleness, the solemnity, the pauses? …No matter what was said or done, there was refreshment in what was left undone and unsaid; the speeches might be dull, but the silence worked conviction. The Spirit might not seem effectual when it moved, but it was heavenly when it restrained. Does it restrain now?  Not a bit of it… In the older speakers, together with some of the Quaker sing-song, there linger something of the old Quaker simplicity.  …More often [younger speakers] stand up, eager and unabashed, to “testify,” without an apparent struggle.

T.W.H., ‘Quaker Revivals’, The Index, vol. 4, no. 185, p. 272 (1873)

Nowadays, it seems to me, Friends mostly take “sing-song” as a completely neutral name for this bygone practice, devoid of any derogatory overtones.

If the specific word sing-song did not come into use among Friends until the 19th century, when did the actual practice of intoned preaching begin? Certainly much earlier, but the few statements I can find by historians are rather vague: “In the 18th century” (B.P. Dandelion, The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction),  ”By the nineteenth century” (Thomas Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism).

The earliest explicit reference to Quaker chanting I have found is in a 1736 French book surveying religions of the world:

But the spirit does not always dictate sermons, or exhortations: sometimes it inspires prayers to the Quakers, other times it inspires them to chant. During the discourse, the prayer, or the exhortation of the faithful one whom the spirit has seized, the other faithful pray silently, examine themselves, sighing, apply to themselves what they hear, also become restless in interior combat of the spirit against the passions, & the efforts that Satan, they say, makes only too often to remain in them. It is during these agitations, and these combats, that a trembling takes the faithful one: and it has even happened, Croesius tells us (a) that the trembling was so universal in the assembly that one would have said there was an earthquake in the place, where they were assembled. It still happens, & even (b) more than one time, that the assembly disperses without anyone there having preached or exhorted, but then they do not pray inwardly any less. I have spoken of the singing of these Quakers, but one must not imagine that it resembles ours. It is a kind of buzzing, worthy of the spiritual slumber of the sect.

Bernard Picard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde vol. 4, p. 132 (my translation)

One cannot say with certainty, of course, that the chanting described here was the same as the sing-song of the 19th century, but it seems quite likely that chanted ministry was in continuous use in the interval, and that 19th century sing-song developed by stages from the kind of chanting described by Picard.

For the present post I decided to try to address these concerns by checking the same set of terms against a larger corpus, namely Google Books.

Google Books presents its own set of challenges and drawbacks for this kind of work. Perhaps most importantly, it provides no practical way to limit one’s search to “Quaker literature” — texts by Quaker authors dealing with Quaker topics. Since I was trying to uncover historical trends in Quaker religious terminology, it was important to me not to chart the relative frequency of my search terms in Google Books as a whole, but against something approximating the body of Quaker literature for each decade.

I dealt with this problem in an admittedly crude way: I limited my searches to works containing at least one occurrence of the word Quaker in addition to whatever my main search term was. To gauge frequency, I divided the totals by the number of results for the single word Quaker without any other search terms.

Of course searching on the single word “Quaker” returns not just Quaker literature in the usual sense, but also anti-Quaker literature, literature on the Quaker Oats Company, on Quaker parakeets, etc. — but as long as the proportion of irrelevant literature does not vary drastically from decade to decade, this should not affect our results too badly.

To give a sense of our sample size, here is a graph showing the number of results for the single word Quaker, decade by decade for the period 1650–2009:

Works containing 'Quaker' in Google Books (Click to enlarge)

As in my earlier searches of the DQC, the figures here represent the number of works in each decade that contain at least one occurrence of the search term — not actual word frequencies.

As you can see, there is enormous growth in our sample size over the period covered. For the 1650s, Google Books contains just 111 works containing the word  Quaker; for the 2000s, it contains some 237,000.

Now, how many of these works contain “Light”-based terminology for God’s inward presence? As in my earlier post using the DQC, I ran searches on the phrases inward light, inner light, light within, and light of Christ, as well as the single word light. Here are the results:

Frequency of 'Light' metaphors (Click to enlarge)

The main surprise here was the big spike in the 1710s. I have no idea what caused this, and am not even sure that it isn’t just a glitch caused by Google’s algorithm for estimating result totals rather than a real increase in frequency. Another slight surprise is that the totals for the single word light are significantly lower than in the DQC. There, 100% of the works for several decades contained at least one occurrence of this word, and no decade showed less than 60%. But in Google Books, none of the totals even reach 40%, and few even exceed 15%.

In other respects, the results here replicate those we found earlier. In the early decades, light of Christ and light within are much more frequent than inward light or inner light. Far from being the most standard of these terms in the early decades, inward light doesn’t reach its peak frequency of just 2% until the 1840s — the same decade in which inner light first breaks 1%. Inner light has shown steady growth ever since, disconfirming my initial impression that its popularity had peaked in the early 20th century.

A popular metaphor in early Quakerism was the “Seed.” As I reported in my earlier post using the DQC, I found it problematic to automate a way of distinguishing this use of the word seed from other uses; but for the sake of comparison across the two corpora, here are the results from Google Books:

Frequency of "Seed" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Don’t look for the “seed of Christ” curve on this graph — this phrase never reached 1% during the entire period, so the curve is a flat line at zero. The single word seed also turned out to be much less frequent here than in the DQC, never returning to its peak of just 7% in the 1650s. (In the DQC, it reached 100% for several decades, and never dropped below 50%.)

Next I looked at “Spirit”-based terms:

Frequency of "Spirit"-based metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Here again the percentages are quite a bit lower than in the DQC. As with “Light” there is an odd spike in the 1710s, but otherwise few real surprises. It is interesting to note the upturn in all these terms over the last decade or so.

My last set of terms includes that of God, that of God in everyone, and that of God in every man:

Frequency of "that of God" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

The surprise for me was how infrequent all of these terms are — none of them ever even breaking 3%! The general pattern is similar to that in the DQC, however: popularity in the early decades and again in recent decades, with a lull in the middle. That of God in every man peaked in the 1950s but has been on the decline ever since, no doubt as Friends have become more sensitive to the sexism this wording implies.

Addendum, 12/19/2010: By coincidence, I posted all this just days after the release of Google Books’ N-gram Viewer, which allows one to graph word and phrase frequency against time in Google Books. There has been a great deal of publicity and Internet chatter surrounding this release and the simultaneous publication in Science of Michel et al.’s article ‘Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books‘, which promotes the use of N-gram Viewer to analyze linguistic, literary and cultural trends — so I should perhaps make clear that I was not using N-gram Viewer, but just the ordinary search function in Google Books.

But as an afterthought, here is an actual frequency graph for our “Light”-based terms generated by N-gram Viewer:

N-gram frequency for "Light"-based metaphors

Unlike our earlier graphs, this one represents actual frequency of these phrases, rather than the percentage of works that contain at least one occurrence of a given phrase.  Frequency is relative to Google Books as a whole by year. As before, we see that in the early years of Quakerism, light within and light of Christ were by far more frequent than inward light or inner light.

Through most of this graph, the curves are all so low that it is hard to see what is really going on, so let’s focus in on some shorter periods. Here is the period 1750–1765:

N-gram frequency for "Light" metaphors, 1750--1765

What I found interesting here is the sudden spike for inward light in 1754, followed by a sudden spike for light within in 1761. It would be interesting to investigate the reasons for these spikes — was the second one in any sense a reaction to the first?

Now here is a chart for 1820–1950:

N-gram frequency of "Light" metaphors, 1820--1950

This shows a huge spike for light within and light of Christ around 1830, presumably as part of the heated debate following the Hicksite separation. What is more interesting to me is that inner light reaches detectable frequency about the same time, and rises more-or-less steadily throughout the period, overtaking inward light about 1885.

Google’s N-gram Viewer is a great tool — not without its problems and limitations, as many people have emphasized, but still extremely useful for doing the kind of work this blog is all about.

Friends have used a variety of phrases based on this metaphor of a spiritual Light: the Inward Light, the Inner Light, the Light Within, the Light of Christ, the Light of Christ Within, and others, including simply the Light — this last probably being the most common.

But it should also be noted that a wide variety of phrases have been in common use for this Divine inward presence which do not appeal to the metaphor of Light: the Seed, that of God in everyone, the Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, and simply Christ, among many others.

It is natural to wonder to what extent these terms have waxed and waned in popularity — whether Light metaphors have been more popular at certain times in Quaker history, for example. My guess, based on nothing more than impressions and intuitions from reading Quaker literature from different periods, was that Light metaphors were extremely common in early Quakerism, but became somewhat scarcer in the 18th and early 19th centuries, before being revived again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More recently, it seemed to me, Light  metaphors have again gone into decline, with modern Friends much more likely to use phrases like the Spirit or that of God than the Light or anything similar.

But personal impressions can be wrong, so I thought I would try to take a closer look and see how well my guesses might stand up to scrutiny. To test this, I decided to take some actual counts of how frequently Friends at various times used these terms.

The largest Quaker-focused linguistic corpus available in electronic format seems to be the Digital Quaker Collection at the Earlham School of Religion, so I took my counts from that. The DQC includes approximately 500 works from the period 1650–1940, though rather unevenly distributed over that time span.

Unfortunately, the DQC’s search capabilities are not as powerful as one might hope in doing this kind of work, and it is not possible to obtain individual word frequencies without doing a lot of tedious hand-counting and arithmetic. However, the DQC does make it quite easy to count the number of works published during a given period which contain at least one occurrence of a given search term, so that is what I did.

The blue region in the following graph shows the total number of works in the DQC for each decade in the period covered. The high peaks in the 1720s, 1780s and 1830s correspond to the publication of the collected works of William Penn, Isaac Penington, and George Fox, respectively. Since these were anthologies of previously published material, the original publication dates were obviously earlier than what is shown on the graph. The DQC includes several additional anthologies and republications which do not produce such noticeable peaks in the graph, but which complicate the interpretation of the dates in the same way.

The purple region shows the number of works that contain at least one occurrence of the word light. Obviously, the vast majority of all works at all time periods contain at least one occurrence of this word — which does not support my initial intuition that “Light” -based metaphors declined and then were revived.

Works with "Light"vs. totals (Click to enlarge)

It should be remembered that this graph shows all occurrences of the word light, including occurrences as a noun in its ordinary secular sense, as an adjective meaning “not heavy,” etc. Since light is a pretty common word, it is not very surprising that a large number of texts contain it, no matter how frequently it may have occurred in religious metaphors.

Perhaps we could find better evidence of historical change if we counted specific phrases like Inward Light, Inner Light, Light Within, Light of Christ, etc. Here is a graph comparing how many works contain each of these terms, again decade-by-decade:

Works containing "Light" phrases (Click to enlarge)

And here is one showing the same data, but presented in terms of what percentage of works from each decade contained at least one occurrence of each of the phrases under consideration:

Percentage of works with "Light" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

These graphs show a few surprises, at least for me. Contrary to what I expected, there seems to have been a pretty steady use of Light metaphors all through this period, with no noticeable decline during the middle period.

I was also surprised to find a couple of very early uses of the phrase Inner Light. A few years ago, on the old Quaker-L email discussion list, some participants claimed repeatedly that early Friends never used this phrase, but only Inward Light — this choice was supposed to have some theological significance, so that the “modern” phrase Inner Light should be considered a distortion of the original idea. At the time, I argued against this view based on historical changes in the meaning of the word inward, but took for granted that they were correct in claiming the phrase Inner Light was modern. In fact, it turns out that this phrase dates back almost to the beginning of the Quaker movement. The earliest attestation I have found is in Samuel Fisher’s Rusticus ad Academicos, first published in 1660. (It shows in the graph as published in the 1670′s because the version in the DQC is from Fisher’s collected works, Testimony of Truth Exalted by the Collected Labours of that Worthy Man, Good Scribe, and Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, Samuel Fisher, published in 1679.) Here is one of several occurrences of Inner Light in Fisher’s book:

And seeing God is the Sole immediate Author of the Light and Spirit within, which is not alterable, flexible, &c. at the wills of Criticks, as thou confessest the Hebrew Text is, and as he is not of the Letter, which is both Copied Canonized and Authorized (as ye have it) by men only as the Rule, if it follow (as secundum Te it doth, not Me ) ab Authore remoto from the remote Author of it God, from whom nothing imperfect can come, that the Letter is the only perfect Rule and Revelation of Gods will, will it not much more forcibly follow from Gods being the only and immediate Author of the Inner Light and Spirit, that they are the only sufficient Rule, and make a perfect Revelation of his will to the ends and purposes aforesaid?

p. 475

Of course it should be recognized that even if this term occurs very early, it did not become commonplace until much later. But — and this was another surprise for me — neither did the term Inward Light. Both these terms occur much less frequently than either Light Within or Light of Christ until well into the 19th century.

What about terms for God’s inward presence which do not appeal to metaphors of light?

The first of these I looked at was Seed, shown in the following two graphs:

Works with "Seed" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Percentage of works with "Seed" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Seed turned out to be quite a  common word in the DQC, with percentages reaching 100% in several decades; but on closer inspection, this included a large number of examples in which this word was used for something other than God’s inward presence in the spirit — mostly other religious usages (e.g. “seed of Abraham,” etc.), but with a few occurrences in the ordinary secular sense as well.

I thought I might better isolate the kinds of examples I was looking for by searching under “seed of Christ,” but as you can see in the graphs, this barely produced a blip — and even some of these turned out to mean something different, as in “I am clothed with a little strength, both to visit the seed of Christ , and to minister to it” (Memoirs of the life and gospel labors of Stephen Grellet, vol. 1, p. 173). It seems pretty clear that simple word searches will not give an accurate picture of the frequency of the “Seed” metaphor for God’s inward presence; perhaps someone with more patience or cleverness than I will come up with a more informative count.

Next, I looked at “Spirit” terms: Spirit of Christ, Holy Spirit, and Holy Ghost. All three of these turned out to be very frequent throughout the whole period, as the following two graphs show:

Works with "Spirit" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Percentage of works with "Spirit" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Finally, I looked at the phrases that of God, that of God in everyone (including examples where everyone was spelled as two words, as was common in the 17th century), and that of God in every man:

Works with "That of God" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

Percentage of works with "That of God" metaphors (Click to enlarge)

It is worth paying attention to the difference in these graphs between that of God and that of God in everyone/every man. It is easy to get the impression from the graphs that that of God was in continuous use as a term for God’s inward presence throughout the period shown (albeit less frequently in the middle period). However, a closer inspection showed that many of these examples were spurious for our present purposes, as in “There is no saving power but that of God” (Memoirs of Samuel M. Janney, p. 145). If we focus on the longer phrases that of God in everyone/every man, it appears that this kind of terminology was popular in the early years of the Quaker movement, then became extremely rare until the early 20th century (aside from the publication of Fox’s collected works).

I wouldn’t draw very firm conclusions about frequency from any of the data I’ve presented in this post. As I mentioned at the beginning, works in the DQC are very unevenly distributed in time. The small sample size for some decades produces big swings in the percentage graphs that probably do not represent real trends. There are several decades, including the 1730s, 1740s and 1920s, for which the DQC does not contain any works at all.

In a future post, I hope to examine whether clearer patterns emerge from in a larger corpus, such as Google Books.

The earliest occurrence of the word orthodox for opponents of Elias Hicks that I have come across is in the anonymous 1824 pro-Hicks pamphlet ‘The Misrepresentations of Anna Braithwait’ [sic]:

Among these for some time stood conspicuous ____ ____, who in a letter to a friend in this city, denounces Elias Hicks as preaching doctrines that tend to destroy the Christian Religion, merely on account of the testimony he bore, in common with many of his Brethren against Bible Societies, and some other similar associations, and to so great a height did he carry his malice that by the cry of heresy, he raised the standard of dissention for all the disaffected; accused Elias Hicks of preaching unsound doctrines and inculcating pernicious principles. Many of the weak members of his Society have been deceived, and the cry of ignorance and infidelity extended across the Atlantic. The sympathy of their wise and orthodox Brethren was excited into lively existence, and the poor, the savage, the unlearned society of Friends beyond the water has claimed their tender commiseration. Hence puffed up with high notions of superior understanding and cultivated mind, raised still higher by ideas of grovelling America, A. Braithwait left the soil of her native England, armed with full documentary evidence of her unity with the society at home, gifted by nature with unbounded assurance of mind and a countenance undaunted in what she considered the service of the Lord. She it was before whom the monster of infidelity was to wither and to die, who was to bring the American people into all the glorious consistency of the Mother Church.

This very early Hicksite application of orthodox comes across as contemptuous and sarcastic — but is really too early, I think, to be functioning as the name of a definite party in the controversy.  Rather, it seems merely to be an ironic description of the perceived self-righteousness and condescending attitude of British Friends. A clearer use of the term Orthodox to refer to an identifiable side in the impending schism appears in the New York religious newspaper The Telescope, April 1, 1826 (almost exactly a year before the actual separation took place in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting):

There is now a general commotion and overturning among the once peaceful people called Quakers.— Within a short period two rival parties have arisen in the society. The division seems mostly to have originated in a difference of sentiment, maintained and strenuously enforced by two noted preachers of that order, viz.: Elias Hicks, and Anna Braithwaite. The old party adhere to the tenets of the latter, and are denominated “Orthodox,” while the new party adhere to the sentiments of the former and are denominated “Reformers,” or “Hicksites.” The Orthodox side maintain that they themselves hold the principles of the founders of the society, and that the other party are rank Socinians, and no better than deists. On the other hand the Reformers accuse them of intolerance, bigotry, and desire “to lord it over God’s heritage;” and thus a constant warfare is maintained; each trying to gain the ascendancy.

Here, the word Orthodox appears to be an expression of the anti-Hicks party’s claim to represent traditional Quakerism, with no hint that it may have been interpreted as pejorative or sarcastic.

(A brief digression: It is interesting to note that this very early description of the controversy portrays the Orthodox side as conservative and the Hicksites as “Reformers.”  Many Friends today look back to Elias Hicks as the father of liberal Quakerism, a perspective that is reinforced in works like Bliss Forbush’s biography Elias Hicks: Quaker Liberal.  But it has been more popular among recent historians to paint Hicks as a conservative, attempting to maintain traditional Quietism against a rising trend of innovative Evangelicalism — see Larry Ingle’s Quakers in Conflict, for example.  It is perhaps worth bearing in mind that Friends on both sides of the schism took their positions for a variety of different reasons, and Hicks’ personal motivations may not have been representative of Hicksite Friends’ more generally.)

The only explicit explanation of the origin of the term Orthodox that I know of by a Friend of this era is offered by Hicksite James Cockburn, who in 1829 wrote:

The application of the term orthodox to a party in the society of Friends, appears to have arisen from the similarity of their assumptions and measures with those of the various sects who, at different periods of the church, have laid claim to this distinction, and on this ground have proscribed and persecuted others who have differed from them in opinion.

A Review of the General and Particular Causes which have Produced the Late Disorders and Divisions in the Yearly Meeting of Friends held in Philadelphia, p. vi

But Cockburn is highly partisan and his explanation should be considered in that light.

In non-Quaker speech, the use of lay down to mean “discontinue” is much less regular, and largely confined to fixed phrases and semi-metaphorical expressions, such as to lay down one’s life, or to lay down one’s arms.  But in the Society of Friends, this is the standard phrase to use in indicating that an organization is being discontinued, and is used even in the formal style of meeting minutes, as in “The work of the ad hoc committee now being complete, accordingly it is laid down.”

This usage goes back to the early days of the Quaker movement.  The earliest example I can find of lay down being used in connection with the discontinuation of a meeting or other organization is in Truth exalted in the writings of that eminent and faithful servant of Christ John Burnyeat (1691).  Burnyeat uses it in his account of the Wilkinson-Story separation of the 1670s:

Amongst many things of Concern, relating to the Truth, and the Churches of Christ, that Division in Westmorland was laid before the Meeting, and how they were hardened, and had set up a Separate Meeting, and so had withdrawn themselves from the rest of their Brethren, and broken the Christian Fellowship: which thing, when understood by the Brethren there assembled, was a grief unto them. And therefore under the sence thereof, and in that Brotherly Love, with which their Hearts were filled towards them, were there Two Epistles writ from the Meeting, one to J. S. and J. W. warning and advising them, as Heads and Leaders in that Sedition and Schism, to endeavour to break up that Separate Meeting, and to be Reconciled unto their Brethren, before they did go abroad to offer their Gift. And the other was writ to the Meeting, as Advice unto them to Return to their former Fellowship with Friends, and lay that Separate Meeting down, and joyn with their Brethren in the Unity of the Truth, &c.

p. 96

As venerable as this phrase is, it would be a mistake to think of it as required by Quaker tradition.  An examination of older sources shows that Friends used a variety of other phrases for the disestablishment of meetings.  The 1809 Discipline of New England Yearly Meeting (apparently citing a minute from 1760) writes simply

Agreed that no quarterly-meeting be set up, divided in two, or discontinued, but by the yearly-meeting; no monthly meeting but by the quarterly; no preparative, or meeting for worship, but by the monthly-meeting…

The Old Discipline: Nineteenth-Century Friends’ Disciplines in America, p.  161

The 1810 Discipline of New York Yearly Meeting likewise uses discontinue rather than lay down.  The 1823 Discipline of North Carolina Yearly Meeting interestingly uses put down rather than lay down:

It is agreed that no quarterly meeting be set up, or put down, without consent of the yearly meeting; no monthly meeting, without consent of the quarterly meeting; nor any preparative, or other meeting for business or worship, till application to the monthly meeting first is made, and when there approved, the consent of the quarterly meeting be had also.

The Old Discipline, p. 416

But other older disciplines, including those of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (1806), Baltimore Yearly Meeting (1806), and Virginia Yearly Meeting (1814), use lay down.

In the period around the Hicksite separation, when the official discontinuation of Hicksite meetings by their Orthodox opponents became newsworthy enough to be reported in the popular press, the Quaker use of the term lay down was sometimes noted, as in the following quote from The Niles Weekly Register for July 5, 1828:

It is well known to many of our readers that unfortunate differences have for sometime existed amongst the members of this hitherto peaceable and retired society, originating in certain points of doctrine, and that one part has attempted to exclude the other from a participation in the use of the property hitherto common to the society, as well to “lay down,” as it is called, many of the meetings, and to disown the members.

vol. 35, no. 87, p. 303

It is clear from this wording that lay down was understood as a peculiarly Quaker expression, and was not part of the ordinary English of the period.

It is worth asking whether Quakers have always used lay down as a term for discontinuing other sorts of practices, and not just for the disestablishment of meetings; or if instead the use of this term with respect to meetings is historically prior to other uses.  In investigating this question, I came across the following passage from George Fox — the earliest Quaker attestation of lay down of which I am aware:

Let all Judges, Lawyers, Attorneys and Clerkes, lay down their fees, and gifts, and all Priests or Ministers lay down their tithes, stipends, gleab-lands, Easter reckonings, Midsummer dues, offerings, the Popes wages, let them all go out free, Judges, Priests, Ministers, Lawyers, Attorneys, and none to judge for money, nor preach for money, tithes, nor land, nor offerings, and then it will be seen who loves his neighbour as himself, who will come to the Law from that which blinds him, and then it shall be seen who will preach the Gospel freely, that they may live of it, and who will thresh, and plant vineyards, and get flocks, and this will be the way to restore Judges, as they were at first, out of that which blinded them, and to restore Ministers as they were in the dayes of the Apostles, into that they were in…

An Instruction to Judges and Lawyers (1658), p. 29

I found this passage interesting not just for its early use of lay down — and in connection with something other than the discontinuation of a meeting — but also because it calls on judges and lawyers to work without pay.  Friends’ opposition to paid ministers is well-known, but I think it is largely forgotten now that early Quakers (or at least Fox) also opposed paid judges and lawyers.

In fact, just three years earlier,  Fox condemned judges and lawyers entirely:

The Lord Jesus Christ who bears the Government upon his shoulders, and he is coming to rule all Nations with a rod of Iron. All you Hills which have been sheltring-places, shall be beaten to pieces: you Rocks that have been hiding places, shall be cloven asunder, you Mountains shall be laid low, you green trees where much adultery hath been committed, must be cut down, and you adulterers judged, the Lord hath spoken it, who will bear the government himself, and rule all Nations with his own mighty power, and women shall not rule the people, there shall be one Judge and one Law-giver, one King, Glory and Honour for ever. Sing all ye Saints and rejoyce, clap your hands and be glad, for the Lord Jehovah will reign, and the government shall be taken from you pretended Rulers. Judges and Justices, Lawyers and Constables, all this tree must be cut down, and Jesus Christ will rule alone: Glory and honour for ever be unto him.

Newes coming up out of the north, sounding towards the south (1655) pp. 19-20

In light of passages like this, it is perhaps not surprising that many people did not clearly distinguish between Quakers and other groups such as the Fifth Monarchy Men, who also anticipated the immanent overthrow of the government and legal system, and its replacement with direct rule by Christ.

To people new to Quakerism, this can be an odd-sounding phrase, since in ordinary usage, we rarely speak of one person “speaking someone else’s mind.” Expressions like “John really speaks his mind” are quite common, of course, but in this case it is John’s own mind which he speaks, not someone else’s.  The implication here is of not holding back, of expressing one’s thoughts despite a possible negative reaction from others.  This implication is not present in “That Friend speaks my mind,” which instead serves as a quite neutral statement that one’s own views on the issue under discussion were already well described by what someone else has said.

It is difficult to gauge how long this phrase has been part of Quaker usage, since it is one that appears primarily just in speech, and even then almost exclusively in the special context of business meetings. It does not appear in early Quaker literature — but this literature consists mainly of doctrinal tracts, epistles, journals, etc.; we wouldn’t expect to encounter it in these genres anyway. Nor should we expect it in business meeting minutes, since these function merely as an official record of the proceedings, and don’t ordinarily include a verbatim transcript of what was said during the meeting.  It is natural to suspect, then, that this phrase was in use long before its first appearance in print.

That having been said, the earliest occurrence of this phrase I have found is from 1821, in a newspaper article describing Quaker business practice (at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in particular):

When a subject is broached, a member rises and gives his opinion of it in language at once concise, comprehensive, and definite. A second follows him, extending the view of the subject if there is any cause for extension, if not, he expresses his accordance of sentiment in a short sentence, such for instance as “I am in unity with the friend who has last spoken,” or, “that friend speaks my mind,” and down he sits very composedly. A third rises delivering his opinion in like manner, or, if he dissents from the others, he expresses his disapprobation in a speech equally pertinent and laconic; and thus a subject is broached, discussed, and decided upon, in less time, perhaps, than we have taken to relate the mode of proceeding; for these people do not think it necessary to use ten thousand words to communicate ten ideas, or give to ten ideas ten thousand forms.

Niles’ Weekly Register, vol. XX, no. 22, p. 348

I wonder how many of our modern business meetings could be described as similarly “laconic.”

Another early appearance of this phrase in print is in the mouth of a Quaker character in the short story ‘The Outlaw of the Pines’, published in Atkinson’s Casket in 1833:

“That’s right, Amy Collins; I like to hear you say so. How them Hessians can run — the tarnal niggars — they steal sassages better than they stand bullets.  I told ‘em it would be so, when they was here beguzzlen my bucket cakes, in plain English; only the outlandish Injins couldn’t understand their mother tongue.—  They’re got enough swallowen without chawen, this morning. I wish ‘em nothen but Jinerel Maxwell, at their tails, tickling ‘em with continental bagnets.”

“That friend speaks my mind,” said Elnathan, with a half sanctimonious, half waggish look, and slight nasal twang.

“Mine too,” as devoutly responded a companion, whom he had just brought to assist in the pursuit of the robbers.

Atkinson’s Casket, no. 2, p. 54.

In any case, the phrase “That Friend speaks my mind” is mentioned by several 19th century authors, almost always as a Quaker expression.  Here is a fairly typical example from 1853:

UNITY OF SENTIMENT

A contemporary asks— What is true independence? and then adds— “A great many people like ‘an independent press,’ which chimes exactly with their own opinions, but a truly honest press must differ from somebody.” Of course it must.  If everybody thought the same way, what an unhappy unanimity there would be!  To use the phraseology of the Quakers, no speech would be uttered, but some one would jump up and exclaim “That friend speaks my mind,” while all the auditors would assent by a charming display of “nods and becks and wreathed smiles,” It has been wisely ordained that tastes should be as dissimilar as individuals, of whom no two are to be found exactly alike; and it is to this opposition, and to these diversities and these similarities with a difference, that every advancement in knowledge and the arts is owing.

Arthur’s Home Magazine, vol. 1, no. 7, p. 560

In this example, the phrase itself and its connection to Quakerism are incidental to the general purpose of the text, but the phrase is discussed in more systematic descriptions of Quaker customs right up to the present, e.g. Charles Frederick Holder’s The Quakers in Great Britain and America (1913), Anna Wistar Comfort’s ‘Some Peculiarities of Quaker Speech’ (one of the first modern scholarly treatments of Quaker language, in American Speech 7.6 (1932)), Howard Brinton’s Guide to Quaker Practice (1943), Leonard Kenworthy’s Quakerism: A Study Guide on the Religious Society of Friends (1981), Thomas Hamm’s The Quakers in America (2003), etc.  Unlike some old Quaker phrases, this is not one which died out and was later revived, but seems to have been in continuous use over an extended period.

Friends have stood against oath-taking since the very early days of the Quaker movement.  But the phrase “a single standard of truth” is much more recent.  The earliest occurrence of this exact phrase I have found is in an address by William C. Braithwaite to Five Years Meeting in 1912, entitled “The Essentials of Quakerism,” and published in his book The Message and Mission of Quakerism the same year:

We witness against oaths, because we uphold a single standard of truth speaking, and against distinctions of dress and address, because all men are equal in the sight of God; we oppose war because the armor of the children of light is the armor of righteousness, and disuse the outward form of baptism because the all-important thing is not the form but the inward repentance and cleansing by the blood of Christ.

p. 25

Variants of this phrase can be found a little earlier.  The earliest I know of is in an address by Richard H. Thomas at the Manchester Conference of 1895 and published in the proceedings:

Accepting the words of our great Master, “Swear not at all,” we desire to be found speaking the truth one to another with but one standard of truth.

Report of the Proceedings of the Conference of Members of the Society of Friends in Manchester, p. 385

It is interesting to note that the phrase ‘standard of truth’ is one which occurs with some frequency in earlier Friends literature — but in an entirely different sense, unconnected with the testimony against oaths.  In this earlier literature the phrase is understood figuratively in the sense of a flag or banner, as in an 1842 letter from Nathan Hunt to J.J. Gurney:

I mention England, because there this remarkable people first raised the standard of truth with the Star of Bethlehem upon it, and may it never be lowered by their descendants in that nation in any respect.

Memoirs of William and Nathan Hunt (1858), p. 152

The following is another representative quote, from Thomas Shillitoe:

Third-day had a meeting: fears were excited in my mind the standard of truth was suffered almost, if not wholly, to fall to the ground by those who were in membership with our religious Society here.

Journal of the Life, Labours, and Travels of Thomas Shillitoe in the Service of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (1839), vol. 1, p. 107

The phrase was especially common in the contentious period around the Hicksite separation. It appears, for example, in the epistle issued by the meeting at which the Hicksite branch of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was originally organized in 1827:

We therefore, under a solemn and weighty sense of the importance of this concern, and with ardent desires that all our movements may be  under the guidance of Him, who only can lead us in safety, have agreed to propose for your consideration, the propriety and expediency of holding a Yearly Meeting for Friends in unity with us, residing within the limits of those Quarterly Meetings, heretofore represented in the Yearly Meeting held in Philadelphia; for which purpose, it is recommended that Quarterly and Monthly Meetings, which may be prepared for such a measure, should appoint representatives to meet in Philadelphia, on the third second day in the tenth month next, at ten o’clock in the morning, in company with other members favourable to our views, there to hold a Yearly Meeting of men and women Friends, upon the principles of the early professors of our name, and for the same purposes that brought them together in a religious capacity—to exalt the standard of truth—promote righteousness and peace in the earth—edify the churches—and generally to attend to all such concerns as relate to the welfare of religious society, and the cause of our holy Redeemer, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

Quoted in James Cockburn, A Review of the General and Particular Causes which have Caused the Late Disorders and Divisions in the Yearly Meeting of Friends held in Philadelphia (1829), p. 220

This phrase was widely used by both Hicksite and Orthodox Friends.  Here are a couple more illustrative quotes:

The power of Truth broke in upon them in a wonderful manner; they seemed melted like wax— some wept aloud, and the Lord was pleased to exalt the standard of Truth, and magnify His power in the eyes of the people. Blessed be His Name for evermore!

Journal of the Life and Gospel Labors of Joseph Hoag (1860), p. 122

I think there is cause for us to magnify the name of Him who has dealt so bountifully with thee!—who, from time to time, (after having brought thee through the deeps,) has raised thee up to bear testimony to his goodness, and enabled thee to exalt the standard of Truth and Righteousness, to his praise, and much, very much, to the satisfaction of thy friends.

Frances Thompson, quoted in Journal of the Life of John Wilbur (1859), p. 89.

Note that in several of these quotes, the phrase appears as part of the longer expression ‘exalt the standard of truth’. This phrase dates back much earlier, long before the Hicksite schism, though it does not appear to have come into widespread use among Friends until then. The earliest occurrence I have found is in a 1666 epistle of Stephen Crisp’s:

But when they shall say, come join with us in this or that, remember you are joined to the Lord by his pure spirit, to walk with him in peace and in righteousness; and you feeling this, this gathers out of all bustlings, and noises, and parties, and tumults, and leads you to exalt the standard of Truth and righteousness, in an innocent conversation, to see who will flow unto that.

The Christian Experiences, Gospel Labours and Writings,
of  that Ancient Servant of Christ, Stephen Crisp (1822), p. 113.

It is natural to suspect that this phrase originates in the Bible; but an electronic search through several translations did not produce any hits.  Do any readers know more?

It turns out my impressions about this word were not entirely accurate. My first hint that the more serious usage of elder was not as recent as I supposed was a brief note in the minutes of Blue River Quarterly Meeting (of Illinois Yearly Meeting) from 1956:

Following the Meeting for Business, Blue River Quarterly Meeting heard two talks by Ralph A. Rose, Associate Secretary, Friends World Committee — one in the afternoon, and one in the evening.  The first was on “The Lost Art of Eldering” and the second on “The World Community of Friends”.

Minutes of Blue River Quarterly Meeting, entry for 2 mo. 4, 1956

In investigating further, the earliest occurrence of elder as a verb that I have found is from 1829, in an article criticizing Edward Hicks:

He possessed a strong aversion to the counsel and admonition of those who were older and more experienced than himself; if any eldering was necessary, he wished it to he done by his juniors, whom he could in return mould into his own views.

The Miscellaneous Repository vol. 3, no. 7, p. 98

(I am not sure who this article was written by; the only indication of authorship is “N.”  The Miscellaneous Repository was edited and published by Elisha Bates.) A few more representative quotes will illustrate how this term was used in the 19th century:

He then proceeded to inform me that he had had some difficulty in getting the chapel for us, ‘For,’ said he, ‘the chaplains, who usually officiate here, do not believe in women preaching, but I pleaded hard, and they consented on condition that I should examine your sermon beforehand, and see whether it was suitable, and now you have not got it ready; will you please to tell me what you are going to say? Our chaplains cannot understand what a woman can have to say to all these men.’ A little more in this new style of eldering I received from him, as to be so kind as to begin promptly and not sit still long, and to conclude in time to be at his house to dine at two o’clock.

Life and Letters of Elizabeth Comstock, p. 138 (1895, quoting a letter from 1863)

Sixth-day afternoon we took the cars, they for Albany and I for Vermont, but we were going some miles the same road. — — beckoned me to take a seat by his side and said, “Thou handed out pretty strong meat today.” I replied I was not aware of it. He said “Thee did,” but, added he, “I have full unity with all thee had to say, for I believe it is truth; but we ought to be careful, for the people cannot bear it; they are not prepared to receive it.” This talk unlocked to view all that I cared about knowing. I had supposed that a minister of the gospel ministered according to the present anointing, and that it was his business to attend to that without considering whether it would please or displease, or whether they would applaud or gnash on him with their teeth; and the minister who takes the other course I think a moral coward. At any rate I do not think the eldering has done me any good, but has left a disagreeable savor.

Memoirs of the Life and Religious Labors of Sunderland P. Gardner, p. 193 (1895, entry from 1866)

In Comstock’s and Gardner’s examples, the idea of criticism — especially undue criticism — is clearly present.  But some other examples use elder in a much more positive sense:

Here is a kindly piece of “eldering” which may be useful beyond the diocese of Exeter: –

“In the course of years a man’s preaching suffers very seriously — all the more seriously because he himself, very likely, does not notice the gradual deterioration — if he allows himself to fancy that he already knows enough, and that all he has to do is to communicate that which in his early days he had stored up in his mind. Nothing can be a greater mistake, and I am certain that when a clergyman in mature years is complained of as being dry or dull — a complaint that we sometimes hear — it arises much more often from the fact that he has disused the quiet and living study of the Bible than from any other cause.”

John Taylor, ‘The Church Lectionary’, Friends Quarterly Examiner vol. 51, p. 429 (1879)

Note that in this example, the word eldering is in quotes, indicating, I think, that it was recognized as colloquial, or at least as not standard English. Many other authors also put it in quotes:

One member cannot suffer without all the members suffering; and it is a painful fact that very often tedious and prolix speakers have been allowed to speak, year by year, without adding anything to the Church, except weariness and the exercise of the gift of patience, while fresh living testimonies, and beginnings of ministries, that should have been welcomed, have been discouraged and “eldered,” because some shibboleth of speech or appearance was wanting.

Helen B. Harris, ‘The Supremacy of Christ in his Church, with Especial Reference to the Question of Worship’, Friends Review vol. 40, no. 48, p. 754 (1887)

“Eldering” by spiritual novices has put out many a tiny spark which might otherwise have become “a burning and shining light.”

Alfred William Brown, ‘Young People and the Society: The Question Viewed from the English Standpoint’, Friends Intelligencer and Journal vol. 48, no .12/vol. 19, no. 947, p. 180 (1891)

It should be noticed that in all these examples, whether eldering is understood as harmful criticism or as helpful advice, it is something which is directed specifically toward ministers, concerning their speaking in meeting. This is not surprising, given that the official charge of meeting elders was “to advise and assist those who may be concerned to minister among us, and in love caution them respecting such mistakes, either in judgment or expression, to which, through human frailty, even good men may sometimes be incident” (Book of Extracts p. 144).

But at least by the late 19th century, elder was being used in a broader sense, so that all kinds of behavior could be “eldered” and not just spoken ministry. An early illustration of this comes from A.E. Wetherald’s short story ‘How the Modern Eve Entered Eden’, published in Canadian Monthly and National Review in 1882 (vol. 8, p. 133.):

‘Thee is a reckless youth, nephew Philip,’ said she, ‘I fear I shall have to give thee an eldering.’

‘An eldering, Aunt Ruth? Do you mean to chastise me with a branch of elder bush?’

‘No, no, foolish boy! Whenever the giddy young people of our society misbehave themselves, the elders in the meeting are constrained to admonish them. That is what some among us call an ‘eldering.”

A.E. Wetherald

Of course this example is from fiction, but Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald (1857–1940) was brought up in a Quaker family and educated at the Friends Boarding School in Union Springs, N.Y.; she would have had a good grasp of Quaker usage.   (Her father, William Wetherald, was a well-known Friends minister, founder of Rockwood Academy, and superintendent of Haverford College.)