Lifespans of Famous Quakers

This doesn’t have much to do directly with Quaker language, but I made the following chart showing the lifespans of various well-known Friends, and thought readers of this blog might be interested. To see the graph full-sized, click on it. This should open the image file; then you may need to click on it again to enlarge.

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.

‘In the manner of Friends’

Quakers will sometimes describe something as done in (or after) the manner of Friends.  This means just what it sounds like it means: that the activity in question is performed in a distinctively or traditionally Quaker fashion.  Most often, this phrase is used of worship or marriage, since in both these areas, Friends’ practice is noticeably different from that of other denominations; but it is occasionally applied to many other sorts of activities as well.

This phrase appears to originate in the first half of the 19th century.  The earliest occurrences I have found are in the Journal of the Life, Labours, and Travels of Thomas Shillitoe (1839), for example in vol. 1, p. 68:

A company of very poor persons at West Houghton, about ten miles
from Warrington, were in the practice of meeting together for religious worship after the manner of Friends, towards whom my attention was turned, with an apprehension of duty to sit with them on First-day in their usual meeting.

The earliest application of this phrase to marriage that I know of is in Life of William Allen, (1847), vol. 1, p. 303, where he describes an interview with the king of Norway, in which the subject of legal recognition for Quaker marriages was discussed:

We spoke of the Friends in Norway, and he told us that the affair of marriage had been before the council, and it was concluded that, provided it was performed after the manner of Friends, and registered, it should be lawful, and that he would protect not only the Friends there at present, but those who might join them in future.

The phrase was used early on for other practices as well, such as shaking hands at the end of a meeting, as in this 1842 report quoted by John Wilbur in A Narrative and Exposition of the Late Proceedings of New England Yearly Meeting pp. 90–91:

We hereby certify, that at the Monthly Meeting of Friends, held at Hopkinton, on the 22d of 8th month last, while the report of the committee in the case of John Wilbur, was in the hands of the women’s meeting, we saw Rowland Greene and Thomas Anthony,
then sitting at the head of the meeting, shake hands after the manner of Friends when breaking up a meeting; but just at that moment, before there was time for others to follow, the women returned the report, and the meeting remained some time longer together.

Stanley Newman uses the phrase to describe the procedure by which a minister requests the approval of a meeting before setting off on a religious journey, in Memories of Stanley Pumphrey (1883), p. 100:

The time was now approaching when after the manner of Friends, this important prospect of service should be thrown before the meetings with which he was connected, for the serious consideration of his fellow-members.

Before closing, perhaps I should say something about the phrase communion after the manner of Friends, used nowadays for waiting worship — predominately, I think, by Orthodox Friends.  This has been around since at least the early 1960’s.  The earliest attestation I have found is in Cecil Riney’s (1964) USC dissertation The Emergence and Development of a Ministry of Music in the Society of Friends, where it appears as part of a sample “Order of Service” on p. 167.

Another relatively early appearance in print is on p. 229 of D. Elton Trueblood’s (1967) biography Robert Barclay.  It is clear from this quote that the phrase was already in reasonably widespread use at that time:

One consequence of this interpretation is that some Friends in the twentieth century now speak of their meetings as “Communion after the manner of Friends.”

This is part of a larger passage in which Trueblood expands on Barclay’s explanation of communion as an inward, spiritual partaking of the blood and body of Christ, not an outward, ceremonial practice with bread and wine.  This conception of communion can certainly be traced back to early Friends, but referring to our worship as “communion in the manner of Friends” is, as Trueblood points out, a modern innovation.

Meeting for X

A characteristic bit of “Quakerese” is our use of phrases of the form meeting for X, for example meeting for worship or meeting for business.  This is a very noticeable usage to newcomers, and one which I think strikes many people as slightly quaint. Perhaps for this reason it sometimes shows up in affectionate jokes, as when I once heard a volunteer cleaning day at our meetinghouse announced as a “meeting for cleaning,” or when a Friend referred to the overly long announcements period after worship as “meeting for announcements.”   But it is also used for perfectly serious but non-traditional events such as “meetings for healing.”

Phrases of the form meeting for X have been in use for a very long time, as in Fox’s Epistle CCCXL, from 1676:

And keep up your meetings for worship, and your men and women’s meetings for the affairs of truth, both Monthly and Quarterly.

Fox here refers to Friends business meetings as “meetings for the affairs of truth,” but the phrase meeting for business appears just about as early, for example in Epistle CCCLXXI (which is undated but obviously written in Fox’s lifetime):

And now, dear friends, in the name and power of the Lord Jesus Christ, and his spirit, keep all your meetings for worship, and your meetings for business, that you may see that all that profess the light of Christ, and his truth, and have received it, that they do walk according to truth, and as becomes the gospel, that the name of God may not be blasphemed amongst you.

Another early example of a phrase of this form is Meeting for Sufferings, for the interim body of London Yearly Meeting (and later, for analogous bodies of other yearly meetings).  This was established in 1675, but the original minute does not quite refer to it under this name:

AGREED, that certain friends of this city be nominated to keep a constant meeting about sufferings four times in a year, with the day and time of each meeting here fixed and settled. That at least one friend of each county be appointed by the quarterly meeting thereof, to be in readiness to repair to any of the said meetings at this city, at such times as their urgent occasions or sufferings shall require. (Book of Extracts p. 121)

The phrase does occur in the following minute, apparently from 1679:

That the meeting for sufferings take the care of inspecting, ordering, regulating the press, and printing of books; and in whatever matter relating to printing of books the country friends find themselves aggrieved, that they write to the said meeting, who are to redress the same; and that no books be reprinted without the said meeting’s direction. (Book of Extracts, p. 15)

It is interesting that the meeting for X form was used here; worship takes place in a meeting for worship, and business takes place in a meeting for business, but one hopes that not too much suffering takes place in a meeting for sufferings!  Perhaps the word choice is an indication that the meeting for X phrasing was already beginning to function as a formulaic way of naming types of meetings, and not just an ordinary descriptive phrase.

There have been a number of more-or-less standard ways of referring to Friends business meetings over the course of history, most of them of the meeting for X form.  The relative chronology of their appearance is worth investigating:

The phrase meeting for discipline appears somewhat later than meeting for business. The earliest occurrence I know of is from the following passage from the Book of Extracts (p. 266):

That the quarterly meetings be careful annually to depute such friends to attend the service of the yearly meeting, as are men fearing God, of good conversation, weighty spirits, prudent and sincere, well acquainted with the affairs of truth, and diligent attenders of meetings for discipline at home; whose practice and conversation is answerable to the testimony they profess to bear; men known to be faithful and conscientious.  1714. P. E. 1733. P. E.

(The notation at the end indicates that this passage was extracted from London Yearly Meeting’s printed epistles of 1714 and 1733; I don’t know which of these epistles contained the actual phrase “meetings for discipline.”)

Just a little later the phrase meeting for church affairs appears in Besse’s Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers (1753):

On the 3d of the Month called July was a Meeting for Church-Affairs, such as providing for the Poor, and the like good Offices, at the House of Joane Wray, of Fulbeck, Widow. (vol. 1, p. 356)

Nowadays this phrase is mainly used in Britain, I think; and if I had not found it in Besse I would have suspected that it arose out of the evangelical trend that came to dominate British Quakerism through much of the 19th century.  But it clearly predates that trend, as this quote shows.

The term business meeting, as far as I can tell, does not appear until close to a century later.  The earliest attestation I have found is from 1845, in John Wilbur’s A Narrative and Exposition of the Late Proceedings of New England Yearly Meeting (p. 159):

That T. C. C. having served this meeting as clerk for many years, has, as we believe, in every case of his re-appointment, that is every year, (to use the committee’s own words,) “made the minute appointing himself.” And the same has been the case under similar circumstances, in relation both to Quarterly and Yearly Meeting’s clerks, if not in all business meetings in New England.

As I mentioned in the Introduction to this blog the currently popular phrase meeting for worship with a concern for business is absent from older Friends literature (as are variants such as meeting for worship with attention to business).  I presume this kind of phrasing was introduced in some modern exposition of Friends business practices, which I have not yet been able to identify.  Do any readers have any ideas?  Searching for these phrases on Google Books returns hits back to the late 1980’s; presumably the phrases are not much older than this.