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The Quakers, however, are so considerable, at least so singular, as to merit some attention; and as they renounced by principle the use of arms, they never made such a figure in public transactions as to enter into any part of our narrative.
On the evening of May 16th, Garrison, Maria Weston Chapman, Angelina Grimké Weld and others addressed the convention in the new temple of freedom. The scenes of that evening have been graphically described by the first speaker as follows: "The floor of the hall was densely crowded with women, some of the noblest specimens of our race, a large proportion of whom were Quakers.
A cautious footstep might now and then be heard in a neighboring apartment, and the sound invariably drew the eyes of both Quakers to the door which led thither. When a fierce and riotous gust of wind had led his thoughts, by a natural association, to homeless travellers on such a night, Pearson resumed the conversation.
Now Fox and the Quakers saved church life by protest against church life. The Bible was still the law, but not the Bible which you read for me, but that which you read for you and I for me, each of us guided by an inner light. The Quaker movement was a distinct protest against church formalism in the interests of freedom of the Bible. David Gregg, The Quakers in America.
Of those who were interested in securing a refuge for the Quakers, the most active was William Penn, who had suffered ridicule and persecution for his faith, and who now desired a clearer field than the Jerseys offered for his political and religious experiments.
The Quakers so called from their trembling agitation when under a powerful sense of eternal realities, and because, in preaching, they admonished their hearers to tremble and quake at the word of God considered the sacraments as mere ceremonies, inconsistent with spiritual worship lived and dressed with the utmost simplicity, and took the lead in attacking error at all risks.
To reconcile, in some degree, the discrepancy between the declarations of Cromwell, in behalf of freedom of conscience, and that mean and cruel persecution which the Quakers suffered under the Protectorate, the generally harmless fanaticism of a few individuals bearing that name is gravely urged.
Yet in spite of the law forbidding them to come, Quakers kept on coming to the colony, and all who came were imprisoned, beaten, and then thrust forth with orders never to return. But still they came.
"When I was a boy," says a prominent Irish-American, "you could hardly see the road here for the carriages and the dust, all of them Quakers going to the Old Meeting House, on Sunday, or to Quarterly Meeting. But now they are all gone."
One would have thought that all such works, whether of the Quakers, of Garrison, of Ballou, or of Helchitsky, asserting and proving as they do, on the principles of the Gospel, that our modern world takes a false view of Christ's teaching, would have awakened interest, excitement, talk, and discussion among spiritual teachers and their flocks alike.
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