258 FOTHERGILL AS A FRIEND CHAP. 



any share in the management of its affairs to the female sex : 

 which they do upon the principle that male and female are 

 all one in Christ. Accordingly we find them in every depart- 

 ment of their institution. They have women preachers," and 

 women's meetings for discipline. 1 



The eighteenth-century Friend, if one may write thus 

 of a period which included more than one epoch, partook 

 of the character of his age. Spiritual gloom in the nation 

 tinged the prevailing tone of religion, and formed a sober 

 foil to the preaching of Whitefield and Wesley. It gave 

 a severe and pessimistic cast to Quaker thought. The 

 faith of the Friend was inherited from a time of more 

 life and light ; tradition had entered into it ; and in 

 the moral corruption of the times the level of his attain- 

 ment fell. A cleansing of the camp took place, as we 

 have seen, in the middle of the century, and pure spiritual 

 faith never failed, but it had become quietist in type, 

 and it did not escape formality even by the absence of 

 all forms. There was little freedom in his thought, and 

 none in his system. His scruples provoked a smile in his 

 own day, and were indeed carried to an extreme by some 

 of the more literal - minded members, who in their 

 sumptuary zeal laid stress upon unnecessary buttons or 

 upon shades of colour in attire. But this must not be 

 charged to the society as a whole. The hat, unlifted to 

 dame or monarch, the plain-cut coat, gown and bonnet, 

 thee-and-thou language and disuse of heathen names of 

 months and days such were the ordinary outward 

 tokens of the Quaker. They are now seldom seen, save 

 in some branches of the community in America ; the 

 homely lingua domestica is also sometimes cultivated, 

 apart from religious sanction, as a badge of neo-Quakerism. 



Yet it would be a mistake lightly to disparage the 



1 Encyclopedia Britannica (ist edition), a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 

 Edinburgh, 1771. The article was printed separately and anonymously as 

 A Brief Account of the People called Quakers, their Doctrines and Discipline, etc., 

 in many editions from 1772 to 1797. For the authorship see Mem. S. Pother gill, 

 p. 480 note. The Baskerville edition of Barclay's Apology, 1766, seems to 

 have been printed under FothergiU's supervision. See MS. Letter from J. 

 Baskerville to Fothergill, with accounts, 242 in all, for printing and paper, in 

 the David Barclav MSS. 



