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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
After having surveyed the barrenness of the valley in which were scattered skeletal remains, the prophet in the book of Ezekiel was asked, “O mortal man, can these bones live?” And his reply was not an optimistic “they will live” but rather “O Lord God, thou knowest.” When the historian begins to discuss the common theological assumptions and issues which perplexed the seventeenth century, he does not know whether they can be put into a meaningful context and is uncertain that these “bones” can be made to live. The recent historian who made a large American audience aware of seventeenth-century thought was the late Perry Miller who summarized the New England strands of thought in an essay entitled “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity.” Miller argued that theology was a part of the essence, the very marrow, of Puritanism to which a copious amount of thought was devoted. The seriousness of the Puritan concern was witnessed by the succession of able theologians from William Ames and Richard Baxter in the seventeenth century, to Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Chauncy in the eighteenth century.
1. Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), pp. 48–98.Google Scholar
2. Before 1800 the Apology was reprinted nine times in England, three in Ireland, three in Philadelphia, and three in New England. Barclay's Catechism and Confession of Faith was issued in English sixteen times in Great Britain and four times in America before 1800. The most detailed analysis of Barclay's thought is Eeg-Olofsson, Leif, The Conception of Inner Light in Robert Barclay's Theology (Lund, Norway: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1954)Google Scholar. Trueblood, David Elton, Robert Barclay (New York: Harper and Row, 1968)Google Scholar is a readable biography and very favorable study of Barclay's theology.
3. Historians have emphasized two influences as of primary importance in the beginnings of the Society of Friends. Robert Barclay, a nineteenth-century historian, Rufus Jones, Rachel King, and Ronald Knox stressed the similarities between Quakers and Anabaptists and mystics on the Continent. George H. Williams termed the Friends “indirectly dependent” upon the Radical Reformation. Rufus Jones found Sebastain Frank, Jacob Boehme, and the Cambridge Platonists as exemplars of the great upsurge in “spiritual religion” which produced the Friends. Geoffrey Nuttall, Alan Simpson, Frederick Tolles, and Hugh Barbour found the Quakers to be a part of the Puritan movement in England with Friends differing from other Puritans in that they took general theological emphases to more radical conclusions. Historians agree on the influence of Baptist ideas, but were the Baptists part of Puritanism or Continental Anabaptism! How broadly can one stretch the designation Puritan! Anglicans and Separatists as well as Quakers and Anabaptists were swayed by and reacted against the Reformed traditions. Historians will probably never be able to isolate with any degree of reliability the intellectual contacts of the early leaders of Quakers, but they have found close parallels in beliefs and practices among Quakers, Puritans, and Anabaptists. Perhaps the safest course is to accept Basil Willey's designation of a climate of opinion affecting most Protestant groups. See Barclay, Robert, The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1876), pp. 237, 248–252, 261Google Scholar, Jones, Rufus, Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1928). 336–349Google Scholar; Knox, Ronald, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 168–175Google Scholar; Littell, Franklin H., The Anabaptist View of the Church (Boston: Starr King Press, 1958), pp. 43–45Google Scholar; Williams, George H., The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), xxiii–xxxiGoogle Scholar; King, Rachel H., George Fox and the Light Within 1650–1660 (Philadelphia: Friends' Book Store, 1940), pp. 16–38Google Scholar; Nuttall, Geoffrey F., Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946), pp. 100–101, 150Google Scholar; Simpson, Alan, Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 1, 43–45, 60Google Scholar; Tolles, Frederick, “Introduction” in Braithwaite, W. C., Second Period of Quakerism. ed. Cadbury, Henry J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), xxviiGoogle Scholar; Barbour, Hugh, The Quakers in Puritan England (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 2, 133–159Google Scholar; Willey, Basil, The Seventeenth Century Background (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 73, 80.Google Scholar
4. This attempt to make the Westminster Confession stand for the theology of all Puritans is undoubtedly an over-simplification and gives a static quality to their doctrines. But to take as normative a theologian—such as Cotton, Sibbes, Preston, or Baxter—would involve an even more subjective view of what Puritan theology entailed. The Westminster Confession was at least drawn up by an assembly of divines and endorsed by both Presbyterian and Congregationalists. For the complete texts of the confessions of Dort and Westminster, see Schaff, Philip, Biblioteca Symbolica Ecclesiac Universalis: Creeds of Christiandom (New York: Harper and Bros., 1919), III, 580–587, 600–660Google Scholar. A discussion of factions within the assembly is in Kirby, Ethyn, “The English Presbyterians in the Westminster Assembly,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 33 (12, 1964), 418–428CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hargrave, O. T., “The Freewillers and the English Reformation,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 37 (09, 1968), 271–280CrossRefGoogle Scholar shows a current of anti-predestinarian thought in the English reformation which does not appear in the Westminster Confession.
5. The best works on New England's covenant theology are Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century and From Colony to Province (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939, 1953)Google Scholar; Morgan, Edmund, Visible Saints (New York: New York University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Pettit, Norman, The Heart Prepared: Grace and Conversion in Puritan Spiritual Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).Google Scholar
6. Westminster Confession, Chap. VI, Pg. 1–6, 615–616.
7. Barclay, Robert, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, 13th ed. (Manchester: England, 1860), Prop. IV, xi.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., xii.
9. Jones, Rufus, The Later Periods of Quakerism (London, 1921), I, 33Google Scholar. See also Ross, Isabel, Margaret Fell: Mother of Quakerism (London: Longmans, Green, 1949), p. 41Google Scholar; Rachel, King, George Fox and the Light Within, pp. 41–43.Google Scholar
10. Morgan, Edmund, The Puritan Family (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 22Google Scholar. See also Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century, Chapters 5–6.
11. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. II, Pg. i, 4Google Scholar. Eeg Olofsson argues that Barclay used scholastic theology, Conception of Inner Light in Robert Barclay's Theology, pp. 73, 81.
12. Ibid., Prop. II, Pg. iv, 8: Prop. V and VI, Pg. xvi, 85.
13. Barclay, Robert, Truth Triumphant (Philadelphia, 1831), I, 210–212, 445–446Google Scholar. Hereafter referred to as Works. See also Apology, Prop. V and VI, Pg. xvi, 85.
14. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. IV, Pg. iv, 59.Google Scholar
15. Ibid., Prop. V and VI, Pg. iv, 64, 66.
16. Ibid., 66.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., Prop. V and VI, Pg. iv, 67.
19. Ibid., 68.
20. Ibid., Prop. VI and VII, Pg. xi, 78.
21. Lawrence, Thomas and Fox, George, Concerning Marriage: A Letter Sent to G. F. And with it, a Copy of an Answer to a Friend's Letter Concerning Marriage (1663), p. 12.Google Scholar
22. Westminster Confession, Chap. I, Pg. 5, 603.
23. Fox, George, “A Collection of Many Select Christian Epistles,” Works of George Fox (Philadelphia, 1831), VII, 31.Google Scholar
24. Whitehead, George, “Preface to Epistles” (1698), Works of George Fox, VII, vi–vii.Google Scholar
25. Doceticism was an early Christian heresy closely related to Gnosticism. The docetics viewed Christ as a purely divine being and denied a mixture between the human and the divine. Friends occasionally wrote as if Christ was a divine being who came down from heaven and used the earthly body of Jesus. The man Jesus suffered on the cross, but the divine being inhabiting his body was incapable of physical pain. See Fox, George, Works, VIII, 236Google Scholar; Penn, William, Works of William Penn (London, 1726), I, 589Google Scholar; Barclay, Robert, Works, III, 566.Google Scholar
26. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. V and VI, Pg. xiii, 81.Google Scholar
27. Ibid., Prop. V and VI, Pg. xiii, 80–81.
28. Ibid., Prop. V and VI, Pg. xiv, 81–82. The idea of a spiritual substance dates from the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas wrote about three kinds of substances: God or divine substance, spiritual or intellectual substances like the soul and angels, and material substance. John Milton described an angel as of “pure Intelligential substances.” When describing the light as a “spiritual substance,” Barclay may have been using this philosophical tradition to assert that the inward light was divine and yet not the pure essence of God. See Gilby, Thomas, ed., St. Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), Pg. 436, 153–157Google Scholar; John Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk. V, Line 408.
29. In Barclay's epistemology—which he termed Cartesian—all natural ideas were formed by the outward objects imprinting “in our sensible organs a corporal motion.” There were also spiritual motions; otherwise, man could have no true knowledge of God or experience his personal guidance. Since there were supernatural ideas, there must be “divine and spiritual senses” to receive the ideas. A corporal object could not convey a spiritual idea because the “less excellent cannot produce the more excellent, else the effect would exceed its cause.” Barclay, Robert, Works, III, 568–578Google Scholar. See also Penn, William, Works, II, 857.Google Scholar
30. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. VI and VII, xii, xiii.Google Scholar
31. Sleigh, Joseph, Good Advice and Counsel Given Forth by Joseph Sleigh of the City of Dublin, in the time of his Sickness, to his Children (London, 1696), pp. 9–10Google Scholar. See also Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. V and VI, Pg. xvii, xxi, 88–89, 98.Google Scholar
32. See Barclay, Robert, Works, III, 97–101Google Scholar. Keith, George, A Refutation of Three Opposers of Truth (Philadelphia, 1690), p. 40.Google Scholar
33. Perkins, William, Works, I, 637–639Google Scholar, quoted in Pettit, Norman, The Heart Prepared, pp. 63–64.Google Scholar
34. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. V and VI, Pg. xiv, 82Google Scholar. See also Keith, George, Immediate Revelation … Not Ceased (London, 1675), p. 11.Google Scholar
35. Ibid., 82.
36. Ibid., Prop. V and VI, Pg. xvii and xx, 88, 92–93. See also Works, I, 365–367, III, 59.Google Scholar
37. Ibid., Prop. II, Pg. xvi, 34.
38. Westminster Confession, Chap. VIII, Pg. vi, 621.
39. Penn, William, Works, I, 586–587Google Scholar. See also Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. V and VI, Pg. xi and xxvi, 77, 111–114Google Scholar; Works, III, 104–106.Google Scholar
40. James, Sydney V., A People Among Peoples: Quaker Benevolence in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 92–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
41. Penn, William, Works, I, 554, 559Google Scholar; II, 779. Penn's defenses of Christianity and Quakerism combined somewhat ambiguously biblical authority and confidence in natural religion and showed eighteenth-century Friends that a pious man could participate in the enlightenment. When Keith criticized Penn for declaring that reason alone was adequate for salvation, he distorted Penn's position. The main difference between Penn and Keith was that Penn was less guarded in certain statements concerning the nature and authority of the light and its relationship to reason. Penn believed that the supernatural light which saved was “natural;” that is, It was naturally in every person. Penn, like Barclay, Keith, and Fox, did not believe that man, through his own ability could reason his way to saving grace. In 1688 Keith asserted that God could save the Gentiles without an outward knowledge of Scripture but that the means he used remained a mystery to mankind. Keith speculated that perhaps God revealed the knowledge of Christ to the good heathen at the moment of death. See Keith, George, The Deism of William Penn (London, 1699), PrefaceGoogle Scholar; A Refutation of Three Opposers of Truth, pp. 40–44; Fox, George, Works, III, 411Google Scholar; Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. V and VI, Pg. xi and xxvi, 77, 111–114Google Scholar; Works, III, 104–106.Google Scholar
42. Westminster Confession, Chap. X, Pg. 2, 265.
43. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. V and VI, Pg. xvii, 88.Google Scholar
44. Ibid., Prop. V and VI, Pg. xi, 77. Barclay did not deny that a few special messengers of God, like Paul, of necessity received grace because God did not allow them to resist it.
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50. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. VII, Pg. iii, 124.Google Scholar
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., Prop. VII, pg. ii, vii, 121, 125–126, 131.
53. Claridge, Richard, Tractatus Hierographicus: or a Treatise of the Holy Scriptures (New York, 1893), pp. 158–159Google Scholar. See also Fox, George, Works, VIII, 63Google Scholar; Barclay, Robert, Works, I, 164–165, III, 555.Google Scholar
54. Westminster Confession, Chap. XVIII, Pg. 1, v, 626–627.
55. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. VII, Pg. iv, 126Google Scholar. Barclay somewhat qualifies this prohibition of the merit of good works in Pg. xii, 146.
56. Westminster Confession, Chap. XVIII, Pg. i-iii, 637–638.
57. Morgan, Edmund, The Puritan Family, pp. 4–5.Google Scholar
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59. Lawrence, Thomas and Fox, George, Concerning Marriage, pp. 10, 7.Google Scholar
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61. Ibid., Prop. VIII, Pg. ii, 149. See also Keith, George, The Presbyterian and Independent Visible Churches in New-England and else-where Brought to the Test (Philadelphia, 1689), pp. 144–146.Google Scholar
62. Ibid. George Keith stated that God's elect could not “finally fall away” though they could temporarily fall and be restored by repentance. He refused to discuss as too philosophical an issue whether there was a difference between a faith which could and could not be lost. See A Serious Appeal to All the more Sober, Impartial, and Judicious People in New England (Philadelphia, 1692), pp. 51–52.Google Scholar
63. We tminster Confession, Chap. IX, Pg. iv, 623–624.
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65. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. VIII, Pg. ii and vii, 149, 155.Google Scholar
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67. Lawrence, Thomas and Fox, George, Concerning Marriage, pp. 8–9Google Scholar. Puritans and Quakers believed that all faith which was true was pure or perfect and the least amount of such faith was a saving faith. See Barclay, , Works, I, 172Google Scholar; Pettit, Norman, Heart Prepared, p. 8.Google Scholar
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72. Ibid., 149. See also Works, I, 376–377Google Scholar. Friends refused to deny the possibility of perfection because they found scriptural proof for such a state, for example, I John 3:3, 10: “Whosoever is born of God, doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him, and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” No Christian could claim that he had reached perfection, however, because, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (I John 1:18).
73. Penn, William, Works, I, 748Google Scholar. See also Barclay, Robert, Works, I, 180Google Scholar; Keith, George, Immediate Revelation Not Ceased, pp. 171–172.Google Scholar
74. Westminster Confession, Chap. I, Pg. v, 603.
75. Ibid., Chap. 1, Pg. vi, 603–604.
76. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. III, xi.Google Scholar
77. Ibid., Prop. II, x.
78. Barclay, Robert, Works, III, 66, 91–92Google Scholar. See also Keith, George, Immediate Revelation, pp. 13–14, 26–27, 37–38, 132–135, 153–154.Google Scholar
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81. Penn, William, Works, I, 598 (printed incorrectly as 589).Google Scholar
82. Barclay, Robert, Apology, Prop. III, xi.Google Scholar
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86. Ibid., Work., I, 443.
87. Ibid., Prop. XV, Pg. x, 343–349.
88. Ibid., Prop. XX, Pg. xv, 356. D. Elton Trueblood argues that Barclay, while opposed to Friends engaging in war, did not deny the lawfulness of a magistrate conducting a defensive war in a sinful world, Robert Barclay, p. 245.
89. Ibid., Prop. XV, Pg. vi, 335.
90. Ibid., Prop. XII, Pg. iii, 262.
91. Ibid., Prop. VII, Pg. iii and iv, 262–265. See also Works, III, 142.Google Scholar
92. Barclay noted how even Christ performed Jewish customs which were no longer binding upon the church. See Works, I, 152, 399–400, 564–565.Google Scholar
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95. Leslie, Charles, “The Snake in the Grass; or, Satan Transform'd into an Angel of Light.” in The Theological Works of the Reverend Mr. Charles Leslie (London, 1721), II, 125.Google Scholar