Ohio Yearly Meeting's Podcast

EOF03A The Eye of Faith, A History of Ohio Yearly Meeting Conservative. Chapter 3 Part A Refining the Form: 1828-1845

• Bill Taber

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Ohio Yearly Meeting takes another step in our journey through "The Eye of Faith," continuing William P. Taber Jr.'s history with Chapter 3, "Refining the Form: 1828-1845," which examines the theological tensions that nearly split our community.

Orthodox Friends consolidated their community after the 1828 Hicksite separation by refining Quaker practices and strengthening biblical foundations. This period of reform would ultimately lead to new tensions between traditional and progressive elements in Ohio Yearly Meeting.

• Two committees helped meetings navigate separation issues and coordinate with other Orthodox Yearly Meetings
• Increased emphasis on Bible reading in families with committees ensuring every Quaker household owned a Bible
• Friends established numerous schools under monthly meeting supervision to provide "guarded education" for youth
• Mount Pleasant boarding school opened in 1837 after 23 years of planning
• Growing tensions between those following Joseph John Gurney's evangelical approach and John Wilbur's traditional Quakerism
• National Road brought economic opportunities and outside influences challenging Quaker insularity
• Abolition movement created friction with traditional Quaker approaches to social reform
• Leaders like Joseph Edgerton warned against "modified Quakerism" and "lifeless ministry"
• Seeds were planted for the second Ohio separation that would occur in 1854


A complete list of our podcasts, organized into topics, is available on our website.

To learn more about Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative) of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), please visit ohioyearlymeeting.org.

Those interested in exploring the distinctives of Conservative Friends waiting worship should consider checking out our many Zoom Online Worship opportunities during the week here. All are welcome!

We also have several Zoom study groups. Check out the Online Study and Discussion Groups on our website.

Advices read in these podcasts can be found on page 29 in our Book Of Dicipline.

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Speaker 1:

Hi, this is Chip Thomas. Again. On 5th month, 15th, I announced a revival of the reading of Eye of Faith, starting with the third chapter. Unfortunately, the episode then published started with the second part of that chapter. This episode starts with beginning of chapter 3. I apologize for the error and hope that it does not detract too much from thy enjoyment of these readings by Kent Palmer.

Speaker 2:

All meet together, everywhere and in your meetings, wait upon the Lord and take heed of forming words, but mind the power and know that which is eternal, which will keep you all in unity, walking in the Spirit, and we'll let you see the Lord near you and among you.

Speaker 3:

This is a continuation of the reading of the Eye of Faith, a history of Ohio Yearly Meeting, conservative, by William P Tabor Jr. Chapter 3. Refining the Form 1828-1845. An immediate result of the Hicksite separation was a closing of ranks throughout American Orthodox Quakerism. A second result, which quickly began to dissipate the harmony created from the crisis of separation, was an attempt by various elements of the society to refine Quaker doctrine and practice. The record in Ohio, and in all Quakerism for that matter, between 1828 and the Second Ohio Separation in 1854 can be described in terms of the growing development of several views of Quakerism in the increasingly partisan behavior of their adherents, behavior of their adherents. Orthodox friends lost little time in consolidating what strengths remained after the shock of separation. Two committees in particular were to prove useful in this task. Having adopted the system of correspondence suggested by Philadelphia, the yearly meeting of 1828 appointed a committee to assist subordinate meetings as they wrestled with problems of disownment and the sharing of the meeting houses with Hicksites. This committee was continued until 1831, by which time most meetings ceased to be troubled by problems of the two groups meeting in the same meeting house at the same time. One side or the other, usually the minority fraction simply moved out and built their own meeting house. The other important committee was the General Committee of American Yearly Meetings, which met from 1828 until 1833. Ohio Friends were represented throughout that period and Elisha Bates was clerk in 1829, the year the committee issued the testimony of the Society of Friends of North America. From the committee also came a concern for more careful supervision of doctrinal and historical books and a concern for republication and more general and easy circulation of Friends books. An example of how yearly meetings were working together to close the ranks is the sending by Ohio Yearly Meetings for Sufferings of two-thirds of its extra copies of the discipline to Indiana Yearly Meeting, which had lost most of its copies to the Hicksites, which had lost most of its copies to the Hicksites.

Speaker 3:

Orthodox leaders saw as their task the refining of Quakerism to the point where it could never again be shattered. Quite naturally they sought to increase the use of the Bible, an emphasis that has been called in the yearly meeting advises as early as 1823. We desire that this practice of retirement after reading a portion from the Bible in families may more and more prevail. May more and more prevail. Such practices were recommended as a means of preservation and a source of consolation. They would introduce us into a deeper feeling for one another and bind the different branches of the family in gospel love. Where we thus exercised in our own hearts and in our families, we should be strengthened in the performance of every social and religious duty. The 1824 advices state that the Christian practices of reading in families a portion of scripture we hope is increasing among us. Parents were urged not only to read themselves but also to call their families together both to read a portion of scripture and to allow time for silent meditation.

Speaker 3:

In 1830, the yearly meeting took more direct action, asking quarterly and monthly meetings to find out how many of their families had a copy of the Bible. The yearly meeting learned in 1831 that several quarterly and monthly meetings had active committees on this concern. These committees were also to concern themselves with friends' schools and that Bibles were to be given to some friends' families. It was also reported that many families read the scriptures aloud connected with a time of retirement and interversion of the mind. The minutes record Hope was entertained that this instructive and interesting domestic regulation is increasing within our limits. A joint yearly meeting committee on primary schools and the use of the Bible were appointed by the yearly meeting to give the highest possible authority for these concerns. It reported that monthly meetings should, in a subtle and delicate manner, see that every family had a Bible, whether by gift purchase or token purchase. In 1832, a visiting committee was appointed for these concerns and rebuilding the walls of Zion. But even in 1834, the committee reported that there were three or four families without Bibles and that the practice of daily reading, while increasing, was not yet general. In 1835, said the committee, the individual perusal as well as the daily reading of them in a collective capacity in families continue to claim the attention of friends and it appears that a care to put into practice the advice of the body on this subject has not abated. Concern for family daily Bible reading and introversion was to be found in the minutes for many years to come, apparently because the practice never did become entirely universal. Even after the separation of 1854, which each branch chose its own method of encouraging personal scripture reading, the practice was uneven.

Speaker 3:

During the years immediately following the Hicksite separation, that's about 1828 through 1845, most Orthodox friends had already begun to move on the matter more rapidly than Ohio yearly meeting, move on the matter more rapidly than Ohio Yearly Meeting for the Quaker turn toward the Bible is sometimes dated at 1818, when Joseph John Gurney introduced his system of Bible study at Ackworth. Hannah Chapman Backhouse, a relative of Joseph John Gurney and who traveled in America from 1830 to 1835, was one of several prominent English and American ministers who pressed for a new emphasis on Bible study. She was especially successful in setting up Bible schools in Indiana. So prevalent were these views on the Bible and so powerful the belief that the Hicksite era was the result of not understanding the Bible that some Bible schools may have been set up unofficially in Ohio during this period. Even Somerset Monthly Meeting, which later became one of the bastions of Wilburism, had a flicker of Gurneyism. In 1833, when a committee was appointed to consider setting up a first-day afternoon Bible school, for which the way did not open In the wake of separation, orthodox leaders felt a great concern that suitable and approved books on Quakerism might be available. From 1831 to 1835, committees labored by direction of the yearly meeting to set up meeting libraries. In every monthly meeting, the 1831 minute urged meetings to apply to the meeting for sufferings for either advice or money. That meeting compiled a list of approved books in 1832, apologizing for the fact that some of them had not been approved by any of the other meetings for sufferings and that a few had not beenden by friends.

Speaker 3:

Yet another cultural result of the separation was a renewed concern for friends' schools within the reach of every family, no matter how poor. Friends had, of course, established schools almost as soon as they had meeting houses and, as soon thereafter as possible, school buildings in which to hold them. But by 1830, many Friends were sending their children to the public district schools. In that year, quarterly and monthly meetings were explicitly requested to appoint committees to visit Friends schools, help establish such schools and ask local meetings to help families unable to pay for friends' schooling. Those committees were also charged with encouraging the use of the Bible. Still in 1831, it was reported that several new schoolhouses had been built and several quarterly and monthly meetings had appointed committees to encourage guarded education and that most of our members have withdrawn from the district schools and increasing concern prevails for the proper regulation of schools by friends teachers and under monthly meeting supervision. Teachers and under monthly meeting supervision. Almost every yearly meeting following 1831 recorded exhortations, directives and reports on the literary and guided education of our youth Apparently.

Speaker 3:

New schools were established each year for several years and most Friends schools were firmly under the control of monthly meetings. There was, however, a shortage of Quaker teachers. By 1834, quarterly meetings were directed to set up education funds so that poor monthly meetings might not have to bear too great a load, might not have to bear too great a load. The report in 1835, a good example of Quaker language indicates considerable progress. Reports on this interesting subject afford grounds for believing that the recommendation of the yearly meeting has in a good degree been observed. By 1838, there were 54 schools and only one quarterly meeting expresses some fear of deficiency in its provision for schools. A joint yearly meeting committee urged that all children be educated, whether poor or remote, and that all schools all should withdraw from district schools. The battle for complete control of education was never won, as the annual school statistics which appear every year from 1839, clearly show. Still, at the end of the 1830s not quite three-fourths of Friends children in school were in the 100 Friends schools available to them.

Speaker 3:

It was during this decade that the yearly meeting boarding school was opened at Mount Pleasant, that's 1837, about 23 years after the first proposal for such an institution had been made. As early as 1816, a committee had been appointed to manage funds accumulating for the school. To this was added in 1819 a standing committee to care for the project, which before the yearly meeting nearly every year until the traumatic separation of 1828. In 1827, the committee had reported that it was about ready to begin actual plans for a school. However, the project was revived in 1831. The school building was located on high ground, within sight and easy walking distance of the yearly meeting house, on an adjoining 64 acres. Its plan and appearance were similar to other boarding schools of the day One large building at the center with slightly narrower wings on either side, one for boys, the other for girls. Ironically, this school the dream of friends in the peaceful, cohesive days of growing yearly meetings and the taming of the wilderness was to come into existence just as peace and cohesion in the society of friends was passing.

Speaker 3:

By 1837, the year the school opened its doors, the tension would grip Ohio. Yearly meeting for a generation had already set in and party lines, however fuzzy and changing, were evident in many places. Even the school building itself would die in fire, just as the long struggle was efficiently ended. Some hints about the spiritual level and concerns of Ohio Yearly Meeting during the 1830s can be gleaned from Yearly Meeting business and advices concerning details of Quaker practice. For example, a committee was appointed in 1830 to consider the subject of the lightness and disorderly conduct which took place on first day at the opening of yearly meeting, as well as some other occasion. The committee reported increasing care should be used in families to impress on the minds of youth the propriety of stillness in meetings. Quarterly meetings should continue to appoint committees to take such care as necessary to promote good order in the large meetings for worship during yearly meeting week.

Speaker 3:

The next year's advice is worn. Unbecoming behavior in meeting or other collected occasions should never be suffered to pass without notice. It is interesting to note that the advices sometimes called the minute of exercise because it resulted from the exercise, that's, worshipful discussion following the reading and answering of the queries were discontinued for a few years during this decade. The advices after 1827, tended to be more stilted and preachy documents, giving less evidence of the life and fresh flowing concern that had characterized them before the separation. They are more magisterial in tone, more pacific as they seek to refine acceptable practice. They not only speak to deficiencies but they see much in their society as lamentable or to be lamented. They also call for timely and tender care for those who transgress the discipline. The catalog of lament included non-attendance at meeting, dullness and sleeping in meetings, novel reading, departures from plainness and too much attention to material things. One possible sign of restless youth, as well as an indication of a growing concern for civilized comfort, also evident in the fact that walks had been laid that year from the meeting house to the village street, was that 1834 sessions approved a proposition to cause the steps leading into the use gallery to be matted or carpeted in such a way as to destroy the sound of footsteps as much as possible. 1840 minutes suggests that the huge meetings for worship on first day mornings at both Mount Pleasant and Short Creek were seldom really still because of the constant trickle of latecomers into the morning meeting and a similar stream of people leaving the afternoon meeting early.

Speaker 3:

Just as the shattering of the widespread South-contained Quaker culture along the Upper Ohio into smaller fragments made individuals and local groups of Quakers more vulnerable to outside influences at that time, so did the westward extension of the National Road into Ohio. It reached St Clairsville and beyond, passing just a few miles south of the flourishing Quaker capital of Mount Pleasant, even though the siting of this road probably prevented Mount Pleasant from achieving its full potential greatness. The town did become a thriving, growing center during this decade. With the national road came growing national pressures and temptations. With such elements the shattered orthodoxy found it hard to resist. As the abolition sentiment, of which Mount Pleasant was an important early center, mounted and as reports of Joseph John Gurney's prominent labor for abolition in the British Empire reached Mount Pleasant, many friends chaffed under an orthodoxy which prevented them from joining in organizations with non-friends for the promotion of good causes. These strains over the right approach to slavery were not limited to Ohio. They eventually precipitated a separation of anti-slavery friends in Indiana and resulted in the disownment of a prominent Hicksite in Baltimore, isaac T Hopper, according to Joshua Moll, who became an ultra-Wilburite.

Speaker 3:

There were many instances during this era. Worldly innovations from the graveyard he noted that friends of Elisha Bates and those like the Optographs who later became Gurneyites had opposed the removing of stones. The yearly meeting advice reflected this struggle by noting exercise and pain on account of the manner by which internments usually take place. The yearly meeting urged each monthly meeting to appoint a committee for the preservation of good order at funerals to promote the quietude and preserve the solemnity of these humbling sessions. They desired that on the way and at the grave, the deportment of those who attend may correspond to the seriousness of the occasion. The sober element appeared to be in full control, forbidding mixing and requiring the forms of sobriety everywhere. An indication of the pressures to mix and the continuing orthodox refinement of discipline can be seen in a sentiment by the yearly meeting in 1834. Any member who attends the entertainment of a marriage accomplished contrary to discipline is equally culpable and should be dealt with as though they saw the marriage accomplished. This was necessary because some friends would attend as guests and step into another room while the marriage is consummated, then joined the company and entertainment without feeling they had violated the discipline.

Speaker 3:

And at least one other way the National Road may have played a role in the development of Ohio Quakerism. Because of renewed immigration encouraged by the Good Road, land values in that part of Ohio increased so that the price of one acre of improved land there would be by 10 acres of equally good limestone land covered with hardwood in Morgan County, a little to the south and west. Although there may have been a few friends in Morgan County before 1828, the real migration began in the 1830s, resulting in the establishment of several monthly meetings there under Stillwater Quarter. After the separation of 1854, these meetings were organized into the new Pinville Quarterly Meeting, which remained strong and influential for many years. Eventually, large numbers moved west, extending Ohio yearly meeting as far as Iowa and later to California, alabama and Costa Rica. Today the very small Chesterfield monthly meeting at Chester Hill is the only survivor of a flourishing Quaker culture there which suddenly flowered and more slowly died because of the lures of the national road.

Speaker 3:

If major events could lead to a major change, however, so could minor ones. An apparently ordinary trip to England in 1831 by an apparently ordinary minister, already past middle age, john Wilbur of Hoppington, rhode Island, was eventually to lead to profound consequences. Even the man himself had no suspicion when he embarked that he would be led to raise a prophetic cry of alarm that would divide Quakerism again in his own lifetime and biblically Christian and what he believed to be the spirit of Barclay and other early friends. Coming from a more egalitarian American Quakerism, he was shocked to discover the influence accorded the brilliant, urbane and wealthy Joseph John Gurney and the others of his class and spirit who, in spite of all their good works in orthodoxy, john Wilbur could not feel to be inspired. John Wilbur and those who rallied to his cry of alarm regarded himself and other true ministers as able to try the words as the mouth tasteth meat to detect the true spirit behind them.

Speaker 3:

His uncompromising insistence that certain friends have such power of discernment and that they should proclaim truth and testify against error regardless of consequences made John Wilbur a thorn to many English friends and a galling nuisance to most of the leadership in New England after he returned in 1833. In the wake of the Hicksite trauma, he and his followers were deeply fearful that any deviation from the received Quaker practice of 1830, as John Wilmer knew it, or any deviation from Barclay and similar writers must be a stratagem of the devil. Indeed, wilbur believed that Gurney's approach to Quakerism was the devil's attempt, after failing to mislead the whole society through Hicks, to lead the rest of Quakerism back to the forms and beggarly elements from which Fox had led them. Wilbur was especially appalled by Gurney's evangelical elevation of the Bible higher than the Holy Spirit and by his evangelical tendency to associate with other Christians. When Wilbur left England in 1833, he left behind him a slim volume of letters to Crossfield, as well as a number of friends who opposed the various innovations championed by Joseph John Gurney. Both the book and the opposition to Gurney reached America before Wilbur himself returned. At the time, joshua Mall settled in Mount Pleasant in 1831.

Speaker 3:

A discerning observer could easily have identified among friends there are some future Gurneyites and Wilburites, had these names been current. Jonathan Taylor, that calm and aged minister who had seen his clerk's table pulled into 20 pieces in the separation, was like Moses Brown of Providence, rhode Island, a friend of the old school. And like Moses Brown, it is possible that had he lived long enough, he would have kept the Wilburite separation from occurring or that he would have chosen the Wilburite side. However, he died in Ireland in 1831. In 1833, joseph Edgerton, who lived near Barnesville, was recognized as a minister after some years of a developing ministry in the old pattern.

Speaker 3:

In time he became a prominent Wilburite leader and his journal gives unmistakable evidence of his tendencies as early as 1836. On a trip to Indiana he wrote to his wife my spirit is with the living in our yearly meeting who keep to their original ground. May they be supported in every trial. Sometime before 1837, he had also written the following the compromising spirits of modified Quakerism has the same injurious tendency both in worship and discipline. It leads to a lifeless frothy ministry, not being under the cross but disposed to shun it. To the cross but disposed to shun it Though, as to words may be pretty sound, while to those whose ears can try words as the mouse tasteth meat, it is unsavory and superficial. It also leads to a lifeless management of the discipline, the Lord's power not being waited for, a light and unfeeling return of business in our meetings for discipline being the consequence.

Speaker 3:

It's the reading of the beginning of chapter three of the Eye of Faith. Chapter three is titled Refining the Form 1828-1845. We will finish reading Chapter 3 in Section B. The podcast we just heard was a production of Ohio Yearly Meeting. It was read by Kent Palmer. The words from our introduction are from George Fox, 1653. The music was composed and sung by Paulette Meyer. More information on her website, wwwpaulettemeyercom.

Speaker 2:

All meet together, everywhere and in your meetings, wait upon the Lord and take heed of forming words, but mind the power and know that which is eternal, which will keep you all in unity, walking in the Spirit, and will let you see the Lord near you and among you.