Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

those for whom it was intended, and reached them on April 12, 1692.

About the beginning of 1692, however, Penn commissioned Thomas Lloyd as Lieutenant-Governor of Pennsylvania, and Markham as Lieutenant-Governor of the Lower Counties; so that this division lasted until the arrival of Governor Fletcher. The representatives of all six counties united in 1692 in one Assembly, but that body had a conflict with the Council of Pennsylvania, and none of the laws suggested by the Councillors presided over by Lloyd and Markham respectively were passed. For the years 1691, 1692, and 1693, the minutes of the Council are wanting. The following new members appear to have been among the representatives of Pennsylvania proper: William Jenkins, Samuel Levis, William Biles, Hugh Roberts, and Richard Hough, while the Pennsylvania Archives, Vol. I, show the election of Richard Wilson in 1st mo., 1692, from Kent, and Samuel Gray appears in that year as a Councillor from the Territories, probably from Sussex.

CHAPTER VIII.

RELIGIOUS DISSENSION.

The Quakers without a standard of beliefGeorge Keith-His contentions with members of the Society-Separate meetings-Written judgment against him and replies thereto-Arrest of Bradford and McComb, seizure of Bradford's tools, and proclamation against Keith-The Yearly Meeting of 1692-Liability of Keith to punishment under the civil laws-His arraignment with that of Boss, Budd, Bradford, and McComb-Hat incident-The rest of the Court proceedings-Relief granted by the Governor under the CrownKeithians issue exhortation against negro slavery -The Yearly Meeting in London disowns KeithHis services in the Turners' Hall, London, and decision to join the Established Church-Subsequent course of various Keithians-Welsh Baptists— Lower Dublin-Seventh Day Baptist buryingground in the city-Trinity Church, OxfordUpper Providence Keithians and rival congregations formed among them-Philadelphia Keithian Meeting Thomas Rutter-Dispute as to the property-The Lloydians-Triumph of Orthodoxy in the Society of Friends.

The Society of Friends had never promulgated articles of religion to be subscribed, or a catechism to be taught. Peculiar tenets and practices, which presupposed the truth of much of what Western Europe believed, were recognized as Quakerism: but the prefatory and even basic dogmas, while they might be gathered from writings like Barclay's, were left to the

individual conscience, directed by an inner revelation. There was no insisting upon even those creeds which have been called the symbols of Christianity, and which Fox and the majority of his followers had accepted together with the historical statements of the Gospels. Fox had flouted at training-schools for ministers, even at making them familiar with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Thus, with hearers ignorant of, or with no predilection towards, what was agreed upon by Roman Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, Greek, and Anglican, there was a diversity of teaching in the bond of fellowship, which is delightful in the view of many people of to-day. There does not seem to have been any considerable movement to give a Unitarian interpretation to the New Testament. John Gough's History of the People called Quakers says that George Whitehead, William Mead, and other English Friends, on examination before Parliament, gave satisfactory statement of their belief in the Trinity as well as Holy Writ, so that the profession of faith required by the Act of Toleration then passed was put in the words suggested by them a strange way, indeed, of stating the Trinity -viz: "I, A. B. do profess faith in God the Father and in Jesus Christ his eternal Son, the true God, and in the Holy Spirit, one God blessed for evermore; and do acknowledge the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine Inspiration." Yet there had been, and there lingered in that body of exalters of their personal intuition a tendency to make figurative or to forget the Bible's story, and, from the expressions of some prominent members, it seemed at times that they were lapsing into Deism. The great opposition which Christian theologians, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists, made to the Society of Friends in the last third of that Century was more conscientious than a desire for soldiers, for tithes, or even for observance of the sacraments: it

was loyalty to external Revelation. The reproaches cast upon the Society that its teachers, if, indeed, they did not reject, at least failed to hand down, their deposit of truth, seemed to many people to be justified by the events now to be mentioned, when a party taking a stand for Orthodoxy declined to hold meetings with the majority of the ministers at Philadelphia, and when, moreover, the Yearly Meeting in London expelled the leader of that party.

George Keith, one of the most eminent preachers and controversialists of the Society, long felt the need of some sort of confession of faith, probably almost as much to answer the jibes of non-Quakers, as to control or teach Quakers. In fact, the occasion of his urging the matter in the Philadelphia meeting was the accusation made by Christian Lodowick in Rhode Island that the Quakers, giving another sense to the words of Scripture, denied the true Christ. Keith had gone to Rhode Island to assist other Friends in disputation. No impression seeming to be made by the spoken avowal of positive or literal faith, Keith and others, in 4th month, 1691, wrote a declaration of the belief of the Friends in certain points of elementary Orthodoxy as to our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Apparently it was another one of Keith's productions, printed in 1692, which he submitted to the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting of 11th month, 1691, and approval of which was expressed at the next Monthly Meeting by three of the six appointed to examine it. The Rhode Island Meeting directed the printing of the aforesaid confession, and it was printed by Bradford in Philadelphia. The leaders in Penn's great town went so far as to find fault with Bradford for doing this, they never having authorized the publication of that much of a creed.

It is necessary not only to mention the Keithian schism, because it was an important incident in the his

tory of the colony, but to go into considerable detail, because, with the exception of Gough, the Quaker writers and those who have echoed them, have told little except of the bad temper, violent language, and self-will of Keith. He certainly had the natural indignation of a zealot, he was habituated to the bitterness of expression of that age, in which the Quakers had been about as bitter as others, and he carried out the sectarian idea of separating from those teaching what is false. The schismatics from whom he separated, by that time, however, had formed themselves into what they believed to be a Church, and thought schism from it to be a sin; and their preachers had begun to be separate as clergy from the laity. Gough's account is not entirely accurate in details, apart from being pretty much a sermon upon two texts put at the end, viz: the statement that, on 1mo. 16, 1713-4, Keith, as he lay sick in bed, said that he did believe that if God had taken him out of the world when he went among the Quakers, and in that profession, it had been well with him; and the statement that, a couple of years later, to a Quaker visiting Keith, when on his death-bed, he said that he wished he had died when a Quaker, for he was sure that it would have been well for his soulremarks which were, after all, different from saying that he had done wrong in leaving the latitudinarians controlling the Society of Friends, and did not even involve the unimportance of the sacraments, for he had received them, water-baptism, as he mentions, and almost as certainly the bread and wine before becoming a Quaker. Both Robert Barclay and he had shown themselves not wholly satisfied with the Quakers' discontinuance of a religious-we may say eucharistic, but not sacramental-feast; and, before Keith received the Communion from the Church of England, he practised the rite, as well as that of baptism, among the

« ZurückWeiter »