Nineteenth-Century Quakerism — the Separations

The Society of Friends came into the nineteenth century intact and left it in pieces. In 1827-28 the American yearly meetings tore apart over Elias Hicks, a Long Island farmer and travelling minister who held that the Inward Light, not the Bible or a doctrine of atonement, was the heart of the faith. Those who followed him and those who opposed him became separate bodies meeting in separate houses. Within twenty years the evangelical side divided again, between followers of the English banker-minister Joseph John Gurney and the conservative John Wilbur. Out of the Gurneyite stream came something Friends had never had — revival meetings, planned worship and paid pastors. So that by the century's end some Quaker meetings still sat in silence while others sang hymns and listened to a sermon. Through all of it Friends kept up the work they were best known for: abolition, prison reform, and the women's rights movement several of them helped to launch.