The Essential Elias Hicks

Introduction

Flee, O my soul, to thy rock, the name of the Lord! For in it is safety and a sure refuge from all the storms and tempests that assail poor mortals in passing through this vale of tears and state of trial and probation. (Journal, p. 145)

In April 1827, the Religious Society of Friends suffered a rupture of a magnitude it had never endured in its previous one hundred and seventy five years. A minor procedural dispute in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting¹ brought a deep and long-running fault-line to the surface. In the end, a majority of the yearly meeting’s members withdrew and formed a new organization which they claimed was the true Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Those left behind carried on, also claiming to be Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Over the next year, the separation spread to the Yearly Meetings of New York, Baltimore, Ohio, and Indiana, producing a total of five parallel yearly meetings. The splits propagated down through subordinate quarterly meetings, monthly meetings, and preparative meetings, opening a fissure that has never healed.

Very soon, each faction declared those in the other party were no longer Friends. One side claimed it followed orthodox Quaker principles, while their opponents were Hicksites – followers of Elias Hicks, a minister from a small meeting on Long Island. In the same way, the Hicksites maintained they were the only true Quakers, and branded their opponents as the Orthodox.

Because of those separations, the name Elias Hicks has acquired a multitude of associations among Friends. Many assume Hicksites came by their name because Hicks encouraged the separations and the establishment of a new sect. This was not the case.

Over the last two centuries, the branches of the Society of Friends have evolved in very different directions. Descendants of the Hicksites are often labeled as liberal Quakers. It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume Hicks must have been a liberal and the most recent biography of Hicks² labels him as one. This is also an error.

A variety of beliefs were attributed to him during his lifetime and even more have been since his death. Since Elias Hicks never attempted to delineate his beliefs in a systematic way, there has been no standard against which to judge the conflicting claims. Nor has an organized record of his theology been published in the years since he died.

The purpose of this book is to discover the true Elias Hicks and to lay out his beliefs in an orderly manner. The first chapter is a brief biography and the succeeding chapters are devoted to topics of importance in his life.

This book aims to be more than just an interpretation of who Elias Hicks was and what he believed. It is almost a dialogue between Hicks and the author. In the text, the two voices are distinguished by the typography. My descriptions of Hicks and his beliefs will be printed in standard type, while quotes from Hicks will be indented and in italic.

The Religious Society of Friends

Elias Hicks was a Quaker. This was part of his core identity and to understand him, some knowledge of the Religious Society of Friends is essential – both what it looked like when he was born and how it changed over the course of his lifetime.

Quakerism emerged in the immediate aftermath of the English civil wars. George Fox, credited as the founder of the movement, had a vision while on top of Pendle Hill in northwest England on Pentecost Sunday in 1652. He reported he was given to see, A great people to be gathered. This vision inspired him to travel throughout England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Holland, Germany, and the British colonies in the West Indies and North America, preaching, Christ Jesus has come to teach his people himself.

Inward Light

Central to the Quaker message is the belief that each person has direct access to the mind of God by the medium of the Inward Light of Christ. According to Friends, this Light is described in John 1:9: That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.³

Friends claim this Light Within originates in the divine and illuminates each person’s heart and soul. It provides knowledge of good and evil, letting people know when they fail to live up to the hopes and desires God has for them, but it does more than just to admonish. This Inward Teacher also provides unfailing guidance for life. Those who faithfully listen to it and submit to its direction have all that is needed for salvation. Moreover, this Divine Light is universally available. Everyone has equal access, not just Quakers or Christians. It can guide anyone – even those who practice no religion – to reconciliation with God, if they heed its proddings.

During the second half of the seventeenth century, Friends endured repeated waves of persecution. Between 1652 and 1689, thousands of Quakers were imprisoned and hundreds died for their faith. But the fires of oppression didn’t destroy the society; they only strengthened the resolve of the persecuted.

Quaker Peculiarities & Worship

During this period, Friends developed a number of distinguishing characteristics. Prescribed uniforms evolved – simple, unadorned, white, gray, and black plain clothes. Friends also came to speak in a distinctive manner. At the time, it was considered polite to address those in a higher social class with the second person plural forms – you and your. Quakers, however, used the second person singular – thee, thou, and thy – when speaking to single individuals of all classes. Despite being persecuted, Quakers acted in ways that made them stand out.

Based on instructions in the Bible, they refused to swear oaths – even in court. They said they were compelled to be truthful all the time, not just when under oath. They claimed they could not participate in any act of war. They declared the outward rites and rituals practiced by other Christians, such as baptizing with water and celebrating the supper with bread and wine, were no longer needed. Already in trouble with the government, they broke the law by refusing to pay tithes to the established church. They said they were the only true Christians.

These Quakers gathered to worship in a simple building they called a meetinghouse, not a church. Coming together with no preplanned order of service, no scripture readings or sermons, and with no worship leader, the congregation gathered in silence at a designated time. If one or more members felt called by God to preach or teach or sing, they would do so. It was assumed anyone present could be divinely inspired to minister – even women, children, and servants. Although women and men sat on opposite sides of the meetinghouse, there was no barrier between them during worship and any ministry offered was heard by all.

Unlike other banned sects, Friends held their meetings for worship openly – in their meetinghouses and at their usual times. This blatant violation of the law infuriated some in the established church, resulting in services being broken up by mass arrests and the destruction of their meetinghouses. They were troublesome and unbending in their demands for religious freedom.

Toleration

Everything changed following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England. The next year, Parliament passed the Act of Toleration. With this change in law, most Protestants were free to hold worship services without government interference. There were still restrictions on Friends (e.g., they could not enroll in universities and were excluded from certain professions), but life became much easier.

Over the next sixty years, two major changes took place. In their private lives, Quietism, the belief people need to entirely quiet the inner voice of their own wills in order to hear the voice of God, became entrenched in Quaker spiritual practice. Any impulse that originated within the individual was suspect.

During the same years, members of the religious society increasingly accommodated themselves to the wider world in their public lives. Those unique characteristics that set them apart from the rest of the world were de-emphasized. Rather than seeing themselves as a people called out of the world to be a Light unto the Gentiles, the society seemed more and more to be just another Protestant sect. Unlike their forbearers, by the middle of the eighteenth century, most Quakers no longer claimed to be the only true Christians – the Religious Society of Friends was merely one part of a larger body of Christ.

A Quaker Reformation

In the middle of the eighteenth century, a reformation movement swept through Quakerism.⁴ The reformers saw accommodation to the world as a slow poison. As the religious society gradually adopted the world’s ways of doing and being, they believed it was becoming less able to fulfill the unique role God had called Friends to fill. These reformers felt a need to purify the society and for Friends to more closely adhere to traditional practices. This was not principally a call for doctrinal purity, but for behavioral conformity. Most disownments were for such things as public drunkenness and marriage to non-Friends.⁵ In the eyes of the reformers, this cleansed the society – no doubt reducing it in size, but forging it into a faithful remnant.

Overseers

One development coincident with the reformation (if not a product of it) was the establishment and spread of the office of Overseer. While Ministers preached and Elders concerned themselves with the spiritual state of the society, Overseers watched over outward behavior.

In principle, the job of the Overseer was to intervene with wayward members before their behavior became too public – helping, counseling, and encouraging them to find a way back to their proper places within the society. A successful intervention avoided embarrassment for the member and obviated the need for public discipline or disownment by the meeting. Danger arose when the scope of intervention moved beyond concern for outward behavior to include a consideration of a member’s faith. There had been a relatively broad range of acceptable beliefs during the society’s first hundred years, but as it moved toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, some among the leadership began to feel more doctrinal uniformity was necessary.

Changes in the Wider World

Both the Religious Society of Friends and the wider world passed through dramatic transitions during Elias Hicks’ lifetime. What he believed and how he conducted his life are to a great degree products of his Quaker milieu, but he was also unavoidably influenced by the many changes in the wider world.

When Elias Hicks was born in 1748, he was a colonial subject of George II, King of Great Britain and an empire that included provinces in North America. These provinces were thinly stretched along the Atlantic coast – barely extending into the continent as far as the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. There were one million colonists with the overwhelming majority living on small farms. No urban area in the colonies had a population greater than twenty-five thousand.

By the time Elias Hicks died in 1830, he lived among more than twelve million citizens of the United States – a republic claiming territory that extended across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Most of these citizens still lived on farms, but the growth of cities was well underway – New York City alone contained over two hundred thousand inhabitants.

These were revolutionary times in many ways besides the American and French Revolutions. Catherine the Great and Napoleon re-arranged the map of Europe. The Enlightenment spurred an ongoing scientific revolution. That, in turn, helped fuel an industrial revolution. It was an era of scientific discoveries and new ideas – Goethe, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, James Watt, Linnaeus, Samuel Johnson, Adam Smith, Jane Austen, Beethoven, and Mozart are only a few of those who were transforming science, philosophy, and the arts. The modern world was starting to take shape.

More important to the future of the Society of Friends, were the revolutionary changes in the sphere of religion. In the first half of the eighteenth century, George Whitefield had helped spark the First Great Awakening in England’s American colonies and paved the way for future waves of religious revival.

In the middle of the century, the preaching of John and Charles Wesley led to the creation of the Methodist Church. When Hicks was born, there were no Methodists – when he died, there were more Methodist Churches in the United States than post offices. Wesleyan theology offered a sure path to salvation by the guidance of scripture and laid the foundations for evangelical Protestantism.

Women were also playing a more prominent role in religious life. Mother Ann Lee set up the first community of Shakers in 1779; while in 1809, Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton established the Catholic Sisters of Charity to work in the new urban slums. In a harbinger of important future work for Quakers, 1816 marked Elizabeth Gurney Fry’s first visit with women imprisoned in London’s Newgate Prison.

The World’s Influence on Friends

Eighteenth-century Friends still wore distinctive clothing, spoke their unique and somewhat archaic form of English, maintained their own schools, and expected members only to marry other members. Many lived in distinct urban neighborhoods or rural communities, thus spending most of their time with others in the faith. But it would have been impossible to live through those years without being aware of the dramatic changes taking place in the wider culture. Hicks preferred to ignore these changes and wished other Quakers would, too. Rather than joining in the spirit, manners, maxims, and customs of the wider world, he advocated that Friends maintain a hedge around the society, separating and protecting those within from outside influences. Like many Friends before and since, he saw Quakerism as a critique of and an alternative to the surrounding culture. Hicks was sure God was still calling Quakers out of the world to be a light unto the Gentiles.

Holes in the Hedge

But the hedge was incomplete and full of holes; Quakers constantly absorbed new ideas from their neighbors. Religiously, some were influenced by Deists and Unitarians. These Friends also tended to be open to Rationalism – the belief religious faith should be based on human reason. Other Friends were won over to the evangelical theology championed by John and Charles Wesley and had powered successive waves of spiritual awakening throughout British North America and the United States. In contrast to rationalism – and to the Quietism that prevailed among Friends – revivalists sought an emotional response from their congregations. Grafting any of these concepts into Quakerism had enormous implications for the role of the Inward Light and proper forms of worship. As these hybrids took root, they inevitably exacerbated pre-existing conflicts within the society that ultimately gave birth to separations in 1827-28.

Intentionally or not, Elias Hicks was at the heart of those conflicts. His preaching – especially in public meetings for non-Quakers – was a lightning rod, attracting the ire of some Friends, especially those who found truth in evangelical thought. What they heard him say was, to their ears, grievously in error. Knowing what kinds of unsoundness he was charged with – as contrasted to what he actually believed – offers essential insight into some of the most tragic events in Quaker history.

Things I Believe But Can’t Prove

I have been living with Elias Hicks for well over a decade and have come to believe some things that go beyond what I can demonstrate in the paper trail he or others left behind. My personal inclination is to keep my opinions to myself, but my wife insists readers will want to know what insights these years of close study have yielded. To accommodate her without misleading readers, some of the chapters below will include subsections with the title Things I Believe But Can’t Prove. Take them with a grain of salt.

Changes in the Religious Society of Friends

For example, I believe there were three large-scale shocks to the Religious Society of Friends over the course of Elias Hicks’ lifetime that dramatically changed it and helped to set the stage for the Great Separations of 1827-28.

Unintended Consequences of Reformation

The first was the reformation of the society in the middle of the eighteenth century, mentioned above. Stricter enforcement of the discipline resulted in many more disownments in the years after 1750 than in the first half of the century. The resulting religious community was smaller and more homogeneous, but disownments also meant more members were related to, and lived in close proximity to, non-members.

It should be noted that movement was not exclusively out of the religious society. Converts were still attracted, perhaps in part