J. W. Rowntree at Manchester

The Report on the 1895 Manchester Conference seems not to be online anywhere, which is surprising and a shame, as the Conference is widely understood to be one of the turning points in the history of the Society of Friends. It was where a new generation of Friends, keen to embrace the “modern” world and keen to move away from what they perceived as their parents’ and grandparents’ stifling Evangelical Quaker faith, started to take over London (as was) Yearly Meeting.

John Wilhelm Rowntree, scion of the Yorkshire chocolate-making family and effectively the leader of the new faction of liberal young Friends, spoke to the question “Has Quakerism a Message to the World to-day?” Below is the published version of his paper, scanned from the Report. After a reasonable amount of due diligence I believe it to be out of copyright. This scan is presented without any warranty of any kind including accuracy or fitness for any particular purpose. Users of the scan agree to indemnify the author of this blog against all claims arising from reading the document to the greatest extent possible by law.

The book is very fragile, as late 19th century inks and paper are very chemically unstable, so I did not squash it flat to scan. The pdf is here. A cheap and cheerful OCR text file is here.

Orientation

It’s 1895, and London YM as has been on an Evangelical spree for several decades.

The Evangelical Turn

London YM had written an Epistle supporting the Evangelical turn within the Quaker faith in 1836. Various Quaker ministers (yes, we had “Recorded” ministers in this period) crossed the Atlantic in various directions as the first major schism in North American YMs (other schisms are available) and a less significant one amongst British Friends developed. In 1887 the Evangelical/Gurneyite YMs convened a conference in Richmond, Indiana to agree the Richmond Declaration. If you are the dominant online English-language type of liberal Quaker you’re likely to find that document quite startling. Although the Declaration was largely the work of the Evangelical British Friend Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, London YM refrained from having an opinion on it one way or the other, although LYM was in fact a largely Evangelical body.

The Declaration remains today a very significant foundational document amongst “Evangelical” and “Orthodox” Friends. Who are by far the global majority of Friends.

One of the foundation stones of Evangelical and Orthodox Quaker faith is the authority of Scripture. And in the later 19th century “Bible-believers” started to have a problem. The development of what the Report calls “modern thought”, especially evolutionary biology (On the Origin of Species, Darwin, 1859) and the emerging fields of geology and cosmology, all of which seemed to point to a vast age for the Earth and a natural history which flatly contradicted Scripture. Estimates of the age of the Earth proceeded upwards over the 19th century, reaching some hundreds of millions of years (An Estimate of the Geological Age of the Earth, Joly, 1899).

A new cadre of Friends, often university educated, who came of age in the later 19th century (Rowntree turned 27 in 1895) wanted to find a faith that could survive alongside an understanding of the world that could stand up to experiment. Some of them were read out of the Society following in the footsteps of David Duncan, tragically disowned in 1871 for “modern views” shortly before his death.

The Conference

The Quaker “Home Missions” committee organised the conference at the direction on London YM. The original idea had been to consider evangelising the urban industrial working class. Rowntree quietly took over the programme committee, ensuring that it was entirely theologically liberal, even if the speakers were not quite all.

Over the course of four days a wide range of papers were read, initially with great controversy amongst older, firmly Evangelical/Orthodox Friends, but it seems that over the course of the event they came to see that they were losing the argument.

And although the conference didn’t actually decide anything, it did mark the beginning of the end of the Evangelical turn. Many of the habits and structures of British Friends that now are taken to have been eternal were innovated in the twenty or so years after the Conference.

Highlights

Some choice snippets.

A new Renaissance?

Even as now so at the Renaissance came perplexity and scepticism. But it was of the new learning, with its larger views of God and the universe, that the reformation was born. So do I unfalteringly believe will there spring out of the present seeming chaos, a renewed and more powerful faith, deeper in its basis, clearer in its vision, broader in its charity, than ever was the old; and as warm in its love.

p. 77

Rowntree compares the rush of new knowledge of the industrial age, with a concomitant growth of skepticism about the “iron hardness of terrible and fatalistic creeds”, with the flowering of intellectual activity in the European Renaissance. He denies that the great discoveries of science truly hide the Christ, or reduce the value of the Bible, but rather says that scientific knowledge opens new ways to approach them, perhaps more valuable than those of the more literal readings of the past.

Empty Benches

We must deduct [from census results on church attendance] those who from the force of habit, rather than from strength of conviction, or from the love of respectability, rather than that of truth, cumber the pews with a soulless occupancy. The large activity which spends itself in Bazaar Committees, or the proud charity that loves the high places of subscription lists, is no criterion of deep religious feeling.
If there be failure, the cause must b e sought, not without the Church, but within.
The empty benches and deserted galleries of our meeting-houses are signs of a high-water mark from which the tide has ebbed away. We may recognize local or particular reasons, more or less pertinent, but the real causes, which cannot be minimised, are the poverty of our spiritual life or the want of aggressive power.

p. 79

Rowentree fears that Quakers have become the kind of mere “professors” of religion that Fox railed against. Filled with pride, a sense of self-importance born of respectability, deference to wealth and position, complacent and weak. “Invertebrate”, as he puts it! Even that people are put off from joining our Meetings because they do not feel enough “spiritual pride”.

Class

Brace yourself!

To the true Christian the world is a commonwealth of all men[sic], knowing neither rank nor class. Nevertheless certain sections of the Christian Church tend to represent certain grades of society and to perpetuate class distinctions rather than destroy them. The equality of position nominally possessed by our members should remind us that we are bound, more than other Churches, to overcome this difficulty. There is, however, grave danger of one-sidedness. We shall never know our full power if we appeal to the working classes alone.
Why do we fail almost entirely to reach cultured and thoughtful people?
Why is it that even many of our own more educated members are leaving us ?

Oh dear.

You may wince, as I do, at the suggestion that a person is either working class or cultured and thoughtful. Not that the urban industrial worker of 1895 was encouraged to be cultured or thoughtful. But even so.

This might be one of the first statements of the current position widely held amongst liber Friends that our belief in spiritual equality should lead us to support secular political egalitarianism and to work towards equality of opportunity and even equality of outcome.

Rowentree observes that that Quaker “Adult School” movement is doing much to open doors to spiritual development for working people, but he observes that there isn’t one on Fleet Street for the benefit of lawyers and journalists. Fleet Street still is home to the offices of many barristers, that is: trial lawyers, and used to be the home of almost all British national newspapers. Nor one in Piccadilly for the benefit of dukes. Many ducal families had their “town” residence, palaces in all but name, in St. James’ and Mayfair, around the London street called Piccadilly.

Now, consider the demographics of your Meeting, Friends. How much has Rowntree’s concern been addressed, and even transformed into its mirror image. How many of the Friends in your Meeting are university educated, “cultured and thoughtful” people? How many are [retired!] teachers; academics; therapists physical, mental, and emotional; writers; even lawyers? And how many are of the urban industrial working class?

Rowntree seems to criticise the “kind patronage” of the wealthy towards the labouring poor, notes that the promise of salvation later is but cold comfort to those who are starving now. And what are we to do about it?

Strength Through Knowledge

If the age of the faith which comes by tradition and authority is gone, and men can no longer believe without knowing why they believe; if they are expanding those partial views of the truth that were inevitable in earlier times, then such a change will bring, as its ultimate result, not weakness but new strength.

p 82

Rowentree repeats that the old model of religion based merely on faith can’t succeed in the new scientific, industrial age while warning that a faith entirely and only intellectual will also fail. He emphasises the adaptability of Christ to the “thought-form of the age” and notes that Friends are not bound by creeds and so do not need to break with our past to change and develop our faith.