'Not Their Most Edifying Method'

I had no first-hand dealings with Quakers until 1983 when I went to work for the newspaper in Richmond, Ind., the home of Earlham College, founded in 1847 by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). There I made friends with the late Clyde Johnson, the most hospitable person I have ever known. His house on College Avenue was always open, whether to junkies, operas buffs or newspaper reporters exiled to Indiana. The librarians at Earlham were always welcoming and granted me liberal lending privileges. All of my impressions of Quakers are positive – friendly, open, principled. Sarah Ruden is a Quaker.

Charles Lamb often poked harmless fun at his Quaker friend (Friend friend?) Bernard Barton. Lamb’s ribbing of the unfamiliar denomination reminds me of the Polish jokes I heard (and repeated) as a kid. Along with the joking, Lamb included a lot of encouragement. Here he is writing to Barton on July 25, 1829:

“’Tis useless to write poetry with no purchasers. ’Tis cold work Authorship without some thing to puff one into fashion. Could you not write something on Quakerism—for

Quakers to read—but nominally addrest to Non Quakers? explaining your dogmas—waiting on the Spirit—by the analogy of human calmness and patient waiting on the judgment? I scarcely know what I mean; but to make Non Quakers reconciled to your doctrines, by showing something like them in mere human operations—but I hardly understand myself, so let it pass for nothing.”

In Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion (1950), Msgr. Ronald Knox devotes much space to George Fox and the early history of the Quakers, including this intriguing passage:

“[T]he great unsettlement of the times in which they lived, their persecutions, and the occurrence of the Plague and Fire in London, produced an atmosphere of catastrophe; and they were very free in the denunciations and woes which they uttered against persons or places. Their most startling, and not their most edifying method of foretelling judgements was to run through the streets completely naked.”

Knox is a master of finely calibrated irony.