Founded by Friends : the Quaker heritage of fifteen - Scarecrow Press

xiv Thomas D. Hamm
The Makefield Friends, however, spoke for an outlook that was increasingly
embattled among Quakers. Significantly, within two years of
their protest, the first public discussion of the possibility of a Quaker college
appeared in print. In the Philadelphia Quaker weekly the Friend, an
anonymous Friend argued that Quakers repudiated higher education because
of “unfounded prejudice.” Early Friends, he asserted, had not objected
to higher education on principle, just the universities of the seventeenth
century, with their “crowds of dogmatic and self-sufficient
pedants” who were concerned largely with producing aristocratic fops
and “hireling priests.” Now, however, a significant number of young
Friends, seeking useful learning, had no choice but to find it outside the
Society of Friends, in colleges under the control of other denominations.
Friends, if they wished to hold their best and brightest young people,
should no longer resist “keeping pace with the progress of knowledge.”
This impulse would be critical in the founding of Haverford in 1833 and
its formal transformation into a college in 1856.
This intellectual ferment took place against a background of controversy
and division among Friends. The first split came in 1827–1828, as
American Friends divided into Hicksite and Orthodox groups. Hicksite
Friends took their name from their leader, the Long Island minister Elias
Hicks (1748–1830). Hicks emphasized the authority of the Inner Light of
Christ within each individual over that of the Bible and sometimes suggested
Christ achieved divinity rather than being born divine. Orthodox
Friends were those who held views on these subjects similar to those of
evangelical Protestants. Hicksites tended to see the Orthodox as overly influenced
by non-Quaker evangelicals and were often skeptical of the social
and economic changes they saw taking place around them. (Makefield
Monthly Meeting, which was so dubious about boarding schools,
was a Hicksite stronghold.) The Orthodox responded with charges that
Hicks was a disciple of the notorious freethinker Thomas Paine. Hicksites
were strongest in the Delaware Valley, New York, and around Baltimore
and in northern Virginia. Orthodox Friends dominated New England, the
Quaker communities of southern Virginia and North Carolina, and those
west of the Appalachian Mountains. Both groups, in turn, saw more splits
in the 1840s and 1850s. Hicksites lost a significant number of Friends who
were drawn into radical reform movements that more conservative Hicksites
saw as threatening Quaker distinctiveness. At the same time, Orthodox
Friends were dividing into Gurneyite and Wilburite groups. The former
took their name from the English Quaker minister Joseph John
Gurney (1788–1847), who had himself studied at Oxford under a series of
tutors without formally entering the university. Gurney advocated an
evangelical vision of Quakerism that encouraged ties with other evangelicals
in good causes, including education. The overwhelming majority of