multiplied embellishments of life, made up altogether the raw materials
of discontent, criticism and division.
These factors go with a state of growing discontent and disintegration.
The men and women possessed of leisure cultivated a humanist state of
mind, with which arose a critical spirit, a nicer taste and a cultured
discrimination. They were offended by literalism, bored by crudeness
however much in earnest, and disgusted with the illogical assertions of
pietists. The imperative mandate of the meeting awakened in them only
opposition. They found many to sympathize with their state of mind.
On the other side there were those who seriously feared the incoming of
luxurious ways. They distrusted books, remembering the values of one
Book to the laborer who reads it alone; they believed in plainness, and
their minds associated freedom of dress with freedom of thought. They
resented also the new privileges conferred on some by wealth, because to
most had come only harder work with discontent.
The schism which rent the community was an economic heresy, the belief
in the use of money for embellishment of life. All the Quakers regarded
with favor the making of money. The Liberals, however, saw ends beyond
money, and processes of ultimate value beyond administration and
business. They looked for household comforts, books, travel, and the
leisure with great souls who have written and have expressed the
greatest truths. They believed in a divinity such as could have made,
and regarded with favor, the whole teeming world.
The Orthodox saw the values of prosperity only in plainness of life,
recognized no divinity in humanized manners, and sternly but
ineffectually called the community back to idealized commonplaceness,
and to hear the utterances of rude ploughmen and cobblers in the name of
Deity.
One ventures to believe, too, that there was a falling away from all
religious exercises at this time, and that the pious of both schools
were troubled about it, and accused one another. The poor were too hard
worked and too poorly paid to feel anything but discontent; and the
leaders of the community differed as to the solution of the religious
problem. Hence came division.
The Quakers are conscious of religious "unity," but their mode of life
is a true economic unity. The Quaker Community was re-arranging itself
economically, but the members felt a religious change. Class division
was coming upon them, and they felt it as
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