The Journal of Elias Hicks (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Journal of Elias Hicks Thomas D. Hamm The Journal of Elias Hicks. Ed. by Paul Buckley . San Francisco: Inner Light Books, 2009. xxiv + 509 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth, $50; paper, $30. Elias Hicks is one of the central figures of Quaker history. Until he was seventy years old, his life was largely unremarkable. He certainly was well known among American Friends because of his frequent travels, but he had put little into print, and his preaching was largely indistinguishable from that of most of the recorded ministers of his era. But in the remaining twelve years of his life, before his death in 1830, he would emerge as perhaps the most divisive Friend in American Quaker history, giving his name to one of the two main streams in a divided Quakerism. This he certainly deplored, both the division itself and the attachment of anyone’s name to what he saw simply as the Society of Friends. But his ministry had become the most controversial Friends had known since the disownment of George Keith over a century before. The gist of that ministry has been the subject of debate for almost two centuries. Those who heard Hicks and agreed with him saw him as simply continuing ancient Quaker testimonies, and that opposition to him largely reflected the insidious influx of evangelical doctrines through Friends who had associated overmuch with Presbyterians and Episcopalians. His opponents, who would eventually embrace the label of Orthodox Friends, at their most charitable saw him as a kind of Unitarian; at their harshest they were sure that he was a disciple of Thomas Paine, if not of the devil. Rufus Jones moved the debate forward in the 1920s by pointing out how in most respects Hicks was a thorough Quietist. Friends General Conference Friends like Henry W. Wilbur and Bliss Forbush now proudly conceded part of the earlier Orthodox attacks and labeled Hicks a “Quaker Liberal,” the Quaker counterpart of William Ellery Channing. In the 1980s, Larry Ingle revised the terms of debate forever by casting Hicks as both a traditional Friend and a reformer struggling against innovations that Orthodox Friends, influenced by their connections with non-Quaker evangelicals, were introducing. Naturally, Hicks’s journal has been a primary source for anyone wanting to understand Elias Hicks and the Quakerism of his era. The printed version has a somewhat curious history. It appeared in 1832, only two years after his death, published by the New York Quaker printer Isaac T. Hopper. Demand was high enough for five printings that year. But while a volume of Hicks’s letters came out in 1834, followed by a reprint in 1861, Hicksites did not reprint the journal. Not until 1969 did it appear in print again. Hicks’s journal keeping was intermittent. He usually wrote only about his journeys in the ministry. Thus we have only glimpses of his thoughts as American Quakerism polarized in the 1820s. And as was common practice, an editing committee made significant revisions in the manuscripts Hicks left behind, partly to create a work of manageable length, but also to remove passages that they found inconvenient in the context of the early 1830s. [End Page 49] Paul Buckley, a member of Illinois Yearly Meeting and an adjunct professor at the Earlham School of Religion, and Inner Light Books have produced a model of how to edit and publish a Quaker journal of the Quietist era in the twenty-first century. Buckley is well suited to the task. His thesis at the Earlham School of Religion was an annotated edition of Hicks’s correspondence with William Poole that brought out the significant differences between the originals and those later put into print. Fortunately, most of Hicks’s original manuscripts have survived, and Buckley was able to draw on them to restore most of what was lost in the 1832 edition. When the journal manuscripts are lacking, he makes use of other appropriate sources among Hicks’s manuscripts in the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. What do we learn that we did not know earlier? Certainly, nothing emerges that radically changes our vision of Elias Hicks, his theology...