The next year, Holmes drafted what was ultimately known as "A Letter to the Scientifically Minded," which was edited and issued by the FGC Advancement Committee in 1929. The Letter was probably the most widely-circulated FGC document of its era, and, for many who became convinced FGC Friends in this period, one of the most influential. It was also a thoroughly humanist manifesto, in which God was reduced to little more than a nice idea held by the right-thinking, highly-educated middle class white folks it was addressed to.

It was G.K. Chesterton who quipped that "There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped." Despite the fact that American liberal Quakerism’s new strongholds were in university communities, and that one of its principal spokesman was a distinguished academic, the essentially anti-intellectual character of FGC religious "thought" by the end of the 1920s can hardly be gainsaid. It could fairly, if harshly be summed up as:

Theology is bunk, and at best no more than irrelevant private speculation. Even so, our theology is the true Christian and Quaker version, which is so simple it can be expressed in a paragraph. As for George Fox, his message has but two main propositions, that of the universal Inner Light and the exaltation of the individual.

This was indeed a thought to stop thought, and this attitude raised a bar to searching scholarship or profound reflection in the FGC orbit that is still to be overcome. It should come as no surprise that thus far little of either has turned up in my studies of the FGC publications from this period (though I have not yet examined them all).

Without theology (or for that matter, history), what view do we get of George Fox? Well, at FGC’s Cape May Conference in 1924, the tercentenary of his birth, the main memorial event was an elaborate pageant, featuring ten living tableaus of men and women in antique costumes, silently reenacting scenes from Fox’s life, accompanied by a narrator’s brief lines of blank verse.

Afterward, for many years – indeed, in large measure, to this day– FGC substituted for both theology and history – religious education. In this effort, Jane Rushmore was the key figure for thirty four years, from 1911 to 1945. She had, notes her biogra-pher, an "incisive mind and decided views" (Johnson: 125) From 1916 to 1945, she produced and wrote a First Day School Bulletin for FGC. These reflected what was rightly called "her indefatigable authorship of lessons." for both adults and children. (Ibid., 128)

While she would surely have bridled at the designation, Jane Rushmore was as much of a theologian as FGC had once Jesse Holmes was sidelined by age. A number of her most popular adult lessons were collected and published in 1936 as Testimony and Practice in the Religious Society of Friends, which was fairly described a few years later as "a standard work in the RE library," at least FGC-liberal libraries.

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