The branch’s anti-reflective bias was reinforced by her work. There is almost nothing about Fox in her book. It opens with a diatribe against theology: "Quakerism is essentially mystical rather than rational We have many clear rational thinkers, and we rejoice in their contribution, which mainly is that the way any of us think about theological or metaphysical matters is non-essential." After confidently declaring that "the religion of exper-ience needs no formulation and no defense. We know it is true and life-giving to us, though all the legalism and dialectics of the earth are turned upon it to prove it unsound." she moves on.. (7-13)

Thus in the years after the death of Henry Wilbur in 1914, and the heyday of Holmes and Rushmore, American liberal Quakerism entered into what I have called "the Age of Amnesia," in which the main sources of Quakerism, from Fox, to the Bible and even Quaker history and practice, were progressively (or perhaps better, regressively) reduced to a handful of pithy statements, which over time took on more and more the character of bromides.

The penumbra of this condition extended beyond FGC. For instance, Pendle Hill began publishing pamphlets in 1934; but it took thirty four more years and 160 pamphlets before it issued a title on Fox. (Brinton: 1968)

It wasn’t until after World War Two that a few cracks began to appear in the seamless, smug and apparently impenetrable facade of this rickety and largely empty intellectual edifice.

But of course there were exceptions to this generalization. The most interesting of these, for our purposes here, are those I lump together (again unfairly to them, but for economy of presentation), as the "Three Bs and a C": Brinton, Barbour, Benson & Cadbury. (Sounds like a great name for an high-end PR agency or an old-money wealth-preservation investment firm, one that advertises on public radio.)

The first "B" is Howard Brinton, who was honored by many in his lifetime, and who looms ever larger as my own studies of liberal Quakerism in the past century continue. With deep roots in Quaker Chester County, Pennsylvania, he journeyed across the country, from Canada to Carolina to California and back. He likewise moved across the Quaker landscape of his time, from Quietist to liberal to evangelical, touching all the bases and seeing clearly what was going on in each quarter. His memoir/essay, "Friends for Seventy-Five years," remains in my view a classic – and classically rare – example of a Friend calmly and incisively speaking truth to and about other Friends. (Brinton:1960)

A year earlier he had wittily skewered liberal Quaker anti-intellectualism in a Friends Journal essay on "The Place of Quakerism in Modern Christian Thought":

"I am using the words ‘Christian thought’ in my title, instead of ‘Christian theology,’" he wrote, "because, while many Friends shy away from theology, we do not, or at least we do not profess to, shy away from thought. Yet the word "theology" means simply thinking or reasoning about God, and I am sure that most of us can hardly avoid some thinking about man's greatest object of thought." (Brinton 1960: 20).

In 1936, when Howard returned East with his wife Anna to direct Pendle Hill, he brought to the task a breadth of information, a scholar’s discipline, a depth of mystical spirituality, and a quiet honesty of expression that was unequaled there, or in few other places, in his time or since. I don’t think it is a coincidence that when Pendle Hill finally did publish a pamphlet on "The Religion of George Fox," Brinton wrote it.

But before that, Brinton had published Friends for 300 Years in time for the Friends World Conference of 1952. The book was a tour de force, and remains remarkably untarnished by the half century since. With an update chapter or two, it can and should be reissued as the best American guide to Friends for 350 years.

Brinton had been a student of Rufus Jones at Haverford. Jones, of course, was the principal exponent of the mystical view of Fox and early Quakerism. (Jones: 1925,1930) Jones’s role in this is well-known enough that I will not dwell on it, except to note that in the FGC liberal stream, his influence is by no means as apparent as the standard histories suggest. On reflection, though, this is not as surprising as it might seem at first glance: Jones only appeared at FGC conferences twice, rarely published in its organ, Friends Intelligencer, and focused much of his institutional work on the Orthodox yearly meetings.

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