' 'Quakers in Boston, 1656 -1964" by George A. Selleck

"Quakers in Boston, 1656 - 1964," An Excellent History

EARLY LAST FALL there appeared in the Bulletin of the Friends Historical Association, published at Haverford, Pa., an excellent and appreciative review of a recent book by George A. Selleck, of Prospect Street, Nantucket, titled Quakers in Boston, 1656-1964. The review, as it appeared in Quaker History, reads as follows:

Though early Friends rejected traditional religious symbols, they were human enough to develop some symbols of their own. One was the city of Boston—symbol of the cruelest persecution and martyrdom Friends endured anywhere—and the Friends Meeting there, whose vitality and strength must seem a measure of the victory of Truth over tyranny. This interesting perception is one of a number of illuminating insights provided by George A. Selleck in Quakers in Boston, 1656-1964, Three Centuries of Friends in Boston and Cambridge. For more than twenty-five years Executive Secretary of Friends Meeting at Cambridge, George Selleck has had a direct role in much of the recent history he writes about and, with the possible exception of Henry J. Cadbury, who contributed the Foreword to this book, is the most appropriate person to have undertaken the present work.

The history is divided into three parts. The first covers the period from 1656 to 1870, the period of assault on Puritan Boston, of martyrs in the Lamb's War, of non-violent victory and grudging acceptance. It is also the period of the first Boston Meeting, which endured for over a century with little growth in numbers or depth before expiring in 1808. Yet so convinced were New England Friends that a Quaker presence must exist in Boston that in 1831 a new Meeting House was built, even though there were no resident Friends to meet in it.

The second part covers the period from 1870 to 1926 and the rise of a new Boston Monthly Meeting, vigorously involved in the "new Quakerism" and struggling with the question of pastoral leadership, with the theological disputes arising from the evangelical movement of the period, and with the challenge to its ministry of a radically changing neighborhood.

"QUAKERS IN BOSTON, 1656 -1964"

The final part traces the period from 1926 through 1964 and the development of the Friends Meeting at Cambridge, its unifying role among the divided Friends of New England, its dramatic growth and active social witness, and its generation of other Meetings in the Boston area. Though this section depicts a dynamic period in the history of Boston Friends, it is, perhaps, the least satisfying of the three parts simply because there has not been sufficient distancing of events by the passage of time to separate clearly the significant from the less significant.

Inevitably the book discusses major developments in the Society of Friends beyond Boston. One of its most interesting analyses is of the processes which pushed American Friends in the 19th century toward a programmed worship and pastoral meetings. Though George Selleck's sympathies are clearly with traditional Friends practices, his understanding and objectivity are such that he can make comprehensible, even sympathetic, the movements of Boston Friends both toward the pastoral system and, ultimately, away from it.

George Selleck's research has been thorough and his documentation careful. Where his sources leave gaps which can be filled only by thoughtful inference, he takes pains to use such phases as "it is likely..." to mark them clearly. Despite the thoroughness of his scholarship, however, his style is never pedantic or inaccessible to the general Quaker reader. Finally, the publishers, Friends Meeting at Cambridge, have produced a handsomely printed and illustrated volume, worthy of an excellent history of a fascinating area and its Meetings.

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