Quakers
QUAKERS. The Quakers, or the Religious Society of Friends, arose in seventeenth-century England and America out of a shared experience of the Light and Spirit of God within each person. This source of worship, insight, and power they identify as the Spirit of Christ that also guided the biblical prophets and apostles. Quakers also affirm each person's ability to recognize and respond to truth and to obey the Light perfectly through the leading of an inner witness, or "Seed," called by some Quakers "Christ reborn in us" and by others "that of God in every [hu]man," out of which transformed personalities can grow. They therefore ask of each other, and of human society, uncompromising honesty, simplicity of life, nonviolence, and justice. Quakers have often been sensitive to new forms of social evil and creative in their programs to overcome them. Their worship has been based on silent waiting upon God without outward ritual.
The early Friends, as Quakers were named (from John 15:5) by their first leader George Fox, arose in England during the Puritan Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, manifesting an inward intensification of radical and spiritual forms of Puritanism; they were influenced by uncompromising Baptists, quietist Seekers, antinomian Ranters, and theocratic militants; and these were in turn influenced by English Lollards, by European Anabaptist Mennonites who rejected both the state and class inequality, and by mystics like Jakob Boehme and the Familists.
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