it is with great diffidence that we from england venture to speak to the american yearly meetings. our circumstances and the problems we have to face are often so different that it would be presumptuous in us to feel that we had advice on matters of detail that would deserve very great attention from you. but when it comes to our common history and to the common inheritance we have in the principles and faith of the society of friends, we may speak freely.

we represent the main body of those who call themselves “friends.” the yearly meetings from which we come connect by continuous history with the first quaker churches of two hundred and fifty years 12ago. of course when we compare ourselves as we are now, with the first friends, we find great differences, as great undoubtedly as exist between the new englander of to-day and the pilgrim fathers. we should find much to astonish if we could peep in at one of those first london meetings held in the summer of the year 1655 at the bull and mouth, the great “tavern-chapel” in aldersgate, in which you could then crowd a thousand people standing. i fancy these meetings may have been rather like some of your pioneer meetings in the west. but the pioneers of the london work, howgill and burrough, would find modern quakerism, whether in england or in the middle west, a strange thing. it takes a wise man to recognize his own great-great-great-great grandchildren. they have an inheritance that connects them up with their ancestor, but their environment is so different that on the surface they seem to have been changed into another type of man. at bottom, however, we shall find that the inherited type will continue.

“for never pilgrims’ offshoot scapes control13

of those old instincts that have shaped his soul.”

(lowell, “fitz adam’s story.”)

in other words, the inner life of a religious movement remains, although the expression of that life will greatly vary under changing conditions of time and place.