Note 17 — Chapter II

In the establishment of the schools at Waltham and at Shacklewell, at the suggestion of George Fox, we have evidence of his desire that a useful education should be imparted to youth. It is an error to suppose the early Friends depreciated human learning, and they must be exonerated from any such charge. They exhibited in their own persons, the practicability of the union of knowledge and virtue. While they were, many of them, eminent for their learning, they were distinguished for the piety of their lives. They were indeed the friends of both,both, but did not patronise the one to the prejudice and expulsion of the other. They always maintained (as Friends continue to do) that learning is not necessary to make a gospel minister, and here it is that many have mistaken their meaning.

Barclay, in his celebrated Apology, nowhere condemns the propriety, or usefulness of human learning, or denies it to be promotive of the temporal comforts of man. He says the knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, or of Logic and Philosophy, of Ethics or of Physics and Metaphysics, is not necessary. But mark his meaning. Not necessary to make a minister of the gospel. But where does he say that knowledge, which he himself possessed to such a considerable extent, was not necessary; or that it did not contribute to the innocent pleasures of life? What would have been the character of his own book, or what would have been its comparative value and usefulness, had he not been able to quote so many authors to his purpose in their original texts, or to have detected so many classical errors, introduced such apposite history, or to have drawn up his propositions with so much logical and mathematical clearness and precision; if he had not been among the first literary characters of his day?

William Penn was equally celebrated with Barclay as a scholar. His works afford abundant proof of his erudition, and of the high cultivation of his mind. Like the rest of his associates, he was no advocate for learning as a qualification for a minister of the gospel; but he was yet a friend to it, on the principle that it enlarged the understanding, and that it added to the innocent pleasures of the mind. He entreated his wife, in the beautiful letter he left her before he embarked on his first voyage to America, “not to be sparing of expense in procuring learning for his children; for that by such parsimony, all was lost that was saved.” And he recommended also, in the same letter, a mathematical and philosophical education.

Penn’s Secretary, James Logan, was also a patron of learning among the early Friends. He was a correspondent of Sir Hans Sloane and other literati of Europe, a contributor to Philosophical Transactions, and bequeathed his library, of 3000 vols. on arts and sciences in various languages, to the city of Philadelphia, with an endowment to preserve it for public use.

Thomas Ellwood, the companion of Milton, was so sensible of the disadvantages arising from a want of knowledge, that he revived his learning with great industry after he had become a Friend. “I mentioned before,” says he in his Journal, “that when I was a boy I made some progress in learning, and that I lost it all again before I came to be a man. Nor was I rightly sensible of my loss therein, till I came amongst Friends. But there I both saw my loss and lamented it, and applied myself with the utmost diligence at all leisure times to recover it. So false I found that charge to be, which in those times was cast as a reproach on the Society, that they despised and decried all human learning, because they denied it to be essentially necessary to a gospel ministry, which was one of the controversies of those times.” Ellwood’s friend, Isaac Penington, assisted him in this matter, and through his influence with Dr. Paget, procured him the means of improvement in becoming a reader to Milton.