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JONES, RUFUS 1863-1948

QUAKER TEACHER, MINISTER, AND LEADER

A Small-Town Boy

In his autobiographical works, A Small Town Boy (1941) and Finding the Trail of Life (1943), Rufus Matthew Jones presented a picture of his idyllic childhood in the small Quaker village of South China, Maine. He wrote that "sunset and evening stars produced a spell on my young mind" and of how he enjoyed the sound of "the swish of my scythe in the grass wet with morning dew." The mystical beauty of nature and the joys of hard work were staples in his young life. The story goes that his Aunt Peace, upon the birth of Rufus, held up the newborn and proclaimed, "This child will one day bear the message of the Gospel to distant lands and to peoples across the sea." She was right, of course, but she might have added much more. Rufus Jones became a Quaker leader, a professor, a historian of the faith, an organizer and unifier of the Society of Friends, and the first leader of the American Friends Service Committee during World War I.

Background

Jones was the son of Edwin and Mary Jones, relatively prosperous farmers at the time of Rufus's birth in 1863. The Joneses were a religious family who often had itinerant preachers staying in their home. Religion was a daily topic of discussion. Even more influential on Jones, however, was his uncle, Eli Jones, a minister and community leader. Eli Jones and his wife, Sybil, had traveled to Africa to help the nascent black African Republic of West Africa and had taken the gospel to the Holy Land. They were close friends of the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and Eli Jones had served in the Maine state legislature. His life as a "noble citizen, valiant man, a living example of what a Christian ought to be" influenced Rufus greatly. Rufus's school years were typical of the times. He attended nearby Oak Grove Seminary from 1877 to 1879, then at age sixteen won a scholarship to attend the highly regarded Friends School in Providence, Rhode Island. Prior to his leaving for Providence he had never traveled more than twenty miles from home. In 1882, having graduated from the Friends School, he was awarded a scholarship to attend Haverford College in Philadelphia. Three years later he received his B.A. His thesis work had been on mysticism, a topic that would interest him greatly all his life. He was offered a teaching position at the Friends Boarding School in Union Springs, New York, and took the offer, the first of his many years of teaching.

Finding the Trail

He taught for one year but needed to take time away. His eyesight was poor and was giving him great trouble. He decided to travel to Europe and borrowed the money for the journey. Although his uncle Eli and his Quaker schooling had set him on his path in life, it was this journey abroad that truly showed him the trail he was to take. He traveled first to England, where he visited Friends schools and meetings and met the English Quaker and Member of Parliament John Bright. In London, Jones met well-known Quaker Charles Taylor and William Charles Braithwaite, son of prominent Quaker Bevan Braithwaite. He would make early plans with William Braithwaite to write a history of the Quakers, a goal that would be achieved more than twenty years later. Weeks later, while in France, Jones would have a mystical experience that would help him to define his future life. While on a solitary walk near Nîmes he "felt the walls between the visible and invisible grow thin." He saw that his future life must be "an unfolding in the realm of mystical religion … interpreting the deep nature of the soul and its relations to God." In a more practical development, he found in Germany a doctor who could alleviate his eye trouble with the correct lens. He returned to the United States in 1887 and began his teaching career at the Friends School in Providence.

Teacher

From 1887 to 1893 he taught, for two years at the Friends School and later at the Oak Grove Seminary in Vassalboro, Maine, where he was also school principal. He married Sarah Hawkshurst Coutant in 1888 and became a father in 1892, when his son, Lowell, was born. In 1890 he was recorded as a minister of the Society of Friends and began to lecture and preach. In the summer of 1892, while on a second visit to Europe, he met John Wilhelm Rountree, with whom he struck up a great friendship. Rountree was influential in convincing Jones that a new type of Quaker ministry was needed, one that combined inspiration with interpretation. Primary to achieving this goal was a fresh historical interpretation of what Quakerism had meant and could continue to mean. Jones again realized that he wanted to write a history of Christian mysticism that found "the roots of Quakerism to these movements before the birth of George Fox," the founder of the Society of Friends. Rountree and Jones would meet annually to discuss their ideas, but only upon the death of Rountree in 1905 did Jones begin seriously to research his history of the Society of Friends. Jones intended to begin graduate work at Harvard in the fall of 1893, but he was offered the editorship of the Friends Review and a position in the Philosophy Department at Haverford College. He accepted both and began a new role, as a leader in the Society of Friends.

Editor

In 1893, when Jones became editor of the Friends Review, Quakerism was foundering. Jones saw four separate movements in the Society of Friends each with its own ideas and publication, The groups ranged from the ultraliberal "Hicksites" (publisher of The Friends Intelligencer), to the ultraconservatives of Philadelphia (The Friend), to the moderat e liberals of Haverford (Friends Review), to the evangelical Quakers of the West {The Christian Worker), who ran Dwight Moody-inspired revivals that were markedly different from the traditional contemplative quietism of the Quaker church. Jones saw his mission as unification, and he began to use his editorial voice to support it. He refused to support any one sect and instead used his skills as an historian to discover what the essential aspects of Quakerism should be. Within a year of beginning his role as editor he merged the Friends Review with The Christian Worker and founded The American Friend in 1894. The orthodox group in Philadelphia changed slowly and reluctantly, however. To further unify the church Jones proposed in 1900 a "Constitution and Discipline" and a national organization to which all Quakers would belong. After some changes the Yearly Meeting of Friends for New England adopted the constitution. This gathering was followed by many other Yearly Meetings. Jones's vision was catching on. Meanwhile, during his editorship he faced two tragedies. In 1898 his wife died after a long illness, and in 1903, at the age of eleven, his son, Lowell, died. Jones was devastated but found solace in Saint Francis of Assisi, whom he would consider as one of his "major guides" for the remainder of his life.

American Friends Service Committee

Jones had much more work ahead of him. In 1906 he began serious work on the six-volume History of Quakerism. William Braithwaite would write volumes three and four while Jones wrote the first two (Studies in Mystical Religion and Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) and the final two (The Quakers in the American Colonies and Later Periods of Quakerisms). All four of the volumes would appear by 1921. Jones did remarry in 1906, to Elizabeth Bartram Cadbury, who gave birth to their daughter, Mary Hoxie Jones, in the same year. Rufus continued to teach, but in 1912 he resigned the editorship of The American Friend. He also continued to lecture and remained involved in Quaker affairs. In 1917 he helped to found what for many is his crowning achievement. As the war in Europe raged on, the United States moved toward involvement in the fighting. The Quakers' belief in pacifism should not exempt them from providing a service, Jones believed. On 30 April 1917 the Yearly Meeting in Philadelphia proposed a plan for service during the war. Rufus Jones was named chairman of the new American Friends Service Committee, an organization that not only supported conscientious objectors to the war but also allowed them to perform useful work, often in harm's way, without their engaging in the fighting. The Friends Service Committee sent men to France to work with the Red Cross, and after the war, at the request of Herbert Hoover, who was organizing postwar relief efforts, the Friends Service Committee sent money and personnel to feed German children in the Weimar Republic. The committee was, in Jones's view, his "cathedral," a "translation of Christianity…greater than any cathedral builders ever made." He would live until 1948, continuing to teach until 1934. He published fifty-four books and personally oversaw Friends' work during World War II. He was chairman of the second World Conference of Friends in 1937 and addressed the world via radio hookup. "The Quaker philosophy of life," he said, "sees in a human spirit something that of all things in the universe is most like that ultimate reality we call God, who is spirit. Spirit like ours cannot come from anything else than Spirit."