Society of Friends

MP regretted the passing of the days when the Friends had been, although persecuted, more steady, pure, and active in their faith. In her husband's words: She mourned for the obvious declension of our society...

The letter pulls no punches, enumerating the causes for the bad state of the Society of Friends in Virginia, which the writers say has given them much pain. They anatomise the exceedingly low state...

MP and her second husband made the momentous conversion to Quakerism , though the mediation of two Friends named Thomas Curtis and William Simpson .

MP , already securely a Quaker , wrote her first autobiographical text: A Brief Account of Some of My Exercises from My Childhood . . ..

Written expression in connection with her religious life was vital to MP from her childhood. She wrote prayers and letters, and began amassing by stages a series of autobiographical writings in the Quaker tradition. She...

MP came from the English middle class, and was born into the Anglican church. After an early disregard for religion, then a long period of spiritual struggle, she became a Quaker .

MP 's surviving letters in general concern themselves with practical and ideological issues in the Society of Friends . She strongly supports the practice of separate women's meetings.

Here she justifies her financial dealings and defends herself against charges of having sought to evade the fines and imprisonment meted out to Quakers : the implication of these charges was that she and her...

MP 's manuscripts survive at Friends House in London (headquarters of the Society of Friends ) and in other Quaker archives. A body of critical work is accumulating around her, and her writing is now...

Catherine Payton (later CP ) prayed, in our little meeting at Dudley, that she might become a Quaker minister.

CP wrote at Redruth, Cornwall, An Epistle to Friends in Ireland, which was published that year at Dublin.

Writing in the late eighteenth century, CP centred all her literary work on her Quaker religion, yet both her poetry and prose also deal with secular politics. She wrote pamphlets, sermons, personal letters and formal...

She was a middle-class Englishwoman, a Quaker both by birth and conversion.

She duly took up the role of minister and missionary for the Society of Friends . She was active in this calling over the course of her life, preaching in Britain, North America, and Holland...

Many of the reasons cited by CP against the Methodists were true, too, of the Anglicans: too many forms and ceremonies, use of vestments, of the communion service, of baptism by sprinkling infants. Missionaries, she...