Quakers Quotes
See {611241}, {611246}, {611442}. While the issues with Cromwell were essentially political, there were substantial theological and cultural issues between the Quakers and other protestant sects which even extended across to the New World. See {612011}
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
The Quakers were in the forefront of not only the abolition of slavery but of the integration of the races.
The National Enquirer was originally a serious abolitionist newspaper, not the sensationalist tabloid it became in modern times.
This is the kind of search and seizure to determine who was practicing which religion with which out Founding Fathers were very much aware and which were eliminated in the Bill of Rights.
This article was published under the name of “A Lover Of Peace” but is generally attributed to Paine. He was publishing in Pennsylvania which had a large Quaker, pacifist population and Paine was urging them to consider being armed.
Fox, the Quaker founder, dispatched Aldam to petition Oliver Cromwell for relief of the persecution of the Quakers. Cromwell at first maintained that he was unaware of these organized governmental persecutions so Aldam and another Quaker, Anthony Pearson, collected the writs of many Quakers who were in Jail. Aldam returned and presented these to Cromwell who, having his own political difficulties choose not to get involved as a substantial part of his political support saw Quakers as heretics. Aldam then removed his hat and rendered it into pieces uttering the quotation which might have been interpreted as a curse. Quakers had a concept of—see {611244} for another—“specific fore-seeing” which others might call prophesy. Shortly thereafter Cromwell was deposed.
This is a particularly interesting historical quotation because it succinctly gives a history of the various horrors of religious strife in British history—a history that was very well known to the American Founding Fathers and the general American Colonial population. This history was the major driver behind the public insistence for the Bill of Rights and the 1st Amendment which erected a wall of separation between church and state with government never favoring or abetting any particular religion.