Driftless by David Rhodes Page A

made all the difference, something that could be experienced, and because of this it had to be admitted that it could also not be experienced, and if it was not experienced it could not be sufficient.
    And as far as the Holy Trinity was concerned—this was of course a wonderful idea so long as you did not worry about the need for All to be One rather than All to be Three, but what Scripture, exactly, was it based upon?
    Her teacher placed his head in his hands, looked at her through the spaces between his fingers, and called her a “bad girl.”
    After leaving church, her foster parents took her home and whipped her until she bled, but this was expected, because suffering
     at the hand of others, she had come to believe because of many resounding examples in the Bible, was a sign of having true beliefs.
    Within the month, she was taken to another foster home.
    That was a long time ago, she reflected on her way back to the parsonage behind the Words Friends of Jesus Church. Now she was no longer a child and did not expect other people to share her thoughts or beliefs. It wasn’t necessary. The Holy Bible Theological Seminary had taught her that. There were hundreds of Christian denominations and all of them had different practices and different shades of belief. They talked about believing the same things, but when it came right down to it, they didn’t. Whatever unity there was came from a shared agreement to not be very specific about what those beliefs entailed. And only odd ducks, like herself, bothered to look very deeply into them.
    The congregation she currently served belonged to the Society of Friends. She had known little about this denomination but studied up before coming for the interview.
    Their mid-seventeenth-century founder, George Fox, had experienced the living spirit of Jesus Christ, in England. Convinced that such personal encounters constituted essential Christianity, Fox attracted a number of equally convinced followers, and they openly criticized established religious and governmental practices. They called themselves Friends and suffered appalling persecution from other Christians for their iconoclastic beliefs.
    Friends came to the New World as many others, seeking religious freedom. Their numbers in Pennsylvania once comprised a majority and their views on pacifism, plain dress, alcohol abstinence, and the shunning of music and dancing were well known. William Penn had been a prominent member of the group. They worshipped in “meeting houses,” in silence, seeking direct communion with God, the males on one side of unadorned rooms, females on the other. There were no paid pastors or priests among them, as they rejected the idea of spiritual intermediaries. Each individual believer, they thought, enjoyed the same direct connection to the Deity. Their nickname, Quaker, currently used to advertise breakfast cereal, mocked the way
     some members’ untrained voices quavered when they delivered inspired messages to the rest of the meeting. They advocated for better treatment of mental patients and criminals, and the Society of Friends included many women who were instrumental in spreading the early faith. In later years, Friends contributed to the abolitionist movement. The Underground Railroad was believed by some to have been engineered by them.
    In the late nineteenth century, the Great Awakening, also known as the holiness movement, swept across the United States in a wave of evangelical tent meetings led by charismatic, European-trained ministers. The movement owed much of its emphasis to John Wesley and profoundly influenced Quakerism. Soon, an acrimonious dispute over practice and doctrine divided the Society. Afterwards, there were many Friends congregations that to an untrained eye resembled Wesleyans, except for omitting water baptism and other rituals relating to the sacraments, which were rejected in favor of less demonstrative forms of devotion. Gone were the plain clothes and peculiar