Pendle Hill

As we traveled, we came near to a very

great hill, called Pendle Hill, and I was moved of the

Lord to go up to the top of it . . . When I was come to the top

... the Lord let me see in what places He had a great people to

be gathered.

--Journal of George Fox

Howard Brinton is a friendly little man with a fuzz of silvery hair and a serene face in which a profound wisdom of the spirit does not imply a complete innocence of the world. One day last week he was discussing the nature and purposes of Pendle Hill, the Quaker school and religious retreat near Philadelphia which he and his wife Anna Brinton have managed for the last twelve years. As he spoke, the folding doors opened, and through the somewhat austere room padded an East Indian woman in full native garb. Looking neither to right nor left, she went out another door. Howard Brinton did not glance up or stop talking.

Then the door through which she had disappeared opened, and a young man in blue work shirt and dungarees tramped across the bare floor. Looking neither to right nor left, he vanished beyond the folding doors. A few moments later, Anna Brinton came to the door, leaned in and said: "The FBI man has gone." Howard Brinton went on talking, but suddenly realized what had been said. "What FBI man?"* he asked. But, with Quakerly tact, Anna Brinton had withdrawn.

That was in the morning. In the afternoon, Friend Brinton was consulted by a Chinese student about his studies in Neo-Platonism. Two relief workers consulted him about D.P. camps in Austria to which they had been assigned. At 4:30, a term paper on U.S. cooperatives was read and pondered. In the evening there was a lecture on the philosophy of Quakerism. It was a typical day in the life of Director of Studies Brinton and of Pendle Hill.

Such personal "singularities" and enlivening activities might have caused George Fox a slight anxiety. Pendle Hill, set in the midst of wealthy suburban Wallingford (twelve miles southwest of Philadelphia), is a long way in time & space from the Lancashire hill where Fox saw his vision of the future Religious Society of Friends. The gently rugged founder of Quakerism, known to his age as "the man in the leather breeches," might have found Pendle Hill's four spacious stone houses, its 15 acres of trees, lawns and gardens strangely remote from the round of jails, beatings and death which was the regular portion of early Quakers. The testimonies of Pendle Hill's morning meetings for worship might have seemed somewhat prosy to a man whose fierce fervor of inward prayer is reported to have shaken the walls of the silent 17th Century meetings.

Yet he could not fail to sense that Friends at Pendle Hill were infused with a true Quaker spirit, relaxed but reverent, and that in their three chief activities--worship, study and work--they were seeking solutions for three of the great problems of the age: the alienation of class from class in society, the alienation of the individual from the community, the alienation of man from God.

The Project. Pendle Hill began with the "concern" of a group of weighty Friends that the Society should have such an institution for adult education. In part, this was a need peculiar to Quakers. Since the Religious Society of Friends has traditionally no professional ministry, the spiritual and educational maturity of all members is especially important. In part, it was hoped that Pendle Hill might fill a need caused by the fact that modern pressures have turned most universities into filling stations for the mind, disregarding the spirit when they cannot entirely forget it.

In 1930 the Pendle Hill Foundation was formed, with a board of 60 managers including Friends from the New York, Baltimore and two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings. Among them were spiritual leaders like Rufus M. Jones, Clarence E. Pickett and Henry J. Cadbury. With $90,000, chiefly from the sale of Quaker property, the founders bought the Wallingford estate of a Philadelphia businessman. Income is derived from contributions, student fees and work done by residents.

Gifts have purchased a new house and seven acres of adjoining property and put up $25,000 worth of new building. Quaker business, like Quaker worship, is conducted in the "leading of the spirit," and debt is abhorrent to Friends.

As Pendle Hill's first director, the board of managers engaged a British Quaker doctor and ex-missionary, Henry T. Hodgkin. He planned to make Pendle Hill a school of the prophets, a place of research, and a training ground for active workers in the social life of today. But Dr. Hodgkin died in 1933. In 1936 the trustees chose as his successors the man & wife team of Howard and Anna Brinton.

The Brlntons. Both Brintons are birthright Friends. Both have spent most of their lives teaching. Howard Haines Brinton, 63, has taught physics, mathematics and religion at Guilford, Earlham and

Mills Colleges. After World War I, he directed child feeding in Upper Silesia. In 1936 he went to Japan to study the meditative techniques of the Zen Buddhists. Brisk, capable, humorous Anna Brinton was dean of the faculty at Mills College when her husband taught there.

Howard Brinton likes to compare Pendle Hill with the religious communities of scholars, like the Brothers of the Common Life, which sprang up in Europe during the Middle Ages. These scholars studied "divine arts," "liberal arts" and "useful arts," which centered respectively in the chapel, the library and the hall. Their aim was to recognize the whole of a man's nature, developing spirit, mind and body in the life of a close community.

The Students. Life at Pendle Hill is similarly organized. The academic year is divided into three main terms--autumn, winter, spring. The 60-odd students include men & women, unmarried and married (during the last year four babies were born at Pendle Hill). The majority of the students, like a fifth of the staff, are non-Quaker.

During the recent term, Pendle Hill residents included: an ex-professor at a Swedenborgian theological school; a minister of the Remonstrant Church* in Holland, who is studying the psychology of religion; a Spanish ex-Roman Catholic whose teaching of the Spanish mystics at a Catholic school in Barcelona resulted in his conversion to Quakerism; the Negro great-granddaughter of a Virginia planter, who while writing a novel, doubles as the school's dietician; a Chinese Taoist who is investigating philosophy in the U.S.; a young musician who is studying the violin. There are no "credit" courses, and Pendle Hill grants no degrees. Instead, each student works on a project for which he must prepare a paper each term. This is read aloud and discussed by the whole student group and staff (the violinist's "term paper" was a recital). Some subjects of term papers that have been read at Pendle Hill during the past few weeks: Experiments in Christian Communities; A Study of Pacifism; The Problem of Love in Kierkegaard; Economic Problems of the South; Workers' Education: Class Problems and Response.

Students confer at least once a week with Director Brinton, who checks on their progress and steers them to pertinent books and authorities--often at nearby Swarthmore and Haverford colleges.

In addition to work on their projects, students attend lectures (usually one a day). These are delivered by Director Brinton or by such weighty Quakers as Rufus Jones or Douglas Steere. Most courses are on religious subjects: the teachings of Jesus, Quaker thought and practice, Oriental mysticism.

Qualitative v. Quantitative. The standard of student achievement is qualitative, not quantitative. A student may develop only one new idea at Pendle Hill, but that is considered enough if the idea is one by which life may be led more fully. Silent meditation and expectant waiting are held to be more important than frantic haste to finish projects. For this purpose, students are urged, but not required, to attend daily Quaker meetings for worship.

Students average from one to three hours a day at manual work--gardening,, housework, secretarial duties, general repairs. Thus one recent visitor, looking for an obscure book in the library, was led to the kitchen to ask the cook where to find it. Newcomers have been startled to find such famed visitors as Author Elizabeth Gray Vining--now tutor to Japan's Crown Prince Akihito--dynamically drying dishes, or bearded Mystic Gerald Heard meditatively hoeing the leeks.

A credit for hours worked is deducted from each student's tuition bill (each student's tuition is discussed and set individually). Many students spend at least one day a week working at an outside job. Social-service agencies in neighboring industrial areas and the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia are happy to give Pendle Hill students such jobs.

Students sometimes return to Pendle Hill at intervals, but it is understood that what they have learned there is to be used in the work of the world.

Publishing House. Pendle Hill is also an active publishing enterprise. This venture, now in general charge of Clement Alexandre, an able and articulate young English non-Quaker, has broken even with a list of some 30 pamphlets and half a dozen books. Most of them are written by Friends, and expound Quakerly thought on current economic and social problems, and Quaker religious practices and history. Pendle Hill is thus the Society's chief U.S. publishing center.

One of the most important activities at Pendle Hill is the conferences of non-Quaker groups which are held there. Trade unions have found the Quaker seclusion and quiet ideal for various types of meetings. They are welcomed, for many Friends are intensely concerned with labor problems, especially the necessity of achieving harmony between labor and management. Few expect the spiritual influence of Pendle Hill to be immediate or sensational; they are content to make a beginning. Nor are all Friends agreed as to how tl beginning should be made. At one conference, union representatives put up loudspeakers through which they berated the Taft-Hartley Act. The harangues came through clearly in the handsome Quaker homes that border the Pendle Hill property, causing these quiet neighbors to express definite anxiety at such stridency.

Religious Retreats. Diametrically different are the religious retreats which take place at Pendle Hill under the leadership of

Friends like Douglas Steere, Howard Brinton and Gilbert Kilpack. These groups, composed of Quakers' and non-Quakers, come together in spring and fall to withdraw from the world into the silence where they seek the frontier of the spirit. The retreat usually begins on Saturday and ends on Monday. During that time the group worships and communes together. Conversation is shunned, and the silence is broken chiefly to deliver the burden of a testimony to the group or to pray.

The Inner Light. The meaning and power of Pendle Hill is not to be found primarily in its activities, but in the spirit that informs them. This spirit, unobtrusive but pervading, is Quakerism. Quakerism is neither Protestant nor Catholic, but a third type of Christianity in which rationalism and mysticism are at one. At the core of its practice is the belief in the Inner Light, or "that of God in every man."

The Inner Light is not human conscience or human reason, but is above both, illuminating reason and sensitizing conscience. "It is," Howard Brinton has written in one of the Pendle Hill pamphlets, "that Creative Power which first dawned upon chaos and which draws all things upward into nobler states of being." It is also the source of inspiration of the Bible and of all saints and holy men--the perpetual power which makes possible a continuing revelation. It is for illumination by the Inner Light that Quakers wait in silence in their meetings. For its wider working in the world they also wait in confidence. For Quakers know that ages of indifference are followed by ages of faith.

Until the Inner Light sweeps fragmented modern society into new community, Friends believe that institutions like Pendle Hill are necessary.

* Not a spiritual "seeker," the FBI man was merely checking up on a former Pendle Hill student who was being offered a Government job. * A church derived from a group of 17th Century Arminians.

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