Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Rules of Discipline and Practice from 1704 

Transcribed and edited by David R. Haines

The Rules of Discipline and Practice compiled by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends as produced to the Yearly Meeting sessions in 1704 appears to be the first attempt to compile a collection of such rules for the Society of Friends in the American colonies. The first recognized attempt to compile rules of practice was the Epistle from the Elders of Balby, written in England in 1656, which was a list of twenty advices written by elders who were gathered for that purpose. The Philadelphia document, which included both rules of discipline (and behavior) and rules of practice, was much more extensive than the Balby Epistle. The Philadelphia document preceded a similar London Yearly Meeting extensive collection of advices by thirty-four years. 

David Haines meticulously transcribed the handwritten text from the original manuscripts. He then edited the document adding punctuation where needed, expanding the eighteenth century shorthand, and correcting the spelling to twenty first century usage while retaining the language of the original.  This book serves as an important resource for anyone interested in the evolution of Quaker identity as demonstrated by their mores and rules.

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Reviews

“A short review cannot do justice to the complexity of David Haines’s work. The shorter volume is a recreation of a work that has previously existed only in manuscript: the 1704 “General Testimony” issued by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Many Liberal Friends today will find its Biblicism and explicit Christianity unsettling. The longer work looks at how the Book of Discipline evolved between 1715 and 1755, focusing on the development of queries, the slow movement of the yearly meeting to ban slaveholding, and the roles of women in meetings for business.”

By Tom Hamm. Read the full review at https://www.friendsjournal.org/book/the-first-american-quaker-discipline-philadelphia-yearly-meeting-rules-of-discipline-and-practice-from-1704/