Religion: 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 But, with Quakerly tact, Anna Brinton had withdrawn.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.