public Friend

English

Etymology

Friend denoted a member of the Society of Friends i.e. a Quaker.

Noun

public Friend (plural public Friends)

1. A Quaker authorized to travel between meetings and communities to preach; a Quaker preacher (in the 18th and 19th centuries).
   • 1830, John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, being a collection of memoirs, page 599:

     Thomas Story [1670?–1742], a public Friend and the Recorder of the city, has also spoken of this calamity [an excessively hot summer in 1699] in his Journal, as being a scourge which carried off from six to eight of the inhabitants daily, [...in total] about 220, of whom about 80 to 90 were of the Society of Friends.

   • 1846, Robert Smith, editor, The Friend, volume 1, page 172:

     George Gray, a public Friend, who had come from Barbadoes early to settle in Pennsylvania, this year returned thither again in the service of the ministry.

   • 1857, The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, page 188:

     [...] through the wilderness four hundred miles or more, where no public Friend had ever travelled before: the journey was perilous, but the Lord was with him; who may, in his own time, make way for his servants in those desert places.

   • 1997, Richard L. Greaves, God's Other Children: Protestant Nonconformists and the Emergence of Denominational Churches in Ireland, 1660-1700, Stanford University Press, →ISBN, page 295:

     Because Quakers eschewed a professional ministry and formal ordination, their ministers—public Friends—operated with relatively few restrictions in comparison, for example, with conformist or Presbyterian clergy. […] A certificate amounted to a meeting's stamp of approval that the bearer was qualified to be a public Friend. For a public Friend about to embark on "truth's service," the monthly meeting provided a certificate, as the Dublin men did for Anthony ...

   • 2014, Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 145:

     As late as the 1750s the actions of Public Friends were considered to be strange, and their motivations unknowable, even sometimes to fellow Quakers. Repetitious, wide-ranging travel was dangerous and painful in this period.

Alternative forms

• Public Friend