Quaker hymnody

The fact that the meetings for worship of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain are held on the basis of silence does not mean that there were no hymns in Quaker worship in the past, nor that hymns are not sung by Quakers in other parts of the world. From the beginning of their movement in 17th-century England Quakers sang psalms, but their attitude to them differed from that of other Christian groups. Robert Barclay, the early Quaker theologian, wrote in An Apology for the True Christian Divinity (1676-78) that the singing of psalms was a part of God’s worship — ‘very sweet and refreshful, when it proceeds from a true sense of God’s Love in the Heart, and arises from the...