5
blood and body. The other sacrament the Religious Society of Friends did not support was the sacrament of baptism with water (21). The Quakers of the seventeenth century, therefore, were fundamentally challenging the religious teachings of the Protestant Church, which led to open hostility towards the Friends.
The Quakers Sail to the new World
As a result of the hostility the Quakers faced in England, it did not come as a surprise that the new colonies in America started to appeal to them as a possible new territory to settle down and organize their Church without religious persecution. Interestingly, the first Quaker to ever set foot in the New World was a woman, Elizabeth Harris, in 1655-1656 (22). In the following years, more and more Quakers arrived to the colonies, even though they were greeted with open hostility by Puritans there as well. Nevertheless, the Friends were successful in establishing a few meetings (their definition of churches) in Massachusetts and in Rhode Island (24). However, by the 1670s the number of Quaker meetings in America was still far from desirable. A fundamental change came when William Penn, a wealthy Quaker
Englishman, acquired a royal grant in 1681 to establish a Quaker colony in America which would later be called Pennsylvania (27). This new colony was structured in “the Quaker way,” which meant that total religious freedom was granted to everyone, colonists were allowed not to take oaths or participate in armed conflicts. Pennsylvania did not have an established militia either, making the colony completely different from the others (28.) In a sense, the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania was considered a successful one, owing it to the amount of fertile soil and the busy port of Philadelphia, both of which acted as an attractive feature for immigrants (28).