SOURCE: An introduction to The Book of the Poor in Spirit, by a Friend of God, Longmans Green and Co, 1954, pp. 1-50.

In the following excerpt, Kelley provides an overview of the Friends of God and discusses factors that led to their formation and rapid disappearance.

It is an accepted maxim that the more a particular age becomes secular and dead to religious truth, the more marked becomes the line of demarcation between the indifferent and the concerned. The concerned person finds himself bound to abstain from occupations and pleasures which, though not injurious in themselves, have become corrupt. Furthermore, the perils of enthusiasm, the mistaking one’s own natural emotions for divine influence, are greatest when that influence, known by the concerned to be real, is ignored, even denied by the world in general. Yet the world in general always claims to be preoccupied with truth.

When...