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New Era? From Philadelphia the split spread, resulting in bitter lawsuits, un-Quakerly polemics. Even today some Orthodox Friends look askance at the indifference of many Hicksites to formal theology. Some Hicksites feel an "uneasiness" at Orthodox attitudes. But the conciliatory principles of Friends, and above all the joint management of such Quaker ministrations as the American Friends Service Committee, have made a healing of the breach inevitable, however slow.
Even the most optimistic Friends expect that it will be a number of years before the two Yearly Meetings will have delegated all their functions and responsibilities to the General Meeting. But most welcomed the first General Meeting as the beginning of a new era of Quakerism. From their new-found unity they look for a surge of power with which to tackle their biggest piece of unfinished business —carrying the spiritual testimony of the Friends as widely and as well among the "world's people" as they have carried their services to suffering humanity.
* Quakers handle the Society's business without resort to parliamentary procedure. Action must be taken unanimously, or not at all; for each meeting a Clerk is appointed to gather the "sense of the meeting" on a given subject, reduce it to a minute for the meeting's approval. Quakers find the method makes up in unity for what it loses in dispatch. Its one big failure: the Hicksite-Orth-dox schism.
*The traditional Quaker ministry is unpaid, drawn from the rank & file of the meeting, any member of whom could theoretically qualify. But today many meetings — chiefly west of the Appalachians — employ regular pastors † One non-Quaker deeply affected by Elias Hicks was Walt Whitman. He considered Hicks's preaching one of the great experiences of his boyhood, kept a picture of Hicks in his bedroom as long as he lived.