ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the degree to which some early Friends found themselves out of 'the world' before looking at how the sense of time, intimacy, and separation changed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how Quakers negotiated the failure of the prophecy about the transformation of the world. Coleman and Collins have used Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ as a theoretical framework within which to interpret Liberal Quakerism. This idea of habitus refers to a cultural and embodied homogeneity to personal and collective social life, a coherence to life which is not context-specific but which is regulated by inherent dispositions. In the periods of Quaker history that followed the early enthusiasms of the 1650s, the Friends would need to devise their own meantime theology as evidence of the imminent Second Coming receded.
