The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson introduced Jones to the idea of George Fox as “one of a great historical succession of mystics.” This revelation changed Jones’s conception of his family’s religion. Having learnt in the study of natural science that “the world was not made in six days and that man did not begin with Adam,” far from being troubled by the scientific evidence, he found, “his religious faith all the more secure when it marched with facts.” He attended the Providence Friends School in Rhode Island and Haverford College in Pennsylvania and, having obtained an MA from Harvard, returned to Haverford as a professor of Psychology and Philosophy. His uncle and aunt, Eli and Sybil Jones, established Friends Schools in Lebanon (then part of Syria) and Palestine. Jones was born in Maine, USA, to an old Quaker family. He delivered the first Swarthmore Lecture in London in 1908, and is the only person ever to have given two, the second being in 1920.
Often described as a Quaker mystic, he was able to reconcile science and modern, liberal thinking with his Quakerism. His influence enabled the two divisions of American Quakerism, which split in the mid 19th Century, to reunite after his death. He was one of the founders of the American Friends Service Committee and an instigator of the Quäkerspeisung feeding programme after the First World War. Rufus Jones was a highly influential American Quaker.
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