George Keith

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George Keith was born in 1638/9 in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, to a Presbyterian family and received an M.A. from the University of Aberdeen. This brilliant and accomplished figure joined the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in the 1660s, accompanying George Fox, William Penn, and Robert Barclay on a mission to the Netherlands and Germany in 1677.

In 1685, three years after Barclay had been made the nonresident governor of the Province of East Jersey, Keith traveled there to take the post of Surveyor-General. In 1686 he ran the first survey to mark out the West Jersey/East Jersey borderline. He moved to Philadelphia in 1689 to serve as headmaster at the Friends School there.

Beginning around 1691 Keith decided that Friends have gone too far from orthodox Christianity and began to have sharp disagreements with his fellow believers. He first broke with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting to form a short-lived group called the Christian Quakers in the colonies. After returning to England and meeting with less success in persuading Quakers to follow his lead, he became an Anglican priest. Sponsored by the Society for the Preservation of the Gospel, he spent 1702 to 1704 on a return mission to the Jerseys trying to win over Quakers and others, and invigorating Anglican congregations in Perth Amboy and Burlington. Returning to England he worked for the Church of England until his death on March 27, 1716, a rector at the parish of Edburton, Sussex.

[edit] Sources

• Bowden, James. The history of the Society of Friends in America. [n. p.] 1850.
• Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911 edition, http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/ accessed May 23, 2003.
• Pomfret, John Edwin, The Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702, the rebellious proprietary. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1962.