Catherine Phillips
Zachariah Taft and women evangelists. Five women to encourage and inspire.
Part 5: by Catherine Coffey.
Most of Taft’s Biographical sketches deal with women from either Methodist circles or the group known as the Friends, more popularly known as Quakers. In the 17th and 18th century the Quakers’ passion for evangelistic endeavour was renowned, and the sketch of Catherine Phillips illustrates why.
Catherine was raised in a pious home. Her paralytic father was in the habit of hosting itinerant ministers whose witness and kindness to his young daughter left a clear impression, ‘I loved their company when but very young ‘ her journal records, ‘and their tender notice of me I commemorate with gratitude’. As she grew up, Catherine was determined to enter ‘the lists of public combatants in the Lamb’s army’ and set off on a mission for Wales with her friend Lucy Bradley. Various other people accompanied Catherine at parts of her journeys through Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, eventually circling back to Bristol and on to London.
The 1740s and 50s were not an easy period for domestic or international travel – it would be another century before railway travel was possible and her journey around southwest England pre-dates the widespread development of canals. Nevertheless, by 1754 she had arrived in colonial America. Her distress at the state of the enslaved people she encountered is clear in her conversation with a slave sent to guide her. She lamented that ‘divers of our friends were then in possession of some [slaves], either by inheritance or purchase’. The issue had become intensely controversial among the Friends although it wasn’t until 1776 that Quakers banned slaveholding among their membership. Catherine’s adventures took her across country to Carvers Creek where the lack of anything like an infrastructure for transport became apparent. The journey took them through a land of dangers. She described one of their lodging places as ‘exposed to the weather on almost every side, and it being a wet night, the rain beat in on us’. She records her fear of ‘the panthers infesting that quarter’ and the nearby discovery of ‘the trac[k] of a wild beast in the sand’ as well as ‘the barking of wolves at a small distance’. Overall, Catherine wrote that that she had ‘travelled upwards of thousand miles in North Carolina, and being preserved from various jeopardies and trials, to the praise of his adorable name’. After two years in America, Catherine returned to Europe.
We might be tempted to assume that she had done enough international travel, but by 1757 Catherine had made her way to the Netherlands where she had a successful preaching tour. ‘I was more at liberty in the exercise of my gift,’ she wrote, ‘than had been usual with me in Holland.’ However, some of the hardships and frustrations of an itinerant ministry were also present. Phillips recorded ‘being told that my interpreter was uncommonly defective’ and later that ‘the labour was hard through the unpreparedness of the hearts of some to receive’, reminding readers that hardships and disappointments were also part of her call.
Her labours were not without criticism. In Cambridge she records trying to ‘convince a man who had con[d]emned women’s ministry in Christ’s church’. Catherine was quick to employ arguments of calling and efficacy in her efforts to persuade him : ‘I may commemorate the mercy, power and wisdom of him who chuseth whom he pleaseth for the various offices of his church’ she wrote. Taft concludes his sketch by summarising her ministry as one which was ‘a blessing to the convincement, edification and comfort of many’.
Taft wrote approvingly of many female evangelists, but maybe none more so than that of Mary Fletcher, formerly Mary Bosanquet.