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From "The Quaker Vision of Religious Life" p 4-5 in The Transformation 
of American Quakerism


Baptisms of the Holy Spirit took many forms, but, in the experience of
Friends, they usually came through suffering and tribulation.  It might be
illness or some personal grief, but most common was a kind of mental
anguish and depression that arose from no discerible cause: "low and much
stripped" was a favorite phrase.  Friends living in the light learned to
rejoice in such experiences, which, they believed, washed and made white
the robes of believers.  One Quaker mother in Indiana in the 1830's tried
to comfort her daughter with the aassurance that " trials and afflictions
patiently endured, and quietly submitted to, prepare the Lord's people for
the enjoyment of ihs love and power."  A Philadelphia Friend wrote that
trials and exercises were as necessary to spiritual health ans medicines
were to physical health.  The prevailing tone, however, was much blunter.
Stephen Grellet quoted Scripture: "Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth,,
and scorgeth every son whom he receiveth.  If we had not chastening, we
should be bastards and not sons." (10)

Not all baptisms involved suffering.  Some were of joy and delight.  The
New England minister John Wilbur, an adamant opponent of doctrinal
innovation, thought that those of grief and happiness balanced each other.
Such was the experience of John Beals, a North Carolina Friend.  Not long
before his death in 1796, he had a vision of heaven with Christ enthroned
in glory and surrounded by the saints.  Beals received a promise that
within a few days he would join their number.  The experience, he told his
faily, filled him with unspeakable joy and a feeling of indescribable
sweetness. (ll)

The predominate motif, however, in the "deep baptisms" that Friends
experienced was tribulation.  Typical is the language of Margaret Jones, a
minister in Indiana in the l850's: "Weakness and poverty generally are my
portion...I think I have been most strangely and sigularly tempted,
proved, and tried, and in such ways that cannot be now described."  One
Philadelphia Friend in the l820's refused even to attempt to comfort one
such sufferer, saying that it would be contrary to God's will.  Such may
account for the common description of Friends as grim, a label whose
justice Friends admitted.  Friends, however, thought that such an outward
appearance was a sign of inward grace.  As one put it in l841:  "By the
sadness of the countenance the heart is made better."  Of course, other
Protestants, such as the evangelical revivalists of the Great Awakening,
were notoriously grim in appearance and outlook; nearly all evangelicals
eschewed levity and "lightness."  But few groups carried dourness to the
extent that Friends did, or saw such spiritual merit in depression. (12)

Those experiences, in the eyes of Friends, earned their sufferers a
reward.  They were a means of "refinement and purification".  Friends saw
the baptism of the Holy Spirit as something to be endured frequently.  "O
the deep baptisms I have daily to experience," Charles Osborn mourned in
l816.  They gradually washed away not only sin but also the desire and
propensity to sin, helping the sufferer to achieve perfection.  After many
baptisms Friends would be as "gold tried in the fire", completely
purified.  They came to surrender their wills to Christ.  Thus the
ultimate end of "deep baptisms" was not merely "conversion" but
sanctification, a state of sinlessness. (l3)

Human beings could do nothing by themselves to advance the work of
salvation, but they could cooperate with it.  The best means was
withdrawal into solitude, where teh world and all that distracted from God
or drowned out " the still small voice" were distant.  "To retire into the
soul," Thomas ARnett wrote in l823, "is to enter into the house of
knowledge; and a perfect silence of all imagination and actings."  Such
solitude prepared seekers for divine instruction.  Like the prophets of
ancient Israel, said Arnett, seekers should dwell in retirement, awaiting
the Lord.  To "keep in the quiet," however, was often a struggle for
Friends, and their letters and diaries are full of pleas for divine aid to
remain in such a state.  The constnt introspection, the waiting, had as
its most tangible fuits the huge number of journals and memoranda in which
Friends recorded their spiritual progress or mourned their lack of it."
(l4)