Job Scott Collection
A traveling minister for the Society of Friends, Job Scott was born in Providence, R.I., in October 1751. After a spiritual experience at the age of 19, Scott became deeply religious, joining Smithfield Monthly Meeting, and at the age of 22, he took a position teaching the children of Moses Brown, helping to convince Brown to join the Society in 1774. Removing to Springfield, Mass., at the time of the American Revolution, Scott was authorized as a traveling minister, eventually visiting communities from New England to Georgia and England. A quietist in principle, he preached and wrote about both the importance of the Inward Light and the importance of scripture, insisting on the dependence on the immediate movings of the spirit that in some ways prefigures the debate at the center of the Hicksite separation of 1827. He died of smallpox while traveling in Ireland in 1793. His posthumously published journal was highly influential throughout American Quakerism.
The Scott collection is a slender compilation of works by and about the Quaker minister Job Scott. In addition to a thin folder of family materials, the collection includes several unpublished essays by Scott (Brief remarks upon the knowledge of the one Lord; Salvation by Jesus Christ the most important of all subjects; Remarks on the nature of salvation; and On perseverance), several of his published works, and research notes and a biographical essay about him compiled by Jessie G. Carter (1940-1946).