Dictionary

public Friend en · NOUN

Etymology

Friend denoted a member of the Society of Friends i.e. a Quaker.

Meanings

1. A Quaker authorized to travel between meetings and communities to preach; a Quaker preacher (in the 18th and 19th centuries).
   • George Gray, a public Friend, who had come from Barbadoes early to settle in Pennsylvania, this year returned thither again in the service of the ministry. 1846, Robert Smith, editor, The Friend, volume 1, page 172:
   • Thomas Story [1670?–1742], a public Friend and the Recorder of the city, has also spoken of this calamity [an excessively hot summer in 1699] in his Journal, as being a scourge which carried off from six to eight of the inhabitants daily, [...in total] about 220, of whom about 80 to 90 were of the Society of Friends. 1830, John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, being a collection of memoirs, page 599:
   • Because Quakers eschewed a professional ministry and formal ordination, their ministers—public Friends—operated with relatively few restrictions in comparison, for example, with conformist or Presbyterian clergy. […] A certificate amounted to a meeting's stamp of approval that the bearer was qualified to be a public Friend. For a public Friend about to embark on "truth's service," the monthly meeting provided a certificate, as the Dublin men did for Anthony ... 1997, Richard L. Greaves, God's Other Children: Protestant Nonconformists and the Emergence of Denominational Churches in Ireland, 1660-1700, Stanford University Press, →ISBN, page 295:
   • [...] through the wilderness four hundred miles or more, where no public Friend had ever travelled before: the journey was perilous, but the Lord was with him; who may, in his own time, make way for his servants in those desert places. 1857, The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal, page 188:
   • As late as the 1750s the actions of Public Friends were considered to be strange, and their motivations unknowable, even sometimes to fellow Quakers. Repetitious, wide-ranging travel was dangerous and painful in this period. 2014, Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain, Yale University Press, →ISBN, page 145:

Forms

wikipedia: Society of Friends