John Yungblut, a student of Rufus Jones and Henry J. Cadbury, worked for the AFSC in the South and became director of Quaker House, a civil rights and peace program in Atlanta in the 1960's. He was invited to give this Henry J. Cadbury lecture at Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1974.

Yungblut begins immediately by dismissing any pretention to predict the future of Quakerism. "I am doing something even more presumptuous: I am saying that in my judgement the only Quakerism that can survive in the future will have to be mystical, prophetic, and evangelical."

Taking each of these subtopics he gives illustrations and discusses what he means by the language. Regarding mysticism he feels that "there is within the Society of Friends a growing group of those who would have us disclaim this heritage." Quoting Dean Inge he maintains that mysticism is "the attempt to realize, in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal."

Yungblut goes on to discuss "The Prophetic", noting that the "white heat of early Quaker testimony cooled when the mystical conciousness that supported it died down." Concluding with a discussion of "The Evangelical", John presents a more personal testimony of his convictions translating the atonement of Christ to his understanding of the mystical "at-one-ment."

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