An Apology for the True Christian Divinity
The definitive systematic defense of Quaker faith — Robert Barclay's fifteen propositions on revelation, the inward light, justification, worship, and the ground of true religion, now in clear modern English.
- Fifteen Propositions · complete & unabridged
- Modernized from the 1678 Latin & English text
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read14.1 hours
- Length201,615 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 14.1 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 14.1 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 11.2 hours to 19.2 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 193,756 words |
|---|---|
| Marginal notes carried over from the author’s own 1678 printing | 7,859 words |
| Total | 201,615 words |
This edition adds no editorial apparatus of its own. The 7,859 words of marginal notes are the author’s, from the 1678 printing, carried over rather than written by us — we do not count them as ours.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
11.2 hours and 19.2 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 14.1 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 576–806 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
An Apology for the True Christian Divinity is the single most important work of systematic theology the Quaker movement ever produced. Written by Robert Barclay — a Scottish gentleman and scholar convinced of Friends’ principles in his early twenties — and first published in Latin in 1676 and in English in 1678, the Apology set out to do for Quakerism what no tract or journal had yet attempted: to state its doctrine in ordered, reasoned form and to defend it against the learned objections of the age. Across fifteen propositions Barclay moves from the foundation of all true knowledge of God in immediate revelation, through the universal saving light of Christ in every conscience, to the Quaker understanding of justification, perfection, worship, ministry, the sacraments, oaths, and civil obedience. It is at once a confession of faith, a work of philosophy, and a sustained polemic — and it remains the text to which serious readers of Quakerism return.
This modernized edition renders Barclay’s dense seventeenth-century prose into clear contemporary English while preserving the rigor and order of his argument. Barclay wrote for an audience trained in scholastic disputation, and the original bristles with Latin tags, period idiom, and long periodic sentences; this edition opens that argument to the modern reader without softening its substance or its edge. The full sequence of propositions is presented complete and unabridged, so that the architecture of Barclay’s case — the way each proposition builds upon the last — stands clearly visible from first page to last.
