The Truth Exalted: The Journal of John Burnyeat
The journal of John Burnyeat (1631–1690), the Cumberland farmer who became the chief builder of Irish Quakerism. Convinced in 1653, he crossed the Atlantic twice, helped answer Roger Williams in the famous 1672 Rhode Island disputation, and organized the meetings of Friends in Ireland. Here is his complete journal, with his letters to his brother and his pastoral epistles, in a modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- Complete journal, letters, and epistles in twelve sections
- A firsthand witness to early Quakerism in Britain, Ireland, and colonial America
- EPUB format
About This Edition
Among the traveling ministers of the first Quaker generation, few left a record as steady and trustworthy as John Burnyeat. Born in 1631 on a farm in the parish of Loweswater, among the fells of Cumberland, he searched for years among the Puritan groups of the day and found rest in none of them. Then, in 1653, the first Quaker preachers swept through the north country, and Burnyeat was “convinced” — the word Friends used for that decisive turning. The experience marked him for life, and the journal gathered here begins at exactly that point.
What followed was nearly forty years on the road. Burnyeat became a “Public Friend,” one of the traveling ministers who carried the Quaker message from county to county and country to country. He rode the length of England and Scotland, crossed repeatedly to Ireland, and was imprisoned more than once under the persecutions of the restored monarchy. He records these sufferings without self-pity, treating jail as simply one of the places the work led him. But the journeys that made his name carried him much farther — twice across the Atlantic to the young English settlements of America, through Barbados, Virginia, Maryland, and New England.
His second American journey placed him at the center of a defining episode. In 1672 the aging Roger Williams of Rhode Island challenged the Quakers to a public debate. George Fox had already left the colony, so the burden of answering fell on Burnyeat and his fellow minister William Edmundson. The result was the famous three-day disputation at Newport, and Burnyeat’s firsthand account is one of the clearest windows we have into colonial religion a generation before William Penn founded Pennsylvania.
In his later years Burnyeat turned to Ireland, and there he did the work for which Friends remembered him longest: building the system of monthly, quarterly, and national meetings that gave Irish Quakerism its lasting structure. He died at Dublin in 1690, worn out at fifty-nine by a life of constant motion. This Friends Illuminated edition presents his complete journal, his tender letters to his brother, and his pastoral epistles to Friends, with a testimony by George Fox at the front, as in the original 1691 collection. The text is gently modernized for present-day readers, with the plain speech of thee and thou preserved where Burnyeat used it, and scripture and historical references linked throughout.