Complete Works of Edward Burrough, Volume 1

Edward Burrough was called the “Son of Thunder” by his fellow Friends — a young man from Westmorland who encountered George Fox at seventeen and within months was preaching across England with a power that drew thousands and terrified the authorities. He died in Newgate Prison in 1663, not yet thirty years old, a victim of the Quaker Act that made it illegal to attend meetings of more than five persons. In those brief years he wrote with astonishing volume and force. This first volume gathers his earliest tracts: the passionate defenses of Quaker faith against critics who called Friends heretics, blasphemers, and enemies of the social order. Here Burrough establishes the central arguments that would run through all his writing — that Christ is present and teaches his people directly, that outward forms and hireling priests are obstacles to true religion, and that the Light in every conscience is sufficient to lead to salvation.

These early writings have a raw urgency that even Burrough’s later, more polished work cannot quite match. He was writing in the heat of controversy, responding to specific attacks, yet always turning the argument back to first principles. This modernized edition preserves the rhetorical force of the originals while making the texts available to readers who would otherwise be stopped by seventeenth-century conventions of spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure.