Free Study Guide IncludedRevelation: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
"The Lamb's War." Nayler's famous tract drew its title from Revelation. Early Friends read this book not as future prophecy but as a present spiritual reality — the cosmic battle between Light and darkness being fought in every conscience.
- 22 chapters · ~70,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read2.3 hours
- Length33,360 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 2.3 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 2.3 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 1.9 hours to 3.2 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 33,360 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 33,360 words |
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
1.9 hours and 3.2 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 2.3 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 95–133 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
Early Friends were not millennialists in the usual sense — they did not read Revelation as a prediction of coming historical events. They read it as a description of what was happening now, in the lives of those who had turned to the Light. The Lamb’s War was not a future military campaign but the present spiritual conflict in which every soul was engaged: the battle between the nature of the Lamb and the nature of the beast, between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world. James Nayler’s tract “The Lamb’s War against the Man of Sin” gave the Quaker movement one of its defining images, drawn directly from Revelation.
This commentary traces the Quaker engagement with Revelation through the whole of its twenty-two chapters: the letters to the seven churches (read as addresses to the spiritual conditions present in every gathered meeting), the vision of the throne and the Lamb (the center of Quaker worship, waiting in silence before the one who is worthy), the great tribulation narratives (read in light of the actual persecution Friends endured), and the vision of the new Jerusalem (the goal of the inward journey, the city of God that comes down from heaven as the soul is transformed). The free Group Study Guide makes one of the Bible’s most demanding books accessible for communal exploration.
