A Short History of a Long Travel from Babylon to Bethel

Among the small classics of early Quaker devotion, few have been loved so long or so widely as Stephen Crisp’s A Short History of a Long Travel from Babylon to Bethel. Crisp (1628–1692), a Colchester man who became one of the most weighty and well-traveled ministers of the first generation of Friends, wrote it near the end of his life, and it was first printed in 1691, the year before he died. It is a brief thing — a single sitting will see it through — yet generations of readers returned to it again and again, because under its plain story it carries the whole inward journey of the soul.

The allegory tells of a young man who, in his father’s house, hears others speak of a great happiness called the house of God, and is seized with a longing to find it. He hires a guide who is paid to lead seekers there, only to discover that the man knows the road no better than he does, and reads it out of a little book. Abandoning that guide, he is taken up by another who leads him cheerfully to a splendid painted house across a bridgeless river — but within, the house is foul, dirty, and full of cobwebs, and its people wrangle over money and office like a fish market. He leaves it too, and wanders into a howling wilderness, where at last, beneath a storm-bent tree in the dark, a small light appears beside him and waits. This Light becomes his only true guide, leading him through serpents and mire to the house of God at last — a house transparent and clean, where the washed and the willing are clothed in white and given a new name.

The meaning would have been plain to Crisp’s first readers, and remains so now. The hired guides are the paid ministers of the day; the painted house is the outward, contentious church that promises glory and gives only frailty; the wilderness is the seeking soul stripped of every borrowed comfort; and the small, patient Light is the inward light of Christ, which the early Friends held to be God’s own teacher in every heart. Babylon is the confusion of the world’s religion, and Bethel — “the house of God” — is the soul brought home to dwell with him.

This edition gently modernizes Crisp’s seventeenth-century prose for present-day readers: archaic spellings and the longest run-on sentences eased for clarity, while his voice and imagery are kept intact. The plain speech of thee and thou has been preserved in the dialogue, where it belongs, for it was a testimony the first Friends suffered for. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and the places and ideas behind the allegory linked to encyclopedic articles, so that any reader may turn at once from Crisp’s story to the Scripture and history beneath it.