The Life of Stephen Crisp
Stephen Crisp was born at Colchester in 1628 and spent his young manhood being disappointed by religion — trying the public teachers, trying the separated congregations, finding people who could argue about baptism and no one who could tell him how to be free of the thing in himself that kept betraying him. In the Fourth month of 1655, in the twenty-seventh year of his age, James Parnell came to Colchester: a teenager, 'a stripling and young in years,' who would soon finish his testimony with his blood. Crisp was convinced, and preached for some thirty-five years afterwards. What makes him unlike any other Friend of that generation is what he did with the second half of his life. He crossed to Holland again and again, and he learned Dutch — well enough to stand up in Amsterdam and preach in it for half an hour together to people who had no English at all. He became the hinge between English Friends and the Low Countries, travelling to Rotterdam, Harlingen, Groningen, Emden, Danzig and Friedrichstadt, answering magistrates, arguing with Baptists, and writing home. He was also among the most argued-with men of his day, and this volume carries his replies alongside his pastoral epistles. He died on the twenty-eighth of the Sixth month, 1692, at Wandsworth in Surrey, and was carried on the shoulders of Friends to Bunhill Fields.
- Fully modernized English — every long sentence broken, every inversion untangled
- 1,655-word editorial introduction placing his work in the Low Countries in context
- 43 chapters: his own life, the testimonies of his Friends, and his collected epistles and replies
- Quoted Scripture and quoted opponents left exactly as he set them down
- 575 linked Scripture and reference notes throughout
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read10.3 hours
- Length147,077 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 10.3 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 10.3 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 8.2 hours to 14 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 145,469 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,608 words |
| Total | 147,077 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,608 of the 147,077 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
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
8.2 hours and 14 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 10.3 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 420–588 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
He was born at Colchester in Essex in 1628, and the first chapter of his own account is not a chronicle of events at all. It is an anatomy of a searching mind, written by a man who had spent a very long time being let down by religion.
The years of seeking
He describes a childhood in which the witness of God was already at work — a conscience that troubled him for lies and for cruelty before he had any doctrine to hang the trouble on. Then came a young manhood spent moving from one profession of faith to the next. He tried the public teachers of the parish. He tried the separated congregations. He found people who could talk about the new birth and people who could argue about baptism, and he found no one who could tell him how to be free of the thing in himself that kept betraying him.
That is the state James Parnell found him in, about the Fourth month of 1655, in the twenty-seventh year of his age. Parnell was a teenager. Crisp calls him “a stripling and young in years.” What Parnell preached was not a better argument; it was the light of Christ in the conscience, and a command to stop running from it. Crisp stopped running.
The man who learned Dutch
The travelling begins almost at once, and it never really stops. He went into Scotland and wrote to its presbyters. He wrote twice to the Mayor of Colchester. He was imprisoned. And then, over and over, he went beyond the seas.
This is the part of his life that has no parallel among the first Friends. Crisp learned the Dutch language and preached in it. Not through an interpreter and not haltingly — the record has him speaking in the Dutch tongue for about half an hour together, to congregations who had never heard a word of English. For something like thirty years he was the living connection between Friends in England and Friends in Holland, Friesland, Germany and the Baltic: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Harlingen, Groningen, Emden, Danzig, Friedrichstadt. He answered the magistrates of Groningen to their faces and then answered them again in print. He wrote The Ground and Cause of the Misery of the Netherlands. He wrote to the Baptists in Holland, to the Princess Elizabeth, to the people called French Protestants, and to all the churches of Christ throughout the world.
The controversialist and the pastor
A large part of this volume is Crisp arguing, and it is worth saying plainly why that material is here. He was answered in print by Robert Cobbet, by Thomas Loddington, by Thomas Crisp, and by others, and he answered them back. Those replies quote his opponents at length, and in this edition those quotations are left exactly as he set them down — long sentences, old spellings and all. To smooth a quoted source is to falsify the evidence being discussed. The same rule protects every passage of Scripture he quotes.
But the man his Friends remembered was not the controversialist. He was a pastor, and the epistles are the best of him — A Faithful Exhortation and Warning to All Friends, A Word in Due Season, the five cautions, the long epistle to Amsterdam, the epistle to Friends in a day of winds. He writes to people who are tired, or quarrelling, or cooling, and he writes without any of the severity he keeps for the men who attack the Truth in print.
The end
On the twenty-fourth of the Sixth month, 1692, under much bodily weakness and pain, he was visited by his old friend George Whitehead, who wrote down what he said. Four days later he was carried by litter out of William Crouch’s house in London to Crouch’s house at Wandsworth in Surrey, four miles off, for the sake of the air. He died there. His body was brought back to the Gracechurch Street meeting house, and on the thirty-first a great number of Friends carried him on their shoulders to the burying ground at Bunhill Fields.
About this edition
Every sentence has been read for readability, not merely for vocabulary: long sentences
broken, inversions untangled, nested clauses opened out. Quaker usage is preserved
throughout — First-day and Second-day, the numbered months, Truth, Friends, convincement,
the Seed. The 1694 text was recovered from a scanned original, and the scanning damage —
running headers dropped into the middle of sentences, page numbers embedded in prose,
columns transposed, l read as f — has been repaired against the source rather than
paved over. Where the repair changed a proper name or a Scripture citation, it was
verified before it was made.
