The Collected Tracts of Richard Farnsworth, Volume I: The Spirit Speaking in Man

Richard Farnsworth (c. 1630–1666) was a Yorkshire farmer’s son who became one of the earliest and most prolific voices of the first generation of Quaker ministers — the company later remembered as the Valiant Sixty. Among the first to be convinced under the preaching of George Fox in the early 1650s, he gave up his employment for the travelling ministry and never turned back, laboring through Yorkshire, the Midlands, the west country, and London, disputing with priests and professors and suffering the fines and imprisonments that were the common lot of Friends. He is generally reckoned the principal author of the Balby letter of 1656, the first attempt at common order among the Quakers, and he died, still a young man, in London in 1666.

This first volume gathers six of his tracts, spanning the decade from 1653 to 1663. A Brief Discovery of the Kingdom of Antichrist (1653), long thought unrecoverable and newly restored from a hand-keyed transcription of the only surviving printing, is his earliest work — a war bulletin from the first collision between the Friends and the Yorkshire parish clergy, signed by “a thresher, laboring where he finds work.” A Woman Forbidden to Speak in the Church (1654) is one of the earliest Quaker defenses of women’s public ministry. The Heart Opened by Christ (1655) describes the inward work of the Light in the soul. The Pure Language of the Spirit of Truth (1655) is the classic Quaker defense of plain speech — the honest singular thee and thou. The Brazen Serpent Lifted Up (1658), the longest tract here, defends the inward Christ, election, and the universal saving Light. The Spirit of God Speaking in Man (1663) defends the most distinctive Quaker practice of all: waiting upon God in silence until he moves someone to speak.

These are documents of a movement under fire. Farnsworth wrote as a controversialist, answering the established clergy, the Baptists, and hostile magistrates point by point, dense with Scripture and addressed to real opponents in real disputes. Yet beneath the controversy runs a single conviction that binds the whole collection together — the immediate, inward speaking of the Spirit of God in the believer, from which the defense of silent worship, the freedom of women to minister, and the refusal of the world’s flattering speech all follow.

This edition gently modernizes Farnsworth’s seventeenth-century prose for present-day readers: archaic spellings and the longest run-on sentences eased for clarity, while his arguments, his terms, and his Scripture proofs are kept intact. In The Pure Language the plain speech of thee and thou is preserved, for there it is the very subject under debate. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and the people and places behind the controversies linked to encyclopedic articles, so that any reader may turn at once from Farnsworth’s pages to the Scripture and history beneath them.