The Dawnings of the Gospel Day, Volume I: The Early Tracts

Among the first generation of the people called Quakers, few burned with a brighter or steadier flame than Francis Howgill (1618–1668). Born at Todthorne, near Grayrigg in Westmorland, he was a man of learning and conscience long before he was a Friend — a preacher among the Independents and then among the Seekers, restless and unsatisfied, searching the Scriptures and his own heart for a faith that was more than words. In 1652, when George Fox came preaching through the northern dales, Howgill heard him and was convinced. What he had sought through years of study broke upon him at last not as a new doctrine but as a present and inward power — the Light of Christ shining in the conscience. From that hour he gave the rest of his life, and at last his liberty and his body, to the proclaiming of it.

The Dawnings of the Gospel Day is the great folio of Howgill’s collected writings, gathered and printed in 1676, eight years after his death in Appleby Gaol, where he died a prisoner for refusing to swear an oath that his conscience forbade. The whole collection runs to nearly five hundred thousand words and spans the entire arc of his ministry. This first volume gathers his earliest tracts and epistles, written between 1654 and 1656 — the white heat of the movement’s first years, when a handful of northern farmers, weavers, and former soldiers went out two by two to turn the world upside down.

Howgill belonged to that band of itinerant preachers later remembered as the Valiant Sixty — the men and women who carried the Quaker message out of its northern cradle into every corner of England and beyond. His most constant companion was Edward Burrough, a younger man of equal fire, and the two are often named together in the chronicles of those years, “the two great pillars,” as one early Friend called them. Together they preached through the north, then carried the message south to London in 1654, where their plain and searching ministry drew great crowds and greater opposition. Howgill traveled also into Ireland, where the tract that gives this volume its spiritual center, The Inheritance of Jacob Discovered, was written and sent forth.

This edition gently modernizes Howgill’s seventeenth-century prose for present-day readers: spelling and punctuation brought into present usage, the archaic verb forms (hath, doth, saith) lightened to their modern equivalents, the older second-person forms (thee, thou, thy) rendered as you and your, and the longest run-on sentences divided for clarity — while the cadences of the Authorized Version, the great Quaker watchwords, and the prophetic intensity of his appeals all remain his own. Scripture references have been added and linked to the King James text, and the persons, places, and events behind the writings linked to encyclopedic articles, so that any reader may turn at once from Howgill’s witness to the Scripture and history beneath it.