The Dawnings of the Gospel Day, Volume II: The Doctrinal Tracts
The second volume of Francis Howgill’s collected writings from the 1676 folio, gathering the great doctrinal tracts of 1658: The Measuring Rod of the Lord, Some of the Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Declared, An Epistle to Friends in London, Mystery Babylon the Mother of Harlots Discovered, and The Invisible Things of God. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- The great doctrinal tracts of 1658
- The Measuring Rod, Mysteries of God’s Kingdom, Mystery Babylon, and the Invisible Things of God
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read5.5 hours
- Length78,086 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 5.5 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 5.5 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 4.3 hours to 7.4 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 72,644 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 5,442 words |
| Total | 78,086 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 5,442 of the 78,086 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
4.3 hours and 7.4 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 5.5 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 223–312 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
If Volume I of this series caught Francis Howgill in the white heat of the first Quaker years — the warnings, the answers to accusers, the Irish declaration of the inward Light — this second volume finds him in 1658, at the height of his powers as a doctrinal teacher. The five great tracts gathered here are sustained expositions of the gospel he and his companions had been preaching since 1652: that Christ is come and coming, that his Light shines in every conscience, that grace is one gift and a sufficient teacher, and that the long night of apostasy is ending as the Lamb rises over the whore, the beast, and the false prophet.
Howgill was then about forty. With Edward Burrough he had already carried the message from the northern dales into London, drawn crowds, and suffered the usual beatings and imprisonments. He still had ten years of freedom before the Restoration oath laws would close upon him and send him to die a prisoner in Appleby Gaol. The writings of 1658 show a mind that had not only felt the Truth but had learned how to open it — to the seeking, to the hostile, and to the Friends themselves — with a rare combination of prophetic fire and patient argument.
This volume gathers The Measuring Rod of the Lord, Some of the Mysteries of God’s Kingdom Declared, An Epistle to Friends in and about London, Mystery Babylon, the Mother of Harlots, Discovered, and The Invisible Things of God Brought to Light by the Revelation of the Eternal Spirit — the doctrinal cluster of 1658 from the 1676 folio The Dawnings of the Gospel Day.
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.
