The Sounding Voice: The Collected Writings of Humphrey Smith, Volume I
Humphrey Smith (d. 1663) — the Herefordshire preacher who gave up a hireling ministry for the Light within and died a prisoner at Winchester — in sixteen pieces: the Evesham persecution narratives, the prophetic proclamations of 1658, the famous Vision Concerning London, and the epistles and meditations of his final imprisonment, with Nicholas Complin's memorial testimony. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- The Vision Concerning London (1660) — his premonition of the city's destruction by fire, six years before the Great Fire
- The Evesham persecution narratives, the prophetic works of 1658, and the Winchester prison writings
- EPUB format
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Free Original EEBO-TCP (Text Creation Partnership)About This Edition
Humphrey Smith is remembered for a single astonishing page. In the fifth month of 1660, not long after Charles II returned to his capital, this obscure Quaker preacher from the Welsh borders published The Vision of Humphrey Smith, Which He Saw Concerning London — a fire “in the foundation of all her buildings” which no hand could quench, consuming all until the walls fell. Six years later, in September 1666, the Great Fire burned four-fifths of the walled city to the ground. Smith did not live to see it: he had died in 1663 in the common gaol at Winchester, a prisoner whom no court ever charged with the breach of any law.
But the vision is only the summit of a remarkable body of writing, gathered here for the first time in modern English. Nicholas Complin’s memorial testimony opens the volume with an eyewitness account of Smith’s life and death. The two Evesham narratives (1655–1656) document one of the most vicious town persecutions of the Commonwealth years — Friends whipped, bolted in irons, and thrown into holes scarcely fit for beasts, set down with names, dates, and the magistrates’ own documents. The five prophetic proclamations of 1658 — The Sounding Voice of the Dread of God’s Mighty Power, An Alarm Sounding Forth, Divine Love Spreading Forth Over All Nations, Man Driven Out of the Earth and Darkness, and Hidden Things Made Manifest — are the trumpet at full strength. Then come the Restoration writings: the vision itself, the appeal For the Honour of the King, the Meditations of a Humble Heart, and the prison pieces of 1662, ending with the only verse Smith ever allowed himself — one hundred and forty-four lines of “secret inward melody” preserved by his friends in the 1683 memorial collection.
What emerges is one of the most complete portraits we have of a first-generation Quaker prophet: the sufferer who recorded persecution with a clerk’s precision, the seer whose warning history took up, and the shepherd who watched over “the meek and open-hearted lambs” from a prison he knew he might never leave. This Friends Illuminated edition modernizes the language while preserving Smith’s fire, keeps the plain speech in quoted dialogue, reproduces warrants and the Winchester mittimus verbatim, and links scripture and historical references throughout.