A Testimony of Divine Grace: The Life of Mary Penington
One of the finest first-person accounts of the long Puritan-to-Quaker spiritual journey — the autobiography of a woman who searched through every form of religion available to her before finding what she called 'the true and living way.'
- Complete & unabridged
- Modernized English
- EPUB format
About This Edition
Mary Penington was born in 1623 into the Kent gentry, married first to a Parliamentary officer who died of fever in the Civil War, and then — after years as a widow and seeker — to Isaac Penington, the mystic theologian who would become one of the towering figures of early Quakerism. Her autobiography is the record of that long inner journey: from the formal religion of her upbringing, through Presbyterianism, Independency, and various other forms of dissent, to the moment when she finally heard George Fox preach and recognized, with something like shock, that she had at last found what she had spent her life looking for.
What makes Mary Penington’s account exceptional is her unflinching honesty about the spiritual search itself — its frustrations, its false stops, its periods of genuine despair. She had tried everything available to a devout Englishwoman of her era. She attended the best preachers. She examined her conscience with rigorous Puritan discipline. She sought conversion and found only more seeking. The Quaker meeting was her last resort, entered with considerable skepticism. What she experienced there — the gathered silence, the sense of a living presence — is described with a precision and simplicity that gives it the ring of genuine testimony.
The autobiography also gives us the other side of the Penington household that Isaac’s letters illuminate only obliquely: the management of Grange House and later Chalfont, the raising of children, the reception of traveling Friends at all hours, the repeated imprisonments of her husband and the toll they took. Mary Penington was not a passive figure in any of this. She negotiated with jailers, managed the estate during Isaac’s absences, and maintained the household as a center of Quaker life through years of persecution.
This Friends Illuminated edition is the complete text, carefully modernized for contemporary readers while preserving the authentic voice of one of the most gifted personal writers in early Quaker literature.