Selected Works, Volume I: Teaching Tracts & Epistles
James Nayler (1618–1660) — the Yorkshire farmer and Parliament soldier who became, with George Fox, one of the two greatest voices of the first Quaker generation — in seven of his earliest printed works, written between 1652 and 1654. Here is Nayler the teacher at full strength, years before the Bristol ride and the terrible punishment that broke him: laying down the ground of true faith, marking the difference between the living Word and the letter, answering the learned, and writing home to the scattered saints. A modern English edition with an editorial introduction to each tract and linked scripture and historical references.
- Seven early works (1652–1654) — A Discovery of Faith, Sin Kept Out of the Kingdom, The Stumbling Block Removed, A Lamentation over the Ruins of This Oppressed Nation, All Vain Janglers, Spiritual Wickedness in Heavenly Places, and Several Letters to the Saints
- Nayler at the height of his powers as a teacher, before the Bristol ride of 1656 — with an editorial introduction to each tract
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read2 hours
- Length27,860 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 2 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 2 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 1.5 hours to 2.7 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 27,860 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 27,860 words |
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
1.5 hours and 2.7 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 2 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 80–111 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.
- Secure checkout by Stripe
- Instant download
- 7-day money-back guarantee
About This Edition
James Nayler was born at West Ardsley in Yorkshire about 1618, farmed and married there, and served as a soldier and quartermaster in the Parliament army through the civil wars. In 1652, at the plough, he heard a voice bidding him leave his kindred and his father’s house, and within a few years he had become — with George Fox — one of the two greatest voices of the first Quaker generation, and by common account the most gifted of all its preachers. Most readers meet him only through the disaster of 1656, when he rode into Bristol in a manner that re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, was convicted of blasphemy by Parliament, and was branded, bored through the tongue, and whipped through two cities. This volume goes back to the years before all that, and presents the man at the height of his powers as a teacher.
The seven works gathered here were all written between 1652 and 1654 and printed at London for Giles Calvert at the sign of the Black Spread Eagle. A Discovery of Faith lays down the ground of the true faith that sanctifies and purifies the heart, and marks the difference between the two seeds and between the living Word and the letter. Sin Kept Out of the Kingdom and The Stumbling Block Removed answer the objections of those who held that the saints must sin as long as they live. A Lamentation over the Ruins of This Oppressed Nation turns to the state of England itself; All Vain Janglers and Spiritual Wickedness in Heavenly Places take up the disputes with the learned clergy of the day; and the closing Several Letters to the Saints are Nayler writing home — plain, tender, and urgent — to the scattered meetings of the north.
This Friends Illuminated edition modernizes the text directly from the original seventeenth-century printings, touching grammar and spelling but never substance, and prefaces each tract with a short editorial introduction setting it in the arc of Nayler’s life and thought. What emerges is the Nayler that his contemporaries knew before the fall: not the cautionary tale of later histories, but one of the clearest and most searching teachers the movement ever produced, with his scriptural saturation and his patient, penetrating voice exactly where he left them, and scripture and historical references linked throughout.
