A Call out of Egypt: Collected Tracts & Epistles
Alexander Parker (1628–1689) — one of the Valiant Sixty and George Fox's most constant traveling companion — gathered here for the first time in a modern edition: his tracts on the soul's deliverance and Quaker worship, his celebrated counsel on silent meetings, his plague-year address to the Mayor of London, and his letters from the heart of the first Quaker generation. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- Seven tracts (1654–1660) including A Call out of Egypt and the Declaration of Faith written with Edward Burrough
- The celebrated 1660 epistle on the conduct of silent meetings, the 1665 plague broadside, and eleven letters to Margaret Fell and George Fox
- EPUB format
About This Edition
Alexander Parker (1628–1689) stands just past the central figure in almost every great scene of the first Quaker generation. When George Fox was seized at Swannington in 1655 and marched to London to face Oliver Cromwell, Parker rode with him rather than leave him alone among the soldiers. When the London meetings swelled in the late 1650s, his steady letters to Margaret Fell at Swarthmore carried the news. When the Restoration broke over the young movement, he wrote to Friends from a Chester prison cell; when the Conventicle Act filled the jails, he wrote from Newgate; and when plague emptied the streets of London in 1665, he stayed, and addressed the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the dying city.
Part One of this volume presents his seven tracts in chronological order, from his first printed paper of 1654 to the Declaration to All the World of Our Faith issued with Edward Burrough in 1660. At their center is A Call out of Egypt (1656), which reads Israel’s bondage under Pharaoh as the map of the soul’s deliverance — Egypt the darkness, Moses the Light of Christ raised up within, the wilderness the long, tempted passage between conviction and rest. Part Two gathers the epistles and papers of a long faithfulness — the Newgate salutation of 1664, the plague broadside of 1665, the memorial testimony for Josiah Coale, the 1675 address to King and Parliament on the case of oaths — together with eleven of his letters to Margaret Fell and George Fox, and the celebrated general epistle of 1660 on the right conduct of silent meetings, quoted by Friends for three and a half centuries.
The tracts are modernized directly from hand-keyed transcriptions of the original seventeenth-century printings; the letters follow the 1841 collection Letters of Early Friends. As throughout the Friends Illuminated series, the modernization touches grammar and spelling, never substance — Parker’s scriptural saturation and steady, patient voice are exactly where he left them, with scripture and historical references linked throughout.