The Works of Isaac Penington, Volume I
The opening volume of Penington's collected works — his earliest tracts, testimonies, and letters, establishing the foundational arguments of his mystical theology and his vision of the inward life of the Spirit.
- Complete & unabridged
- Modernized English
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read15.9 hours
- Length227,405 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 15.9 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 15.9 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 12.6 hours to 21.7 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 222,916 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 4,489 words |
| Total | 227,405 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 4,489 of the 227,405 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
12.6 hours and 21.7 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 15.9 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 650–910 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
Isaac Penington spent decades searching for authentic spiritual experience before finding it among the Quakers — and those decades of searching gave his writing a depth that few other Quaker authors matched. He knew what it was to seek and not find. He knew the dry religion of outward forms, the exhausting self-examination of Puritan devotion, the hollow satisfaction of theological correctness. When he finally encountered the living presence he had sought, he wrote about it with the precision of a man who had mapped every false road and could describe the true one exactly.
This first volume of his collected works gathers the foundational writings of his early Quaker period: the tracts that established his theological vision, the testimonies to the inward work of the Spirit, the letters addressing doubt and grief and spiritual dryness with remarkable gentleness and psychological insight. Here Penington lays out the central convictions that would animate everything he wrote: that the Christ who saves is a present spiritual reality, not merely a historical figure; that the inward light in every conscience is sufficient to lead the seeking soul to God; and that the forms of outward religion — however ancient, however beautiful — can become obstacles to the living encounter they were meant to facilitate.
Penington’s genius was never to dismiss the struggling reader. He wrote for people who genuinely wanted to find God and couldn’t. His counsel is patient, practical, and honest about the cost of the inward journey. These earliest writings already show the qualities that would make his letters treasured across generations: the willingness to sit with difficulty, the refusal to offer easy answers, and the quiet certainty of a man who had been where his readers were and found a way through.
This Friends Illuminated edition presents the complete text with editorial introductions to each piece, synopses, and links to scripture passages — the most accessible edition of Penington’s works ever produced.
