The Works of Isaac Penington, Volume IV
The fourth and final volume of Penington's collected works — sixteen theological tracts and seventy-seven letters, completing the most comprehensive edition of his writings ever prepared.
- Volume 4 of 4
- 550+ pages
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read17.4 hours
- Length248,995 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 17.4 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 17.4 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 13.8 hours to 23.7 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 242,390 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 6,605 words |
| Total | 248,995 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 6,605 of the 248,995 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
13.8 hours and 23.7 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 17.4 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 711–996 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
Volume IV completes the collected works of Isaac Penington with sixteen major theological tracts and seventy-seven additional letters. This is the final volume of a four-volume set that represents the most comprehensive modernized edition of Penington’s writings ever prepared.
The tracts in this volume span the full range of Penington’s theological concerns. Truth Revived out of the Apostasy addresses the recovery of authentic Christianity from centuries of formal religion. Life and Immortality Brought to Light explores the believer’s participation in the eternal life of Christ. God’s Teachings and Christ’s Law defends the Quaker understanding of inward spiritual guidance against accusations of antinomianism. Reading the Scriptures Aright presents Penington’s distinctive approach to biblical interpretation — one that refuses to separate the letter from the spirit, yet insists that the spirit must be known before the letter can be understood aright. A Reply Concerning Gospel-Baptism argues that the true baptism is not the outward application of water but the inward plunge into Christ’s death and resurrection — “the one baptism” of which Paul speaks in Ephesians.
The seventy-seven letters continue the pastoral correspondence that makes Penington’s work unique among early Quaker writers. These letters were written during the last years of his life, when imprisonment and declining health had refined his spiritual perception to an extraordinary degree. He writes to the poor among Friends, to scholars disturbing Oxford meetings, to sufferers in Scotland, to women gathered for meeting, to those drinking medicinal waters at Astrop Wells — to anyone whose spiritual condition he could address with the wisdom his own suffering had earned.
This edition completes the Friends Illuminated Collected Works of Isaac Penington, a four-volume set that makes available to contemporary readers the full range of one of the most penetrating mystical minds the Quaker movement produced. The text has been carefully modernized — archaic word order and verb endings rendered in standard contemporary English — while preserving the precise nuance and occasional strangeness of Penington’s thought. Scripture quotations are identified and hyperlinked, and the full navigational structure allows readers to move easily between tracts, letters, and scriptural cross-references.
