No Cross, No Crown
The masterwork of Quaker devotional literature — written by William Penn in the Tower of London — arguing that true Christianity requires the daily cross of self-denial, not mere assent to doctrine.
- Complete & unabridged
- Modernized English
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read8.4 hours
- Length120,501 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 8.4 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 8.4 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 6.7 hours to 11.5 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 115,124 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 5,377 words |
| Total | 120,501 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 5,377 of the 120,501 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
6.7 hours and 11.5 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 8.4 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 344–482 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.
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About This Edition
William Penn wrote No Cross, No Crown in 1668 while imprisoned in the Tower of London at the age of twenty-four, charged with blasphemy for questioning orthodox doctrine. He had nothing but his learning, his faith, and the manuscript paper his friend Thomas Ellwood smuggled in. What emerged from that cell is the greatest devotional work in the Quaker tradition and one of the finest arguments for practical Christianity in the English language.
Penn’s thesis is simple and demanding: that the Cross of Christ is not merely a past historical event to be believed, but a present spiritual reality to be lived. The self-will, the love of comfort, the craving for status and display — these are the flesh that must daily die if the spirit is to live. Penn traces this demand through Scripture and through the early church, then turns to demolish the easy religion of his own day: a Christianity of ceremony, fashion, and social performance that requires nothing of its practitioners and produces nothing in them.
What makes the book endure is not its polemic but its moral intelligence. Penn is not a killjoy; he understands pleasure, beauty, and the good things of life. What he contests is excess — the luxury that deadens conscience, the vanity that substitutes for character, the religion that decorates rather than transforms. His critique of worldly Christianity is as precise as a surgeon’s, and as relevant now as when he wrote it.
This Friends Illuminated edition has been carefully modernized for contemporary readers while preserving Penn’s original voice and argumentation. Scripture references have been verified and linked. The original chapter arguments and structure are preserved throughout.
