Memoir of John Spalding
John Spalding was a farrier in Reading, in Berkshire — he shod and doctored horses — and he died in the thirtieth year of his age, on the 30th of the First month, 1795. This short memoir covers barely three years of that life, and it is one of the plainest records in Quaker literature of a conscience worked out in public. It begins with a young man unsettled under a celebrated preacher at St. Giles' church and ends with the account he dated at Reading in the Seventh month of 1794, setting down, point by point, why he could no longer attend the worship he was raised in. In between: a scruple against singing, a father lost, a trade laid down, the plain dress taken up, a refusal to illuminate his windows for a naval victory, letters to his own parish vicar, and a year of service as an overseer. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references.
- Thirteen chapters covering three years, 1792–1794, and a death in 1795
- A Reading farrier's reasons for leaving the national established worship
- His refusal of the national fast and the illuminations of 1794
- With the preface prefixed to the original memorial
- EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read1.7 hours
- Length24,514 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 1.7 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 1.7 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 1.4 hours to 2.3 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 23,121 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,393 words |
| Total | 24,514 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,393 of the 24,514 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
1.4 hours and 2.3 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 1.7 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 70–98 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
John Spalding was a farrier. He shod horses and doctored them, in the market town of Reading, and he was dead before he was thirty. The part of his life this book records is shorter still — roughly the three years between 1792 and the account he finished in the summer of 1794 — and almost nothing happens in it. There is no imprisonment, no travelling ministry, no dispute with a priest in front of his parish. A young tradesman goes to church, becomes uneasy, reads, argues with himself, writes some letters, and eventually stops going. That is the whole of the outward story.
What makes it worth reading is that he shows his working. Spalding was not raised a Friend and did not drift into becoming one. He came to it the slow way, by objection, and he set down each objection as it arrived. The first was singing. He sat in the congregation at St. Giles’ church and could not get past the fact that the words being sung were not true of the people singing them — that a room full of ordinary men and women were declaring, in unison and on cue, experiences they had not had. He turns the thing over carefully, allows what can be allowed, and arrives at a position he then has to live with.
The rest follows the same pattern. His father dies. He gives up a line of business he has decided he cannot hold with a clear conscience, knowing it will cost him, and records the fear of losing his trade in the same breath as the scripture that answered it. He takes up the plain dress, which in a small town is not a private decision. Then 1794 arrives, and with it the war, and with it two public demands that he could not meet: a national fast appointed by the government, and an illumination — the custom of putting candles in your windows to celebrate a victory, with a mob outside to see that you did. His reasons for refusing both take up a chapter, and they are not sentimental. He argues from the prophets that a fast appointed by the state is not the fast God chose, and from the gospel that followers of the Prince of Peace cannot light their windows for a battle.
He also wrote to the vicar. Twice. The letters are in here, courteous and completely immovable, and so is the odd detail that in the middle of all this he served a year as an overseer of the poor in his own parish — a man arguing himself out of the established church while doing its unpaid civil work.
The second half of the book changes gear. Having told the story, Spalding sets out the doctrine: a set of serious queries to the high professors of religion, then his reasons at length — deliverance from sin, the ground of separation, objections answered one by one, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the sign and the substance, and finally the Light Within as the one true teacher. It is argued almost entirely out of scripture, cited constantly and sometimes from memory, with the kind of confidence a man has when he has read one book very closely rather than many books loosely. Where his citations slip — and they do, more than once — this edition links the verse he is actually quoting while leaving his own wording exactly as he set it down.
The preface prefixed to the original memorial is included. It was written by Friends who knew him, and it is the only place in the book where you see him from outside: a young man of few words, those seasoned with grace, remarkably steady, who would not flinch in the day of battle, and whose memory was precious to the people who had watched him arrive among them.
