Strength in Weakness Manifest: The Life, Testimony & Sufferings of a Quaker Woman

Elizabeth Stirredge (1634–1706) was born at Thornbury in Gloucestershire, the daughter of a devout Puritan who told his family that a day was coming when Truth would break forth more gloriously than at any time since the apostles. He died in that hope, seven years before the first Quaker preachers reached the west of England; his daughter lived to see what he only foretold. By her own account she was, from her earliest years, a child of a tender and fearful heart — terrified by thunder, haunted by the question of her soul, and unable to find rest in the religion of her neighbors. Then, in 1654, two of the Valiant Sixty, John Audland and John Camm, came preaching into her country, and Audland’s voice pierced her. From that day she was a convinced Friend.

What follows in this little book is one of the most moving spiritual autobiographies the early Quaker movement produced — the testimony of a woman who never thought herself fit for any public service, who trembled at the cost of obedience, and who was nonetheless sent on errands that would have daunted far bolder hearts. The book’s title is taken from the Apostle Paul: that the Lord’s strength is made perfect in weakness. Stirredge offers herself as living proof of it.

The narrative carries her from her convincement into the ministry, and then to the great trial of her life: a journey to London to deliver a warning, laid upon her by the Lord, to King Charles II himself. She records the distraint of her family’s goods for the crime of worshiping as Friends, the downfall of the persecutors who had harried them, and the bitter internal conflict of the Wilkinson–Story separation, in which she stood firmly for the order of the church against those who would have unraveled it. The book reaches its climax in her arrest at Chew Magna and her imprisonment in Ilchester gaol in 1683, where, in the worst of conditions, she found the day of her deliverance.

To these memoirs are joined her closing counsel to her children, finished in 1692, and two printed prophetic addresses — a salutation and warning to the city of Bristol, and a faithful warning to the inhabitants of England — in which the trembling girl of Thornbury speaks with the authority of a prophet, calling whole cities and a whole nation to repentance. The work was first published in 1711, and again in the second edition of 1746 from which this text is drawn, with a preface by the Quaker editor and historian John Whiting and the collected testimony of Friends who had known her.

This Friends Illuminated edition modernizes her seventeenth-century spelling and the long, winding sentences of the period, so that her voice may reach a modern reader without hindrance, while preserving the fervency of her devotion, the boldness of her prophetic speech, and the distinctive plain language of Friends — the “thee” and “thou” she retained as a testimony. Scripture references have been linked and made visible, and the people and places of her story annotated, so that her account may be both read and explored.