A Journal of the Life of Thomas Story, Volume I: Convincement & Ministry

Thomas Story (c. 1670–1742) was born near Carlisle in Cumberland, in the far north of England, to a family of some means and Presbyterian convictions. His parents gave him a good education and intended him for the law; he was a bright, serious young man, drawn to books and to argument, and by every outward measure his path was set. The inward Light had other plans. Among the distinguished company of early Quaker autobiographers — George Fox, Thomas Ellwood, William Penn — Story holds a place all his own: a trained legal mind turned wholly to the service of the inward Light, a man who could argue sacramental theology with learned divines, stand before a czar without flinching, and cross the Scottish Highlands when no Friend had ventured there in years.

This first volume of Story’s Journal covers the years from roughly 1686 to 1698 — from his youth and education through the beginning of his Irish ministry. It is the story of a calling discovered, tested, and accepted, and it moves through a series of episodes that rank among the most vivid in early Quaker literature.

The narrative opens with Story’s early life and the famous dream of five lights — an experience so powerful and so strange that he sets it down with the care of a lawyer presenting evidence. The dream unsettled him and set him searching, and the chapters that follow trace the long, often painful process of his convincement among the people called Quakers. His public confession at Carlisle is a set piece of quiet drama, culminating in a remarkable theological confrontation with Dr. Richard Gilpin, a learned Presbyterian divine, on the subject of the sacraments. Story argues, with lawyerly precision and scriptural depth, that water baptism and the outward supper are types and shadows belonging to the old dispensation, fulfilled and superseded by the coming of Christ. It is one of the most sustained and closely reasoned doctrinal passages in the Quaker journals.

The call to ministry, once answered, sends Story north. His journeys through Scotland — to Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Elgin, and as far as Inverness — are among the most gripping passages in the book; he traveled farther into the Scottish north than any Friend had ventured in years, through country where hostility to Quakers was fierce and the roads were dangerous. Returning south, he labored across the western and southern counties of England before settling for a time in London, where he practiced conveyancing and wrestled honestly with the tension between the demands of business and the demands of the Spirit. The volume closes with his great doctrinal letter on the sacraments and Christian perfection, his audience with the Czar of Muscovy, and the voyage that carried him toward his Irish ministry.

This Friends Illuminated edition modernizes Story’s seventeenth-century spelling and the long, winding sentences of the period, so that his voice may reach a modern reader without hindrance, while preserving the cadence and diction of the original and the distinctive plain language of Friends — the “thee” and “thou” he retained as a testimony. Quoted letters and doctrinal writings are presented verbatim in set-off blockquotes. Scripture references have been linked and made visible, and the people and places of his story annotated, so that his account may be both read and explored.