Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric

Chapter 11 “This is My testimony unto you from the life of God” The Theorist Tests His Own Advice

279 chaPTer 11 “THIS IS MY TESTIMoNY UNTo YoU FRoM THE LIFE oF GoD” The TheorisT TesTs his oWn adviCe Robert Barclay (1648–1690), the most important early Quaker intellectual and the sect’s most capable apologist, delivered a sermon in London on May 16, 1688, the only sermon of his for which a text survives . Being a Scot from Ury, he could be in London only on occasion, and none of his sermons delivered in Scotland have survived. The existence of this sermon provides a very interesting case, since we have seen in earlier chapters that Barclay wrote specifically and systematically about immediate revelation and inspiration and thus profoundly shaped the development of the theory of Quaker impromptu preaching. In this chapter, I will examine Barclay’s sermon against the context of his life and particularly the backdrop of his Apology and Immediate Revelation. Specifically, I will begin with the context of the sermon, then turn to the sermon itself. Barclay and The conTexT of The serMon Barclay, the son of David Barclay, a colonel in the Commonwealth Army, was born in 1648 at Ury, Scotland. After the Restoration in 1665, the elder Barclay was imprisoned at Edinburgh because of his association with Parliament forces. There he came under the influence of a Quaker, a fellow prisoner, as did also Robert when he visited his father. Subsequently, they both became Quakers in 1666. Significantly, Robert Barclay’s mother was distantly related to the Royal Family, which connections helped Robert to have a small measure of political influence during the Restoration period, though he also spent a term in prison for his Quaker faith (in Aberdeen from November 7, 1676, until April 9, 1677). However, in later years, through his connection with James II, he was appointed governor of New Jersey, a position he held by deputy from 1682 to 1688. Eventually, he was named Laird of Ury.1 280 PREACHING THE INWARD LIGHT As noted in chapter 4, Barclay, then a twenty-seven-year-old Scot, educated in the schools of Aberdeen and the Scots College at Paris, where his uncle was rector, composed and published his Apology in Latin in 1676 and two years later published it in English.2 We are reminded that Barclay’s Immediate Revelation was composed in 1676 as a letter in Latin to Heer Paets, a Dutch ambassador, and was not published in English until 1686, just two years before the sermon.3 My examination of Barclay’s Apology and Immediate Revelation in chapter 4 indicates that he developed the philosophical outlines of a rhetorical theory with direct revelation as the center of knowledge. Barclay replaces the classical system, with its emphasis on inventional machinery, with a system that relies on the perception of inward revelation . For Barclay, the mind comes preseeded with divinely implanted ideas that are “stirred up” by the Inward Light or by outward sensation . Language, for Barclay, is dictated by the Spirit so that the speaker becomes a kind of oracle for the Word. The emphasis on silence translates into a belief that all utterance is fraught with caution. Consequently , the words actually spoken may gain substantially in credibility and become more weighty. Regardless of his cautionary analysis, Barclay nevertheless believed in the efficacy of preaching and that preaching , when prompted immediately by the Spirit, could help reinforce an inward message and provide comfort and assurance. When Barclay rose to speak on May 16, 1688, at Grace Church Street Meetinghouse, the largest Friends meetinghouse in London, we can assume that he had followed his own advice to wait silently before the Lord in the gathered meeting until he was moved by the Spirit to speak. He was forty years old but would die relatively young in 1690, still in his prime, at the age of forty-two. There must have been an air of expectancy among the gathered Friends, since Barclay was a respected Quaker thinker and writer and also well known as a publick Friend. He was also a visitor from Scotland and a person with a record of publications, public ministry, and missionary work. In sum, he was a person likely to be moved by the Spirit to speak at any given meeting. He might also have been expected to draw numerous non-Quakers to the meeting, one of whom took down his sermon in shorthand. Like most seventeenth-century Quakers, Barclay had suffered imprisonment for his faith, but on that day in May, Friends, especially in...