Barclay's Apology in Modern English (review)

Book Reviews55 of the alleged slaveholders' conspiracy behind the Texas annexation project. His well-researched and widely circulated book, The War in Texas, contributed to growing opposition to annexation and the defeat of that program in 1837. Temporary success in blocking Texas annexation was an example of antislavery political action, another of Lundy's long-time emphases. He worked with politicians throughout his career, supporting specific candidates, supplying legislators with petitions and arguments, and working for legislation useful to his cause. Among those influenced by Lundy was Congressman John Quincy Adams who, however, never fully enlisted in the abolition movement. Lundy was an important leader. His newspaper and other publications helped prepare the way for the reformers who came after him. Unlike many abolitionists, he knew slavery and the South from firsthand experience. He lived in Missouri during the debates of 1819 and 1820 and later in Tennessee and Maryland. Above all, he enlisted William Lloyd Garrison in the antislavery cause. Although Lundy did not live to see the end of slavery, he prophesied correctly that only war and coercion would succeed in bringing about its demise. This biography is well researched and clearly written. It may be that the author underestimates Lundy's Quaker background, with its moderate emphasis on reform, and overestimates the influence of the Enlightenment. Similarly, the ultraism of the later abolitionists may have been as much a product of frustration as of religion. It is unfortunate that Lundy the man does not come alive in these pages, for a biography of him has been needed for a long time, and this book fills a gap in our total antislavery history. There is an excellent, annotated bibliography. Wilmington, OhioLahby Gara Barclay's Apology in Modern English. Edited by Dean Freiday. 1967. 465 pages. Obtainable from the Friends Bookstore, 302 Arch Street, Philadelphia , Pa. 19106, paperback, $3.50. Editors of Robert Barclay's Apology for tL· True Christian Divinity, however various in other respects, usually agree on two points: one, that the Apology, first published in 1676, is the classic statement on Quaker theology; and two, that the substance of this work should be communicated to contemporary ears. How to do this remains the problem. The most recent solution has been offered by Dean Freiday with his Barclay's Apology in Modern English. The new volume presents not only the text, in somewhat abridged form, but also a biographical note on the author, a preface on the work itself in relation to the times that produced it, and a wealth of annotation and comment ranging from Church Fathers and medieval scholastics to Methodism and the Ecumenical Movement. The last two items might come as some surprise to Barclay, who did not Uve to experience either. But they are distinctly relevant to the editor's purpose in relating this seventeenth-century work to modern thought and ecumenical unity, and they provide interesting and helpful marginalia on the Apology. 56Quaker History Less successful, at least from an esthetic point of view, is the modernization of the text. With care and competence, and a conscientious regard for the integrity of each sentence, the editor has managed to strip the language of its music; the effect cannot be otherwise than pedestrian. It is a half-way job by the very nature of the process. Though the syntax has been altered the images have not, and the use of modern headings only worsens the gap. To confer on the Fall of Man the existential term "Estrangement," then to follow this with a sober reference to the number of centuries which Adam survived his Fall, is to present the reader with two planes of thought which cannot meet. As a result he does the worst thing a reader can do: he ceases to believe; and the revision which was intended to make a concept vivid and modern only succeeds in pushing it farther into the past. Barclay's figures are not mere forms of speech, applied as external ornament; they are part and parcel of the thinking of his time. The ideas, images, and syntax of an age are all of a piece, and to subtract any one of these elements leaves the...