ABSTRACT
In his preface to Thomas Ell wood's 1694 edition of the Journal, William Penn invoked 1 Corinthians 2 to turn this in a way familiar from apologies for other poorly educated Puritan writers. The hypocrisy of the ritualistic was to be eschewed in language as in devotion or worship. It is a style incantatory, repetitive, evocative, a style in which to enthuse but not to argue, a manner so rapt that the self may become one with the divine. For an early Quaker to write as "an Enlightened and Experienced Man" was to produce something far more rhapsodical, figurative and allusive. This chapter describes a literary temper of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a temper shaped and sustained, if not determined, by a combination of personal, religious, social and cultural factors. To have recommended the Quaker case in Quaker language to the political and religious establishment would have been to disqualify it by inviting ridicule and obloquy.
