"no early Quaker tract, treatise or journal has much merit as consecutive discourse."

      Hugh Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England, Yale publications in religion 7 (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1964), xi.  Barbour is speaking, presumably (?), mainly of those composed "During 1652-65, the years with which this book is most concerned," and therefore not, for example, of Fox's Journal, since "Fox's well-known writings have been less used here than works by other Quaker authors."  Madeleine Pennington:  "The Journal is not strictly a contemporary source; even the earliest manuscript was only written during Fox’s imprisonment in Worcester Jail between 1673 and 1674, as he dictated it to his stepson-in-law Thomas Lower, and the first published edition was not issued until 1694. Furthermore, since the original manuscript is missing its earliest pages, the passages dealing with Fox’s early religious formation only appear in the 1694 edition onwards" (Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2021), 6).