Stephen Crisp (1628-1692) is an example of one whose desperate search for Truth (lasting twenty long years) at last brought him to an experiential knowledge of the grace and truth that are in Jesus Christ. Having found the Pearl of great price, he sold all to buy it, and became an eminent preacher and writer among the early Society of Friends. For the remaining thirty-five years of his life, he labored in the power and wisdom of the Spirit, traveling throughout England, Scotland, Holland, and Germany, and writing many valuable epistles and treatises to the church in both the English and Dutch languages.

These thirty-two “sermons” or declarations of Stephen Crisp were all delivered extemporaneously in meetings in and about London between the years 1687 and 1692, and were taken down in short-hand and later published by an anonymous person who was deeply impacted by them. In his preface to the sermons, the unknown publisher assures the reader that “he has not in the least altered or imposed upon the preacher’s sense, either in the taking or transcribing of them.” And though he says he is not, nor ever was, a member of the Society of friends, yet he found these sermons “to contain so many gospel truths, delivered with such plainness, zeal and demonstration, and generally agreeable to the known doctrines of Christianity, that it is hoped the publishing of them may be useful to the world.”