An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South-Carolina, To bring their Deeds to the Light of Christ, in their own Consciences.
[Hume, Sophia].
Bristol: Printed by Samuel Farley, 1750.
Price:
$1,200.00
About the item
First British edition. 80pp. 8vo. Contemporary quarter vellum, marbled boards. Some rubbing, small label to front board, light wear and early vernacular repair to foot of spine. Occasional light soiling, text block loosening but sound. Provenance (signatures to front free endpaper): Grace Fell (d.1768); Thomas Tanner (d.1830); Benjamin Salisbury. ESTC T98606.
Item #378079
Hume was born into a landowning Anglican family in South Carolina but converted to Quakerism, the religion of her mother and maternal grandmother, in the 1730s after a series of illnesses and the death of her husband. Her conversion led her to England, where she joined the Society of Friends, but in 1747 "she felt a divine call to return to return to Charleston to reprove the self-indulgence of the inhabitants and call them to repentance. She obeyed the call, even though it meant humiliating herself on the scene of her former elegance.… The Exhortation, with its parade of long quotations from the learned and its extensive examinations of Scripture, actually conveyed a fairly simple appeal for repentance and reformation, its strength derived from Sophia Hume's lifelong gift for strong phrases and intense, incantational prose" (Notable American Women).
The work, her first published book, was first printed by Benjamin Franklin in 1748 and went through five subsequent editions in America and England, the present edition being the first published in Great Britain. After its publication, Hume left South Carolina and continued her ministry in England, preaching and issuing several other religious tracts.
