Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel

This is a window into the heart of early 19th-century English religious life, told through one man's struggle to find God against the grain of his own family. John Yeardley grew up the son of a troubled farmer, his childhood shadowed by his father's misconduct and the small cruelties of rural poverty. His conversion in 1803, sparked by the preaching of Joseph Wood, didn't offer easy salvation. Instead, Yeardley documents years of spiritual wrestling, family estrangement, and the painful work of reconciling his newfound faith with the life he'd been born into. What emerges is not a triumphant testimony but something rarer: an honest accounting of how faith costs, and what it means to answer a calling that divides you from everything familiar. For readers interested in Quaker history, the evangelical revivals of the early 1800s, or the genre of spiritual autobiography, this memoir offers firsthand access to one man's passage through doubt toward ministry.