William Penn

1661, we get anothe

he king should ride through London. There he found "Sir W. Pen and his son, with several others." "We had a good room to ourselves," he says, "with wine and good cake, and saw the show very well." The streets were new grav

e world was here presenting its attractions in competition with the "other world" of the earlier vision. Th

e returning, as the Restoration became more and more a probability, he had secured a seat in Parliament, and had been a bearer of the welcome message which had finally brought Charles from his exile in Holland to his throne in England. For his part in this plea

Christ Church, at the beginning of the Michaelmas term of 1660. It was clearly the paternal i

his, of itself, displeased the new student, whose sympathies were with the dispossessed. The Churchmen, moreover, brought their cavalier habits with them. In the reaction from the severity which they had just escaped, they did many objectionable things, not only for the pleasure of doing them, but for the added joy of shocking their Puritan neighbors. They amused themselves

sms and holy causes, that he received the impulse which determined all his after life. He spent but a scant two years in college; and the work of the lecture rooms must have suffered seriously during that t

they spoke; others deduce it from the trembling which their speech compelled in those who heard it. By either derivation, it indi

nd so slenderly educated that he did not express himself grammatically, Fox was nevertheless a prophet, according to the order of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa. He looked out into the England of his day with the keenest eyes of any man of the

against the unmeaning courtesies, he wore his hat in the presence of no matter whom, taking it off only in time of prayer. In protest against the unmeaning compliments, he addressed no man by any arti

enience. Not only did it make the Quakers guilty of contempt of court and thus initially at fault in all legal business, but it exposed them to a natural suspicion of disloyalty to the government. It was a time of political change, first the Commonwealth, then Charles, then James, then William; and every change signified the supremacy of a new idea in religion, Puritan, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Protestant. Every new ruler demanded a new oath of allegi

rable customs of Christianity. They did away with all the forms and ceremonies of Churchman and of Puritan alike. Not even baptism, not even the Lord's Supper remained. Their service was a silent meeting,

Quakers made themselves obtrusively obnoxious. They argued and exhorted, in season and out of season; they prin

e teaching of the Apostles was remembered, and the fellowship of the Apostles was faithfully kept,-when Justin Martyr and Iren?us and Ignatius and the other holy fathers lived. And let us listen to the inner voice; let us live in the illu

the university, Thomas Loe had become a "public Friend," or, as would commonly be said, a minister. When William Penn entered Christ Church

is faith would attract others. Their emphasis upon entire sincerity and consistency in word and deed would commend them to honest souls, while the exaltation of the inward light would move then, as in all ages, the idealists, the poets, th

e who in England could expect no peace from either Puritan or Churchman. Not only had they planned to have sometime a country of their own, but they had already located it. They had chosen the lands which lay behind the Jerseys. While Loe was preaching and Penn was listening, Fox was writing to Josiah Cole, a Quaker who was then in America, asking him to confer with the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians. This plan Loe revealed to his st

ong the early Quakers, and as the founder of a commonwealth. He first became acquainted with the Quakers, and firs

n." It is true that he may have written to his father to take him away, for Mr. Pepys records in his journal, under date of Jan. 25, 1662, "Sir W. Pen came to me, and did break a business to me about removing his son from Oxford to Cambridge, to some private college." But nothing came of it. William is said, indeed, to have absented himself rather often from the college prayers, and to have joined with other students whom the Quaker preaching had affected in holding prayer-meetings in their own rooms. But all went

graduate he had regarded the university authorities: "Shall the multiplied oppressions which thou continuest to heap upon innocent English people for their religion pass unregarded by the Eternal God? Dost thou think to escape his fierce wrath and dreadful vengeance for thy ungodly and illegal persecution of his poor children? I tell thee, no. Better were it for thee thou hadst never been