PREVIOUS LIFE OF WILLIAM PENN. 377 XVI. court of the princess palatine, and to the few Quaker CHAP. converts among the peasantry of Kirchheim. To the peasantry of the highlands near Worms, the visit of 1678. William Penn was an event never to be forgotten. The opportunity of observing the aristocratic institutions of Holland and the free commercial cities of Germany, was valuable to a statesman. On his return to England, the new sufferings of the Quakers excited a direct appeal to the English parliament. The special law against Papists was turned against the Quakers; Penn explained the difference between his society and the Papists; and yet, in an age of Protestant bigotry, at a season when that bigotry was become a jealous frenzy, he appeared before a committee of the house of commons to plead for universal liberty of conscience. "We must give the liberty we ask ;"-such was the sublime language of the Quakers;-"we cannot be false to our principles, though it were to relieve ourselves; for we would have none to suffer for dissent on any hand." Defeated in his hopes by the prorogation and dissolu- 1679. tion of the parliament, Penn appealed to the people, and took an active part in the ensuing elections. He urged the electors throughout England to know their own strength and authority; to hold their representatives to be properly and truly their servants, to maintain their liberties, their share in legislation, and their share in the application of the laws. "Your well-being"-these were his words" depends upon your preservation of your right in the government. You are free; God, and nature, and the constitution, have made you trustees for posterity. Choose men who will, by all just and legal ways, firmly keep and zealously promote your power." And as Algernon Sydney now "embarked with those 378 XVI. WILLIAM PENN AT NEWCASTLE. CHAP. that did seek, love, and choose the best things," William Penn, with fearless enthusiasm, engaged in the election, and obtained for him a majority which was defeated only by a false return. 1680. But every hope of reform from parliament vanished. Bigotry and tyranny prevailed more than ever, and Penn, despairing of relief in Europe, bent the whole energy of his mind to accomplish the establishment of a free government in the New World. For that "heaven1682. ly end," he was prepared by the severe discipline of 27. life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed Oct. the basis of his character. The sentiment of cheerful humanity was irrepressibly strong in his bosom; as with John Eliot and Roger Williams, benevolence gushed prodigally from his ever-overflowing heart; and when, in his late old age, his intellect was impaired, and his reason prostrated by apoplexy, his sweetness of disposition rose serenely over the clouds of disease. Possessing an extraordinary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precision, and "surpassing in speculative endowments;" conversant with men, and books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations, as they existed in England and France, in Holland, and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the source of wisdom in his own soul. Humane by nature and by suffering; familiar with the royal family; intimate with Sunderland and Sydney; acquainted with Russel, Halifax, Shaftesbury, and Buckingham; as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton and the great scholars of his age,—he 1 Testimony of Friends. Compare J. F. Fisher's just and exact tribute to Penn, in Private Life of William Penn. So too R. Tyson's JOHN LOCKE AND WILLIAM PENN. 379 XVI. valued the promptings of a free mind more than the CHAP. awards of the learned, and reverenced the single-minded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the wisdom of philosophers. And now, being in the meridian of life, but a year older than was Locke, when, twelve years before, he had framed a constitution for Carolina, the Quaker legislator was come to the New World to lay the foundations of states. Would he imitate the vaunted system of the great philosopher? Locke, like William Penn, was tolerant ; both loved freedom; both cherished truth in sincerity. But Locke kindled the torch of liberty at the fires of tradition; Penn at the living light in the soul. Locke sought truth through the senses and the outward world; Penn looked inward to the divine revelations in every mind. Locke compared the soul to a sheet of white paper, just as Hobbes had compared it to a slate, on which time and chance might scrawl their experience; to Penn, the soul was an organ which of itself instinctively breathes divine harmonies, like those musical instruments which are so curiously and perfectly framed, that, when once set in motion, they of themselves give forth all the melodies designed by the artist that made them. To Locke, "Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions;" to Penn, it is the image of God, and his oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, esteemed "the duty of parents to preserve their children not to be understood without reward and punishment;"2 Penn loved his children, with not a thought for the consequences. Locke, who was never married, declares marriage an affair of the senses; Penn reverenced woman as the object of fer 1 Essay on the Human Understanding, b. i. c. iii. 8. 8. 2 Locke's Essay, b. ii. c. iii. s. 12. 380 XVI. JOHN LOCKE AND WILLIAM PENN. CHAP. Vent, inward affection, made, not for lust, but for love. In studying the understanding, Locke begins with the sources of knowledge; Penn with an inventory of our intellectual treasures. Locke deduces government from Noah and Adam, rests it upon contract, and announces its end to be the security of property; Penn, far from going back to Adam, or even to Noah, declares that "there must be a people before a government," and, deducing the right to institute government from man's moral nature, seeks its fundamental rules in the immutable dictates "of universal reason," its end in freedom and happiness. The system of Locke lends itself to contending factions of the most opposite interests and purposes; the doctrine of Fox and Penn, being but the common creed of humanity, forbids division, and insures the highest moral unity. To Locke, happiness is pleasure; things are good and evil only in reference to pleasure and pain;3 and to " inquire after the highest good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples, plums, or nuts ;"4 Penn esteemed happiness to lie in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly, that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave, "it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in ; Penn, like Plato and Fenelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practised for its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity 995 1 Art. Union, in Penn. S. Laws. 3 Essay on the Human Understanding, ii. xx. 2. 4 Ibid. ii. xxi. 55. 5 Ibid. JOHN LOCKE AND WILLIAM PENN. 2 381 XVI. from the senses, describes it as purely negative, and CHAP. attributes it to nothing but space, duration, and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth, and virtue, and God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed "not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for ; " Penn likewise vindicated the many, but it was because truth is the common inheritance of the race. Locke, in his love of tolerance, inveighed against the methods of persecution as "Popish practices;" Penn censured no sect, but condemned bigotry of all sorts as inhuman. Locke, as an American lawgiver, dreaded a too numerous democracy, and reserved all power to wealth and the feudal proprietaries; Penn believed that God is in every conscience, his light in every soul; and therefore, stretching out his arms, he built-such are his own words-" a free colony for all mankind." This is the praise of William Penn, that, in an age which had seen a popular revolution shipwreck popular liberty among selfish factions, which had seen Hugh Peters and Henry Vane perish by the hangman's cord and the axe; in an age when Sydney nourished the pride of patriotism rather than the sentiment of philanthropy, when Russel stood for the liberties of his order, and 1 Essay on the Human Under- the Quakers. It is not always posstanding, ii. xvii. 1. 2 Ibid. iv. xviii. 7. 3 Ibid. iv. xix. 15. 4 Locke's whole chapter on Enthusiasm was probably levelled at sible to know when Locke is op- |