But without WILLIAM PENN to reinforce and more fully execute
the noble plans, ideas, and beginnings which went before him, things
perhaps never would have come to the fortunate results which he was
the honored instrument in bringing about.
This man, so renowned in the history of our State, and so specially
honored by the peculiar Society of which he was a zealous apostle, was
respectably descended. His grandfather was a captain in the English
navy, and his father became a distinguished naval officer, who reached
high promotion and gave his son the privileges of a good education.
Penn was for three years a student in the University of Oxford, until
expelled, with others, for certain offensive non-conformities. He was
not what we would call religiously trained, but he was endowed with a
strong religious nature, even bordering on fanaticism, so that he
needed only the application of the match to set his whole being aglow
and active with the profoundest zeal, whether wise or otherwise. And
that match was early applied.
When England had reached the summit of delirium under her usurping
Protector, Oliver Cromwell, there arose, among many other sects full
of enthusiastic self-assertion, that of the Quakers, who were chiefly
characterized by a profound religious, and oft fanatical, opposition
to the Established Church, as well as to the Crown. Coming in contact
with one of their most zealous preachers, young Penn was inflamed with
their spirit and became a vigorous propagator of their particular
style of devotion.
As the Quaker tenets respected the state as well as religion, the bold
avowal of them brought him into collision with the laws, and several
times into prison and banishment. But, so far from intimidating him,
this only the more confirmed him in his convictions and fervency. By
his familiarity with able theologians, such as Dr. Owen and Bishop
Tillotson, as well as from his own studies of the Scriptures, he was
deeply grounded in the main principles of the evangelic faith. Indeed,
he was in many things, in his later life, much less a Quaker than many
who glory in his name, and all his sons after him found their
religious home in the Church of England, which, to Quakers generally,
was a very Babylon. But he was an honest-minded, pure, and cultured
Christian believer, holding firmly to the inward elements of the
orthodox faith in God and Christ, in revelation and eternal judgment,
in the rights of man and the claims of justice. If some of his friends
and representatives did not deal as honorably with the Swedes in
respect to their prior titles to their improved lands as right and
charity would require, it is not to be set down to his personal
reproach. And his zeal for his sect and his genuine devotion to God
and religious liberty, together with a large-hearted philanthropy,
were the springs which moved him to seize the opportunity which
offered in the settlement of his deceased father's claim on the
government to secure a grant of territory and privilege to form a free
state in America--first for his own, and then for all other persecuted
people.