THE EARLY QUAKERS
To understand the history of William Penn we must have a clear idea of
the Quaker faith in the time of Charles II. All through the Middle Ages
the Christian Church, which was the Roman Catholic Church, had built up
a network of beliefs that people took for granted, so that men never
used their minds where religion was concerned, but were, to all intents
and purposes, merely children, believing whatever the priests told them
to believe. For centuries England, as well as all of Western Europe, had
taken its creed directly from the Pope and his clergy, no more doubting
the truth of what was told them than a child doubts the truth of the
multiplication-table. But at length certain men of unusual independence
of mind, men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, became restless
under the arbitrary teachings of the Pope and dared to question whether
the priests were always right, no matter what they said. These men, and
others like them, took part in what was known as the Reformation, an
era in which men began to do a little thinking for themselves. The
revival of the classical learning of Greece and Rome and the invention
of the printing-press helped this new freedom of thought greatly. The
first books to come from the printing-presses were copies of the Bible,
which had formerly been beyond the reach of all but the priests, and as
men soon translated the Scriptures from Latin into English and French
and German and other languages, the people gradually became able to read
the Old and New Testaments for themselves. The Bible was no longer a
sealed book, from which the clergy gave the ordinary man and woman as
much or as little as they thought good. It was free to all, and new
teachers began to explain its meaning according to their own ideas.
It took a long time, however, for men to break away from the implicit
obedience they had given for centuries to the Church of Rome. The most
daring reformers only rid themselves of one or two dogmas at a time.
Wycliffe, the first great leader of the Reformation in England, only
denied a part of the truth of the Mass, and kept almost all the rest of
the Catholic belief. Huss, who followed him, only dared to doubt the
truth of certain of the miracles, though he did declare that he
believed in religious liberty. Martin Luther himself devoted most of
his eloquence to attacking the sale of indulgences, which had been
carried to great excess. Later he grew so bold as to oppose the
authority of the Pope, but he still held to the larger part of the creed
of the early Church.
In England Henry the Eighth had broken with the Pope chiefly because the
latter had refused to grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and
not because of any great difference in religious views. This break,
however, gave the reformers an official position in England, and led to
the establishment of the Church of England, which was called a
Protestant Church to distinguish it from the Catholic. Henry's daughter,
Mary, was a Catholic, and her reign saw a bitter struggle in England
between Catholics and the new reform Protestants. Mary's sister,
Elizabeth, favored the Protestants, and with her reign the new Church
actually came into its own, and the teachings of the Reformation began
to bear fruit.
Very gradually, then, men came to think more and more freely for
themselves. The Church of England discarded some of the beliefs of the
Roman Catholic Church, but held to a great many of them, and once it
became well fixed as the Established Church of England it also became
conservative, and insisted that people should obey its teachings, just
as the Catholic Church had done. But the idea of the right of every one
to think for himself had been set rolling and could not be stopped. Men
and women who wished liberty to worship God in their own way went to
America and founded communities with that principle as their basis,
while others in England began to show their independence of the
Established Church, and began to league themselves together as
Presbyterians or Lutherans, under a number of different names, and many
were often spoken of as Puritans. The Civil War between Charles I. and
Parliament was also largely a war between the men of the Church of
England and the Puritans. Then, when the Puritans had won a place for
themselves and a certain amount of power, they in their turn became
conservative, and wanted to impose their own beliefs and religious
observances upon the rest of England.
By this time, however, men had grown so used to freedom of thought in
religious matters that every little group had its own peculiar creed.
Any man of an original turn of mind could start a new sect and win
converts. The Puritans themselves were not sufficiently liberal to suit
men who now took pride in recognizing no authority in questions as to
what they should think. Most of these small sects played very small
parts in history. Some, such as the Independents, the Anabaptists, and
the Pietists, flourished for a short time, and then became merged in
other sects. The Quakers, however, made a much stronger appeal than many
of the others, and drew into their ranks a great number of those who
were dissatisfied with the conservatism of the Catholics, the Church of
England, and the Puritans.
The reason the Quakers absorbed many of the other sects and grew so
rapidly, and doubtless the chief reason why they appealed so strongly to
the liberal mind of young William Penn, was that they set forth as their
aim the definite plan of returning to primitive Christianity in its
simplest form. To those men and women who thought that all religion had
become hopelessly corrupt through the ignorance and fraud and cruelty of
the priesthood that had so long controlled the church, the Quaker
leaders tried to show that original Christianity was as pure and simple
as ever. What they wanted was that people should return to the doctrines
of the Christian Church as they were before the Bishop of Rome became
Pope, and before the priests interpreted the Bible as best suited
themselves. The Quaker teachers declared that the Church of England and
the Puritans had gone only halfway; they were still making their appeal
chiefly to the rich and influential; this new religion was to satisfy
the ordinary, the poor, the simple, those who cared little for wealth or
high station. No wonder that this direct appeal made many converts among
the great mass of English people, who were tired of the endless
struggles between kings and parliaments, bishops and ministers.
In their desire to return to the simplicity of the early days of the
Christian Church, the Quakers became earnest students of those who were
called the fathers of the Church,--the early writers on Christianity,
such as Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Cyprian, and Origen. There
they found the principles of a religious worship that was free from all
elaborate ceremonies. There they found an absolute freedom of opinion;
preachers who served without pay and solely because they felt
spiritually called upon to preach; they also found that many of the
early Christians were opposed to war and to the taking of oaths, and
that they protested against the use of titles, elaborate clothes, and
entertainments that tended to corrupt the tastes. Therefore it was easy
for the Quaker leaders to show their audiences that the ideas they were
urging upon them were actually the beliefs of the earliest Christians,
and were therefore worthy of earnest consideration.
Other people had urged a return to primitive Christianity earlier than
the Quakers. The Albigenses, in the south of France during the
thirteenth century, and the Waldenses, who lived in the valleys of
Piedmont, in Northern Italy, both held somewhat similar ideas, but in
each case the iron hand of persecution had suppressed them. The Quakers
would doubtless have met with a similar fate had they come into
existence a century earlier, for they held even more extreme views than
had the Albigenses. But by the reign of Charles II. the principles of
the Reformation had made such headway that it was impossible to do away
with a new form of religion by killing its converts. The government was
willing to go a certain distance in suppressing these new heretics, and
ordinances were passed empowering justices to imprison any who denied
the validity of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper. Quakers
who held meetings in the streets or market-places were liable to be
arrested for committing a breach of the peace, and their missionaries
were often treated as vagrants and whipped; but these were extremely
light punishments compared with those that had been inflicted earlier.
Although there were a few men and women among the early Quakers who
made themselves conspicuous by their extreme views, as there are among
the people of any sect, the Quakers were for the greater part a
remarkably sober, sensible, and law-abiding party. The Catholics, the
Puritans, the Presbyterians, and others had never hesitated to hold
their meetings in secret when the laws seemed too severe against them.
The Quakers, however, never held secret meetings; they performed their
duties openly, no matter how much the magistrates were opposed to them.
They argued their cause freely and openly on all occasions, and they
wrote a great many pamphlets setting forth their belief and also telling
to what persecutions they had been subjected. These tracts were widely
distributed, and served to call attention to the reasonableness of their
cause and to win sympathy for their struggles with the law.
They also soon showed the English virtue of obstinacy in their cause;
for no matter how many times they were imprisoned or arrested they
continued steadfastly on their course. At first people laughed at the
Quakers' custom of holding their religious meetings in prison just as
they might have held them in their meetinghouses, but before long the
laughter changed to respect, and finally became sincere admiration. The
Puritans, who had themselves had to endure the same sort of treatment a
little while before, could appreciate the attitude of this still younger
religious movement, and though they did not sympathize with the views of
the Quakers they came to admire their courageous independence.
William Penn, young as he was, saw that the Quakers stood at the
opposite pole from what he had come to consider a superstitious
priesthood; he saw that with them religion had nothing to do with
politics or power; that it was destined to stand for a more reasonable
and simple faith than any of the others then existing in England. It was
the latest form of that great wave of liberty that had begun with the
Reformation; and as the latest it appealed to him as the most liberal
form. He had a natural interest in religion, a natural earnestness of
mind that led him to study the new movement, and sufficient strength of
judgment to be able to find the truth in it that was hidden from many
others. Add to this a basis of heroism, inherited from adventure-loving
ancestors, and it is not difficult to see how the young man was led to
sympathize with, and then to adopt, the Quaker faith as his own.