“Bancroft’s writings are as well worthy of study, both for
form and substance, as any that have been produced on American
soil.”—_John McClintock, LL.D._
“His every paragraph is animated with a philanthropic, liberal
and progressive spirit.”—_D. D. Whedon, D.D._
“The work of Mr. Bancroft may be considered as a copious
philosophical treatise, tracing the growth of the idea of liberty
in a country designed by Providence for its development. It is
written in a style marked by singular elaborateness, compactness,
and scholarly grace, and is esteemed one of the noblest monuments
of American literature.”—_American Cyclopædia._
William Penn.
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 “heavenly end” he was prepared by the severe discipline of
life, and the love, without dissimulation, which formed 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-flowing 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, with 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 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 valued the promptings of a
free mind more than the awards of the learned, and reverenced the simple
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 foundation 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 Hobbs 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 who 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 to not be understood without reward and punishment;” 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 fervent, 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 the
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; and to inquire after the highest
good is as absurd as to dispute whether the best relish be in apples,
plums or nuts; Penn esteemed happiness to be 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 Fénelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots,
that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practiced for
its intrinsic loveliness. Locke derives the idea of infinity from the
senses, describes it as purely negative, and attributes it to nothing
but space, duration and number; Penn derived the idea from the soul, and
ascribed it to truth and virtue, and to 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; 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 ax; 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 not for new enfranchisements, when Harrington and Shaftesbury and
Locke thought government should rest on property—Penn did not despair
of humanity, and, though all his history and experience denied the
sovereignty of the people, dared to cherish the noble idea of man’s
capacity for self-government. Conscious that there was no room for its
exercise in England, the pure enthusiast, like Calvin and Descartes, a
voluntary exile, was to come to the banks of the Delaware to institute
the “HOLY EXPERIMENT.”