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not accept his rule, yet offered him their cheeks and necks to smite? A sword that cut a path through Naseby field was useless in the presence of this unresisting force. He tempted them with smiles, with gifts, with places, but these simple souls would have no part in him and in his rule. Now,' said he, 'I see there is a people risen whom I cannot win.' These Friends were men of peace. If what they did was wrong, they took upon their backs the burden of that sin. Such sects as Levellers and Anabaptists he could meet as sword encounters sword; but with the Quakers there was nothing he could strike. They courted stripes and chains. They bowed their heads to fine and sentence; taking his decrees as so much penance laid on them in love. They would not fly before his troops, and if he wished to kill them they were ready for the cross. However fixed his purpose, they were not less fixed in theirs-to weary out and overcome his strength.

The system of these Friends was one of State affairs as well as Church affairs; announcing that all men are equal before the laws; that all men have a right to express opinions; that all men have a right to worship God according to their conscience; not because such and such things were done by ancient tribes; not because it is well to have certain balances and checks; but on account of the inward, independent, indestructible light in every human soul. Each man is a separate power, and therefore has a separate right. This system met with bold denial every claim of prince and pope to curb the individual will, and every claim of prelate and inquisitor

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to search the individual mind. It held that every man's own light-his conscience or his reason-is the safest guide. To doff the hat, to bend the knee, to call a man by such vain names as lord and prince, was sin against the Lord and Prince of heaven. For God, the Friends declared, had made men peers, and setting up these marks of separation was dividing men without a cause, and trifling with the noblest work of God.

To a young man holding such a gospel what

was a baron's coronet-what a seat in the House of Lords?

Shut out from his home in the Navy Gardens at the age of twenty-three, Ensign Penn was not left to starve in the streets. Lady Penn sent him money from her private purse. His new friends made him welcome in their homes; for this young soldier came amongst these pious people as a brand plucked out of a burning fire. This time of exile from the Navy Gardens was a trial to his faith. He loved his mother and his sister Peg, the merry matron and the romping girl; and for the Admiral he entertained a high, though not unreasoning, respect. On every side he had to count some loss. With his opinions he could not hold his Ensign's rank, he could not keep his Clerkship of the Cheque. These small things had to go the way of greater things.

The set-off to his loss was not so obvious to a worldly eye, and Admiral Penn could not be made to see that he had any set-off at all to count. In giving up his rank, his office, and his home, as

well as sacrificing the hope of greater things to come, the young man felt he was obeying the summons to forsake his father and mother for a higher good. He found no comfort in the romps and revels, in the tavern dinners and the evening plays. The creed of Fox was to him a saving creed. Such men as Fox and Loe were notable for the purity of their lives. What they professed to be they were; not so the titled people whom he met in his father's haunts. At the theatre in Drury Lane, to which his mother and sister went so often, he had seen virtue mocked, and truth abused, and female modesty put to shame. The park, where his father loved to be seen, was thronged with harlots and bravoes; with women who sold their smiles and men who were ready to sell their swords. He knew that the royal palace was a nest for every crawling thing. Look where he would upon that society from which he was shut out, he saw little beyond vanity, rottenness, and death. In the highest place of all— that chamber in which, not long ago, Cromwell had poured out his soul in prayer, and Milton had pealed his organ-note-a herd of gamesters, courtesans, and duellists, diced and drank the live-long night.

A young man, pure in heart, might well turn

anchoret in such a world.

The politics of Fox had also their attraction for this idealist of twenty-three. For four or five years he had been poring over Sydney's dreams. One Commonwealth had failed. He wished to see a new experiment in freedom; an experiment conducted, not by orators and soldiers acting in a worldly spirit,

and with personal ends in view; but a religious and fraternal commonwealth, where every member would devote himself to God and man. Penn loved that great republican like a son, but he could never give his heart up wholly to the idea of a country governed in the pride of intellect and virtue. Fox supplied what Sydney wanted-faith in things unseen and passionate belief in individual men. Penn found that he could feel and act with both these leaders ; looking up with Sydney to the free government of Pericles and Scipio, yet denying with Fox that past example is of higher use to man than inner light.

After a few months of absence from the Navy Gardens, Penn was suffered to return, but still the Admiral held aloof from his rebellious son. He would not speak to him; he would not sit at table with him. Penn hung up his sword and coat of mail, and put into a trunk his lace and plume. He dressed in homely garments, and resigned his lucrative Clerkship of the Cheque.

56

CHAPTER VII.

SWORD AND PEN (1668).

ALONE in his rooms at the Navy Gardens, he who had just laid down his sword, took up his pen. While the Admiral was fighting through a court intrigue of Lord Arlington and Sir Robert Howard, as the minions of Prince Rupert, Penn was engaged in struggling with the sins and sufferings of a host of men whom he regarded as agents of the Prince of Darkness. But his only weapon was, as yet, the

pen.

A startling call was made to princes, priests, and people, to examine for themselves the Quaker doctrine of the inner light, in a tract called Truth Exalted; in a short but sure testimony against all those religious faiths and worships that have been formed and followed in the darkness of apostacy,and for that glorious Light which is risen and shines forth in the life and doctrine of the despised Quakers, is the alone good old way of life and salvation'— a boyish piece, signed, William Penn, whom divine love constrains in holy contempt to trample upon Egypt's glory, not fearing the King's wrath,

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