having beheld the majesty of Him who is invisible.' This kind of protest was not relished by such courtiers and buffoons as Arlington; the less so when they found how prompt the young man was to practise what he taught. In face of shrug and sneer, Penn walked among the scoffers of the Mall, his sword and feather laid aside, in simple garb, saluting those he met as thee and thou, and keeping on his hat in presence of the greatest lords. Such men of wit and rank as Rochester observed him with a pleasant smile, and bucks and bloods of lower standing were restrained from offering insult to the man of peace by what they knew of his dexterity in fence. In company with George Whitehead and Thomas Loe, he waited on the Duke of Buckingham, as one who had both power and wit to help him in his cause, and standing covered in his Grace's chamber, urged upon that flighty nobleman the policy of tolerating all opinion in the Church. The Duke sat still, while Penn denounced the stocks and pillories, to which good men were daily sentenced for their conscience sakes, while he recited Saxon laws and Norman charters, and appealed to jurists of a later time. His Grace not only thanked his guests for coming to his house, but told them he was of their mind in such things, and would help them when he could. Not much was to be got from the mercurial Duke. They went to Arlington, Secretary of State, but Arlington, who was angry with the Admiral, put these Quakers to the door.

A few weeks after 'Truth Exalted' saw the light of day, the writer gave his second essay in

polemics to the world. One Jonathan Clapham, Rector of Wramplingham, in Norfolk, had abused the Quakers in 'A Guide to True Religion,' with grotesque severity. Penn answered Clapham in 'The Guide Mistaken,' an extremely fierce and personal piece of writing, such as the religious public loved to read. All writing was in that day highly spiced; the plays with an indecent wit, the sermons with ridiculous compliments, the controversies with personal spite. In following up the fashion of his time, Penn always called a fool a fool. His nights and days were therefore full of strife, and in these early times, before his spirit had been tempered by the Tower and Newgate to a softer wisdom, he was rather Ensign Penn than Quaker Penn.

At this time-summer time of 1668-there lived in Spital Fields a minister of good repute named Thomas Vincent, once a student of Christ Church, Oxford, afterwards a chaplain to Robert Sydney, Earl of Leicester, and pastor of St. Mary Magdalen, Milk Street. He had been ejected from his living at the Restoration, and had afterwards obtained a pulpit in Spital Yard. This Vincent was a sound scholar and an eloquent, though a coarse divine. Now two of Vincent's hearers, happening to stray from Spital Yard chapel to a Quaker meeting-house in the city, out of simple eagerness to know what people like the Children of Light could say for themselves, were caught, as Penn himself had been caught by Thomas Loe. These followers of Vincent left his chapel in Spital Yard, on which he turned in wrath on the

seducers of his people, calling them blasphemers, hypocrites, and schismatics, and denouncing them to his flock as worthy of the fiery pit. For Vincent, though a good and worthy man, employed the controversial language of his time.

These violent words inflamed the Friends, and two of their recognised chiefs, the aged George Whitehead and the youthful William Penn, repaired to Spital Yard to ask from Thomas Vincent, as their right, a time and place where in the presence of his congregation they might answer his attacks. At first the minister of Spital Yard refused, but on their suit being pressed more warmly he consented on condition that they left the choice of time and place to him. To this condition Whitehead and Penn agreed, when Vincent named a certain evening as the time, and his own pulpit as the place. Such controversies were a fashion of the age; as popular as plays and bull-baits, even when they turned on abstract articles of faith.

When Penn and Whitehead came to Spital Yard, attended by a body of their friends, they found the chapel densely packed by Vincent's people. Not a man could enter save the speakers, and these speakers saw too plainly that their chance of a fair hearing was but small. Yet they passed in.

George Whitehead, as the elder, rose to state his views, but Vincent took exception to this course. The better way, he said, would be for him to put questions, and for the Quakers to reply, as then the Quakers would stand condemned out of their own mouths. Penn could not see the justice of this line,

but Vincent's people cried, 'Yea, yea, let it be so!' Alone in that vast crowd of men, the Quakers were obliged to yield, and let the wrangle take such form as Vincent pleased. Then Vincent rose and asked the two blasphemers' whether they owned one Godhead, consisting in three distinct and separate forms? Whitehead and Penn asserted that the dogma so delivered by Vincent was not found in Holy Writ. Vincent answered by a syllogism. Quoting St. John, he said :-'There are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.' These three, he argued, 'are either three manifestations, three operations, three substances, or three somethings else besides subsistences; but they are not three manifestations, three operations, three substances, nor anything else besides three subsistences; hence, there are three separate substances, yet only one deity.' Whitehead rejected the term 'subsistences' as not of scriptural authority, and wished to hear from Vincent what he meant by it-in vain. Penn laid this point before the public in a pamphlet called 'The Sandy Foundation Shaken ;' an attempt in author-craft which brought him into conflict with men as swift to strike as Vincent, and with greater power to hurt than the excited folks in Spital Yard.

'I found it so well writ,' says Pepys, in speaking of this pamphlet, as I think it too good for him ever to have writ it; and it is a serious sort of book, not fit for everybody to read.' Much wiser men than Pepys thought with him; for in some good

people's view, to hold that God is One, is to deny that Christ is also God. While Vincent railed against 'The Sandy Foundation' as a book denying Christ, he also called upon the civil power to put it down by force. This cry exactly suited Arlington, then hot in quarrel with his colleague at the Navy Office, Sir William Peun. As he had not been able to hurt the father, he seized too eagerly on any chanc of injuring him through his son.

Like nearly all the pamphlets of that time, 'The Sandy Foundation Shaken' was printed without a license from the Bishop of London; and the fact, however common, laid both printer and author open to proceedings by the crown. A recent act (14) Car. II. c. 33), had made it unlawful for any private person to print a book without a license; and Lord Arlington at once arrested John Derby, printer of 'The Sandy Foundation Shaken,' and committed him prisoner to the Gatehouse till he should disclose the author's name, submit himself to mercy, and confess his fault.

The full title of Penn's pamphlet was 'The Sandy Foundations shaken; or those so generally believed and applauded doctrines of One God subsisting in three distinct and separate persons,-the impossibility of God's pardoning sinners without a plenary satisfaction-and the justification of impure persons by an imputative righteousnessrefuted from the authority of Scripture testimonies and right reason by W. P. j., a builder on that foundation which cannot be removed.' W. P. j. was known to stand for William Penn, junior, son of