The Quaker Colonies
In 1661, the year after Charles II was restored to the throne of
England, William Penn was a seventeen-year-old student at Christ
Church, Oxford. His father, a distinguished admiral in high favor at
Court, had abandoned his erstwhile friends and had aided in
restoring King Charlie to his own again. Young William was
associating with the sons of the aristocracy and was receiving an
education which would fit him to obtain preferment at Court. But
there was a serious vein in him, and while at a high church Oxford
College he was surreptitiously attending the meetings and listening
to the preaching of the despised and outlawed Quakers. There he
first began to hear of the plans of a group of Quakers to found
colonies on the Delaware in America. Forty years afterwards he
wrote, "I had an opening of joy as to these parts in the year 1661
at Oxford." And with America and the Quakers, in spite of a brief
youthful experience as a soldier and a courtier, William Penn's
life, as well as his fame, is indissolubly linked.
Quakerism was one of the many religious sects born in the
seventeenth century under the influence of Puritan thought. The
foundation principle of the Reformation, the right of private
judgment, the Quakers carried out to its logical conclusion; but
they were people whose minds had so long been suppressed and
terrorized that, once free, they rushed to extremes. They shocked
and horrified even the most advanced Reformation sects by rejecting
Baptism, the doctrine of the Trinity, and all sacraments, forms, and
ceremonies. They represented, on their best side, the most vigorous
effort of the Reformation to return to the spirituality and the
simplicity of the early Christians. But their intense spirituality,
pathetic often in its extreme manifestations, was not wholly
concerned with another world. Their humane ideas and philanthropic
methods, such as the abolition of slavery, and the reform of prisons
and of charitable institutions, came in time to be accepted as
fundamental practical social principles.
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