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.

CHAPTER III William Penn Travels

When his son William came home from Oxford, Admiral Penn was a prominent figure in London. He held numerous offices, for he was a Naval Commissioner, a Member of Parliament, Governor of Kinsale, Admiral of Ireland, a Member of the Council of Munster, and a favorite of King Charles and the Duke of York. He was in high hopes that he would soon be made a peer. His wife, Lady Penn, and his daughter Margaret, or Peg, as she was usually called, were fond of society and fashion. It was somewhat natural, therefore, that Admiral Penn should not altogether understand or appreciate the new religious views of his son William. He thought the youth exceedingly willful, but could not believe that his interest in the new movement was anything more than a passing whim. Therefore, in order to interest William in other things, he introduced him to his own friends and showed him something of the pleasant side of life at King Charles's court. He took William