When one critic disclosed in a preface that he was sixty years of age, Penn, then at the ripe age of twenty-seven, mocked the man’s “decrepit” reasoning and rang the changes on the fact “that any Man should live so long, and to so little Purpose.” To Richard Baxter, perhaps the foremost dissenting divine of the Restoration period, he announced, “Scurvy of the minde is thy distemper; I feare its Incurable.” He was fond of proclaiming his own moderate spirit as enjoined by his faith, but even in doing so he could not resist a jab at his opponents, as when in an answer to one critic he began by saying, “I would give the Worst of Men their Due,” and then added, “I justly esteem him of that Number.”
In a running controversy with John Faldo, an Anglican minister, he addressed Faldo successively as Whistling Priest, Busie Priest, ungodly Priest, cavilling Priest, rude priest, ignorant priest, and told his readers,
…in the Earth there is not any Thing so Fantastical, Conceited, Proud, Railing, Busie-Body, and sometimes Ignorant, as a sort of Priests to me not unknown (among whom our Adversary is not the least) who think their Coat will bear out their worst Expressions for Religion, and Practice an haughty Reviling for Christ, as one of the greatest Demonstrations of their Zeal; an ill-bred and Pedantick Crew, the Bane of Reason, and Pest of the World; the old Incendiaries to Mischief, and the best to be spar’d of Mankind; against whom the boiling Vengeance of an irritated God is ready to be poured out to the Destruction of such, if they repent not, and turn from their Abominable Deceits.
This diatribe was not mere youthful exuberance. In one of his last tracts, written when he was fifty-four, he described his opponent as a “snake-in-the-grass” and then specified what kind, a rattlesnake.
Penn coupled his unrelenting hostility to conventional Christians with an anti-intellectualism that attributed the whole apparatus of Christian theology and ecclesiastical institutions, both Catholic and Protestant, to the pursuit of forbidden knowledge that had caused the expulsion from paradise. It was one of the marks of purity in the early followers of Christ, Penn thought, that “for the first Hundred Years, scarce an Eminent Scholar was to be found amongst the Christians.”
In his first publication he warned against “Extollers of Humane Learning,” and throughout his life in offering advice to the godly he warned them against “that Thirsting Spirit after much Head-Knowledge,” which would only clog the passages to truth that lay within them. “My Friends,” he would write, “disquiet not your Selves to comprehend Divine Things, for they that do so are of the Flesh.”
Those who claim direct access to divinity, whether they call it the inner light or the oversoul or by any other name, have always discounted the learning to be had from books, though they often, like Penn, couch their antibook message in books of their own (Penn’s bibliography runs to over 130 titles). Penn from the time of his conversion professed to be wary of books. Solitude and silence, not books, he thought, were the way to reach the Spirit. In his final testimony of advice to his children, he cautioned them that “reading many Books is but a taking off the Mind too much from Meditation…. much reading is an Oppression of the Mind, and extinguishes the natural Candle; which is the Reason of so many senseless Scholars in the World.”
The senseless scholars he had encountered personally in his stay at Oxford, and his impatience with human learning rose to a climax whenever he considered what went on in universities, those places of “Folly, Ignorance, and Impiety,” which “infect the whole Land with Debauchery, and at best Persecution, and anti-Christian clumsy-witted Pedants, and useless pragmaticks.” The universities were simply the last stop in the long line of degeneration from the simple truth of Christ and the prophets. God’s message had been lost in “the obscure, unintelligible and unprofitable Metaphysicks of the Heathen, too greedily received and mischievously increased by Fathers, Councils, School-Men and our modern Universities, to the corrupting of Christian Doctrine, and disputing away the Benefit of Christian life.” He was not against secular learning that devoted itself to secular things, to “Building, Improvement of Land, Medicine, Chirurgery, Traffick, Navigation, History, Government.” But when brought to bear on religion, human learning was only a block to the true knowledge that came from within.
Penn’s hostility to universities extended to the ministers trained there. Their objective, he claimed, was only to make a living out of religion, and their ministry was unavailing because they relied on book learning instead of the inner light. Penn thought of himself as a minister, unpaid and unordained but called, like all true ministers, directly by God. He advised others like him,
We are not to Study nor speak our own Words…. We are to minister, as the Oracles of God; if so, then must we receive from Christ, God’s Great Oracle, what we are to minister. And if we are to minister what we receive, then not what we Study, Collect, and beat out of our own Brains, for that is not the Mind of Christ, but our own Imaginations, and this will not profit the People.
True Christian doctrine, Penn insisted, did not have to be “prov’d by Aristotle and his Philosophy.” The Scriptures themselves needed no interpretation. Indeed, it was ridiculous to suppose that God had made the Scriptures so obscure that they required a privileged race of scholar-priests to be explained. They were “suited to the Capacity of the Young, the Ignorant, and the Poor.” And that was how Penn liked to think of the Quakers. To him they were always a “poor, despised people,” poor not only in their ignorance and in the bad treatment they received, but poor in lacking the good things of the world on which false Christians prided themselves. They were, he assured himself, mostly mechanics. And he gladly assimilated their humility to himself, gladly shared their sufferings, for he was convinced that in doing so he was opening the way for the spirit, which could scarcely penetrate the antichristian world of fleshly delights and scholarly philosophy that had been his heritage.
In his professed affinity for the poor, Penn touched a dynamic element of the Christian tradition that has sparked more than one rebel against the ways of the world. There is an egalitarian leaven in Christianity, subdued by the institutions that Christianity fosters, but ever ready to breed prophets in sackcloth to denounce the churches that forget it. “Christ,” Penn observed in No Cross No Crown, “came Poor into the World, and so lived in it.” Did he call his disciples from among the learned? “I would fain know,” asked Penn,
how many Rabbies, Greek and Latin Philosophers, yielded themselves Proselytes to the Christian Religion, though they had his Presence, Ministry, Death and Ressurection amongst them, who was and is the Author and Master of it? If such Learning be so great a Friend to Truth, how comes it that the greatest Things have fallen to the Share of Poor and Illiterate Men; And that such have been most apt to receive, and boldest to suffer for it? Why not Rabbies rather than Fishermen…?”
True Christians now as then, Penn believed, were most likely to be found among “Handicraft, Labouring, and Husband-men, Persons inexpert in the Scholastick Adages, Disputations and Opinions of the Heathenish Philosophical World.” George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, whom Penn revered, had been a simple and untutored man, “not of High Degree,” Penn recalled, “or Elegant Speech or Learned after the Way of this World.” To be a Christian was to be humble, meek, of low degree. Penn never tired of citing the first epistle to the Corinthians that “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.” And he continued to identify the Quakers with “the Weary and Heavy Laden, the Hungry and Thirsty, the Poor and Needy, the Mournful and Sick.”
Quaker doctrine, moreover, spelled out for him some of the egalitarian implications of Christian teaching. Quakers, as we have seen, made it a matter of principle to ignore and flatten social distinctions. Penn found refreshing their insistence on simplicity, their drab clothing, their refusal to doff their hats or to use customary forms of address. The world’s addiction to these empty forms was simply another sign of its apostasy. With his usual air of defiance Penn dismissed the objections
that his own sort of people made to this seeming uncouthness: if, as they claimed, it would “overthrow all Manner of Distinctions among Men,” then so be it. “I can’t help it,” he said, “the Apostle James must answer for it, who has given us this Doctrine for Christian and Apostolical,” and he cited the second chapter of James, where the apostle warns against respect of persons.
After joining the Quakers and assuming, however proudly, the mantle of meekness, Penn welcomed unmeek confrontations with the authorities of Restoration England, representatives of the world he had left behind. With his acid tongue and sharp wit, he was more than a match for the judges before whom he and his Friends appeared. The incarceration he nevertheless suffered at Newgate Prison and the Tower of London only gave him the leisure to grind out more books and pamphlets denouncing the ways of the world he had known and justifying the ways of the Quakers.
We have, then, a man who made his life a testimony against the world he grew up in, a world that called itself Christian and allowed, indeed enjoined, its people to study and do what Christ had taught, but which seemed to a sharp young mind to deny his teachings in all its institutions, not least in all the churches save one that claimed the name of Christ. Why, then, may we ask, have we ever heard of William Penn? The world is pretty good at sending into oblivion those who defy or deny it. The meek may inherit it later on, but they don’t get far in the here and now. If we have heard of William Penn before this, it is because he was not meek. He was not humble. And being neither meek nor humble, he did not in fact reject as much of the world as he seemed to. The man who sassed his judges and filled the presses from his cell in Newgate was not content to inherit the world later on or to leave it as he found it. He wanted to change it now, and he did in fact leave his mark on it.
He left his mark because what he wanted and argued for, pleaded for, almost fought for was not quite outside the possible. He left his mark because he knew how the world worked and was prepared, in spite of his denunciations, to work within its terms.
We may find a first clue to his capacity for coming to terms with the world in his relationship to his parents. He was obviously fond of them, proud of his father’s success in a career that he himself had to eschew. In recounting the sacrifices he had to make for his faith, he always dwelt on the displeasure of his parents. And his father’s displeasure was real. Penn spoke of “The bitter usage” he underwent when sent down from Oxford in 1662, “whipping, beating, and turning out of Dores.” And when he returned from Ireland a full-fledged Quaker in 1667, it must have gone just as badly, though by this time whipping and beating were out of the question. But the Penns, after trying to talk their son out of his queer beliefs, became reconciled to them and to him. By the time the admiral died, in 1670 (not yet forty-nine years old), he had entrusted his son with many of his business affairs and made him his principal heir and executor of his considerable estate. Indeed, according to Penn, the parents “that once disown’d me for this blessed Testimonys sake…have come to love me above all, thinking they could never do and leave enough for me.” He showed no hesitation in accepting that share of the world which his father had accumulated, nor did he ever think of disowning his parents, as they for a time had thought of disowning him.
Admiral Penn had raised his son as a Protestant, as a gentleman, and as an Englishman. Penn was proud to be all of these. His understanding of what each entailed might differ from his father’s and from many other Englishmen’s, but not to the point of disavowal. Rather, he thought that if Protestants were true to their principles, they ought to become Quakers as he had. If gentlemen were true to their principles, they ought to give up the vices that he had given up. And if Englishmen were true to their principles, they ought to prevent their government from meddling in religion and threatening the liberty and property of Englishmen like him, who did not conform to the dictates of a set of bigoted priests. As a Protestant, a gentleman, and an Englishman, Penn presented his case, in terms designed to appeal to Protestants, to gentlemen, and to Englishmen.
THE PROTESTANT
Penn insisted throughout his life that he was a Protestant. In a speech before a committee of Parliament in 1678, supporting a bill for religious toleration, he told the members,
I was bred a Protestant, and that strictly too…. reading, travail and observation made the Religion of my education the Religion of my judgement…. I do tell you again, and here solemnly declare in the presence of Almighty God, and before you all, that the Profession I now make, and the society I now adhere to, have been so far from altering that Protestant judgment I had, that I am not conscious to myself of having receded from an Iota of any one principle maintained by those first Protestants and Reformers in Germany, and our own Martyrs at home against the Pope or See of Rome.
Protestantism, as Penn saw it, was Christianity rescued from the apostasy that had befallen it under Roman Catholicism. And Quakerism was Protestantism rescued from the apostasy that had befallen it after the passing of the great reformers of the sixteenth century. Almost all his voluminous writings were designed to demonstrate this proposition and to defend Quakerism from denials of it by Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Socinians, Anabaptists, and Catholics. His first tract, in 1668, like so many seventeenth-century tracts, tried to get the whole argument on the title page: Truth Exalted; In a Short, But Sure Testimony against all those Religions, Faiths, and Worships, That have been formed and followed in the Darkness of Apostacy: And For that Glorious Light which is now Risen, and Shines forth, in the Life and Doctrine of the Despised Quakers, as the Alone Good Old Way of Life and Salvation. Presented to Princes, Priests, and People, That they may Repent, Believe, and Obey. By William Penn, whom Divine Love constrains in an Holy Contempt, to trample on Egypt’s Glory, not fearing the King’s Wrath, having beheld the Majesty of Him who is Invisible. The same intent is apparent in his other tracts, such as (without the subtitles) Quakerism a New Nick-name for Old Christianity and Primitive Christianity Revived in the Faith and Practice of the People called Quakers.
Quakerism as Protestantism required a good deal of defending, because its distinctive doctrines seemed clearly heretical, in direct defiance, as we have seen, of central Protestant Christian dogmas. Protestant heresies generally went in one of two directions: either on the one hand toward antinomianism, in which the true believer was thought to be freed from adherence to the Law by the presence of Christ within him, or on the other hand toward Arminianism, in which the believer was thought to be capable of achieving his own salvation by escaping from original sin and obeying the Law. Antinomianism entailed a belief in direct revelation, which was supposed by the orthodox to have ceased with the writing of the Bible. Arminianism amounted to a denial of justification by faith and thus a return to the repudiated Catholic doctrine of justification by works. Quakerism, it seemed, embraced not one of these heresies but both at once. In the doctrine of an inner light, Quakers claimed a direct revelation from God. At the same time they affirmed that everyone possessed this inner voice of God and could achieve salvation by obedience to it. They thus rejected predestination and affirmed or seemed to affirm justification by works.
This combination of heresies appeared to subordinate the Scriptures to some fancied inner voice, and to eliminate Christ’s atonement for human sin. The recovery of the Scriptures had been central to the Reformation, which had also restored Christ as the sole savior of man, freeing the church from reliance on any kind of human merit. But the Quakers, as if to emphasize that they had no need of Christ, eliminated the sacraments that memorialized him. And to top off their heresies, they denied the conventional doctrine of resurrection of the dead at the last day.
In defending Quaker heresies as Protestant and Christian, Penn had one advantage. Protestants prided themselves on eliminating idolatry and superstition from their worship. They emphasized the Holy Spirit, which brought unmerited grace to those whom God would save. They destroyed graven images and denounced the materialism of the Rom
an church. Quakers, too, emphasized the spirit and explicitly affirmed God to be an infinite spirit, affirmed it far more unequivocally than orthodox Protestants did. It was thus possible for Penn to turn some accepted Protestant doctrines and institutions against his opponents in the Church of England, which still harbored many of the sensual accompaniments of worship inherited from Rome. English churches, despite the Puritans, still contained paintings and statuary, still contained some ceremonies and trappings that betrayed, in Penn’s and the Quakers’ view, the Protestant repudiation of graven images. It was, as Penn put it in his devastating fashion, as though “God was an old Man, indeed, and Christ a little Boy, to be treated with a kind of Religious Mask [i.e., drama], for so they picture him in their Temples; and too many in their Minds.”
The sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, in spite of the Protestant denial of transubstantiation, Penn dismissed as relics of superstition. Water baptism was only slightly less offensive than the Old Testament circumcision that it replaced, and the Lord’s Supper was “a Kind of Protestant Extream Unction.” Both sacraments were departures from true Christian and Protestant freedom from formalistic, external devices that encouraged sinners to think they could be saved without an inner transformation. Circumcision of the heart, baptism by fire was what Christ demanded of those who believed in him. “Where Ceremonies, or Shadowy Services [Penn’s term for traditional rituals] are continued, People rest upon the Observance of them, and Indulge themselves in the Neglect of the Doctrine of the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The ceremonies by which other Protestants memorialized Christ were in fact ways of escaping the burden that he laid on his followers.
The orthodox doctrine of resurrection of the dead similarly departed from Christ’s insistence on the spirit. Penn did not deny that the dead would be raised, but he regarded as grossly materialistic the notion that men would recover their earthly bodies. It betrayed a continuing sensual element in the orthodox view, as though heaven would be incomplete without a resumption of the earthly pleasures enjoyed in this world. “It makes the Soul,” said Penn, “uncapable of Compleat Happiness without a Fleshly Body, as if Heaven were an Earthly Place to see, walk in, and for all our Outward Senses to be enjoyed and exercised, as in this World, though in an higher degree.” This, Penn maintained, was neither Christian nor Protestant but Mohammedan. And he went on to heap scorn on the notion: if the dead were supposed to rise “so strictly…as they Dyed, then every Man is to rise Married, [single], Low, High, Fat, Lean, Young, Old, Homely, Handsome, and according to former Complexion and Sex….” The idea was too ridiculous to contemplate.
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