American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  The central Quaker doctrine of an inner light, the voice of God in every man, was nothing if not spiritual. To Penn it was no novelty but the essence of Christianity and especially Protestant Christianity. Nor was it difficult to find passages in the writings of Christians from Saint Paul onward that could be interpreted to support it, a task to which Penn gladly devoted himself. Almost all explanations of saving grace, of God’s calling of his saints to salvation, could be read as expositions of the Quaker doctrine. Orthodox divines, to be sure, took pains to indicate that saving grace did not involve direct revelation; but the line between the two had always been difficult to maintain, and Quakers relieved themselves of the difficulty by erasing it. The inner light and saving grace, Penn maintained, were one and the same. They were the voice of Christ, who was God within man, enabling man to sin no more, to be made pure and thus acceptable to God.

  In answer to the charge that Quakers denied Christ’s atonement for sin, Penn developed a distinction made by other Quakers, between past and present sin. Christ’s sacrifice, he maintained, was necessary to atone for the sins that every man committed before he submitted to the inner light. Christ justified man before God for these past sins, but this did not excuse future sins. And it was sacrilege to suggest that God would welcome to his bosom men who continued to sin. The inner light, Christ within man, enabled believers to stop sinning. Christ not only atoned for past sins but prevented future ones, and he did so for all men and women who heeded his voice within them. Such a view precluded predestination and robbed original sin of its power. And Penn went on the offensive against both these dogmas. Predestination he derided as the work of narrow, pinched-up souls who made “the Eternal God, as partial as themselves, like some Ancients, That because they could not Resemble God, they would make such Gods as might Resemble them.”

  But it was unnecessary to waste much argument on predestination, for it was out of favor in the Church of England anyhow. Penn reserved his greatest scorn for the doctrine of original sin as something that debilitated men and prevented them while in the flesh from ever fully complying with the will of God. Penn dubbed this a “lazy” doctrine for “sin-pleasing times.” It was simply, in his view, an excuse for sinning, and he mocked the orthodox ministers who preached it. “Methinks,” he wrote,

  these Hireling Ministers are like some Mercenary Souldiers…that cannot bear to think of the Enemy’s being totally routed, lest their War end, and their Pay with it…. They had rather the Devil were unsubdued, than they disbanded, that his being unconquered might be a Pretence for keeping such Mercenaries always on foot.

  For all his wit, Penn was hard pressed to defend as Protestant a doctrine that resembled so closely the Catholic one of justification by works, but he could cite a good many Protestant divines, as well as Scripture, to show that the presence of saving faith was normally evidenced by good works. And he argued that making good works necessary to salvation was not the same as making them merit salvation. Good works, he said, were

  not strictly meritorious; only they have an inducing, procuring, and obtaining Power and Virtue in them. That is Merit where there is an Equality betwixt the Work and Wages; but all those Temporary [i.e., temporal] Acts of Righteousness, can never equal Everlasting Life, Joy, and Happiness (being of Grace, and not of Debt) and therefore strictly no Merit.

  This may seem a distinction without much difference, but Penn was convinced that “Preferring Opinion before Piety hath filled the World with Perplexing Controversies,” and this was one of them. The Puritan’s tendency to separate saving grace from morality seemed to him monstrous. Indeed, “This Distinction betwixt moral and Christian,” he thought, was “a deadly Poyson these latter Ages have been infected with to the Destruction of Godly Living, and Apostatizing of those Churches [Presbyterian and Congregational] in whom there might once have been begotten some Earnest, Living Thirst after the Inward Life of Righteousness.” It was God who had joined grace and virtue, and it was human “stinginess of spirit,” not Protestantism, that separated them.

  In demonstrating the Christian and Protestant character of Quakerism, Penn knew that he had to meet other Protestants on their own ground. They would not listen to an argument that defended the inner light and other Quaker doctrines by means of the inner light itself. Erudition was what it would take, and in spite of his hostility to learning, Penn was prepared to supply erudition, probably better equipped to do so than any other Quaker. He knew Latin. He knew French. He knew enough Greek to discuss Greek texts of the New Testament. He could even put on a display of linguistic pyrotechnics (discussing the ninth chapter of First John) that included translations into French, Italian, German, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee (though it is clear that he did not know all these). Although he was no theologian and thought that theologians were in large measure responsible for the apostasy of Christianity from its primitive purity, he had studied the church fathers and the scholastic and Protestant divines enough to mine their writings for arguments. Similarly, although he held fast to the Quaker insistence that the inner light was a more direct and reliable avenue to God’s will than the Scriptures, he knew the Scriptures backward and forward and could always summon up appropriate passages to serve his cause.

  Penn’s usual method of attack was to refute his opponents by appeals to reason and to Scripture and then to offer voluminous passages from past authorities. For example, in arguing that the inner light was present and recognized in all men before Christ’s appearance as well as after, he quoted, among others, passages from Orpheus, Hesiod, Thales, Sybilla, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Timaeus Locrus, Antis thenes, Plato, Parmenides Magnus, Zeno, Chrysippus, Antipater, Hieron, Sophocles, Menander, Philo, Cleanthes, Plutarch, Epictetus, Seneca, Diogenes, Xenocrates, Virgil, Justin Martyr, Clemens Alexandrinus, Tertullian, Origen, Lactantius, Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Augustine. In defending the Quaker refusal to take oaths, he dredged up no fewer than 122 authorities from ancient times to the seventeenth century.

  When Penn was not occupied in defending the Quaker movement, he was often busy keeping it defensible. He recognized how vulnerable it was to the charge that reliance on the inner light could be used to justify any kind of conduct, say, “Murder, Adultery, Treason, Theft, or any such like Wickedness.” In answer he could only say, in effect, that it did not, that “God’s Spirit makes People free from Sin, and not to commit Sin.” Which was to say that Quaker morality was for the most part conventional Protestant morality: the inner light did not call Quakers to immoral actions. But Quakers had broken with convention at several points: in their mode of address, in refusing to take oaths, in wearing their hats before their betters. Penn was aware that some members, having broken convention at one point, might throw it to the winds. Such had been the case with another group, the so-called Ranters, antinomians who defined their actions, whatever they might be, as righteous by attributing them to the spirit of Christ within them. This was dangerously close to Quaker doctrine, and if Quakers were to gain the acceptance Penn thought they deserved, it was necessary to keep the movement free from such anarchistic tendencies.

  Accordingly Penn took a strong stand, along with George Fox, in support of a church discipline that could restrain eccentricity and eccentrics. There was, for example, the case of William Mucklow, who carried his attachment to his hat to a stage that violated the whole purpose of Quaker practice. Quakers refused to take off their hats to human superiors in order to testify against worldly honors, and they could thereby distinguish their reverence for God by taking off their hats in worship. But Mucklow insisted on wearing his hat in prayer. When admonished for it, he fell back on the inner light and denied the right of the church to command his conscience. Others took up the same cry, challenging the right of the weekly, monthly, or yearly meetings of Quakers to supervise the conduct of members, including the right that the meetings had begun to exercise, of determining the appropriateness of members’ marriages.

  In
these controversies Penn was always on the side of authority, affirming the right of the church to rid itself of “Wrong Spirits under never such right Appearances.” His commitment was not simply to the doctrines of Quakerism but to the movement. He was ready to use arguments that he would have scorned in a Church of England man, maintaining that the majority in a church were more likely to be right than any individual, and advising anyone who dissented to “wait upon God in Silence and Patience…and as thou abidest in the Simplicity of the TRUTH, thou wilt receive an Understanding with the rest of thy Brethren.” And if this failed, “since the Spirit of the Lord is one in all, it ought to be obey’d through another, as well as in one’s self.” If anyone persisted in mistaking his own idiosyncrasies for the Spirit of the Lord, the only recourse was to expel him from the movement.

  With Penn’s assistance, though it required adjusting principles a little, the Quakers avoided the errors of the Ranters. Though Quakers remained at the outer edge of Protestantism, they became, thanks in no small measure to Penn, a recognized church, a force in the world, unlike the ephemeral groups around them. And Penn, fervently a Quaker, could continue to think of himself as a Protestant.

  THE GENTLEMAN

  That Penn was a gentleman and remained a gentleman is apparent both in his behavior and in his beliefs. His social position gave him an access to power that no other Quaker enjoyed. At the same time, his gentility affected his understanding of Quakerism’s most controversial doctrine and helped to shape that doctrine in ways that presented a special challenge to men of his class.

  The most radical departure of Quakerism from orthodox Protestantism was its insistence on the possibility of perfection in this world, the possibility of living entirely as God would have us live, pure and sinless. When Penn called on Christians to take up Christ’s cross in opposition to the ways of the world, he did not think he was asking the impossible. True Christians could imitate Christ, for Christ would enable them to make the imitation, to become pure and sinless. But what did purity and sinlessness require?

  Since Penn continually emphasized the affinity of Christ for the poor and humble and of the poor and humble for Christ, it would be plausible to suppose that he thought the imitation of Christ required poverty, that those of his own class who gave up the ways of the world had to give up the privileges and perquisites that went with wealth and rank. And the Quaker refusal to recognize worldly honors in forms of address and behavior would seem to support such a supposition. But Penn took pains to assure everyone that this was not his meaning.

  We get our first hint of his position in No Cross No Crown, immediately after his defiant statement that if Quaker doctrine will overthrow all distinctions among men, so be it, the apostle James must bear the blame, not the Quakers. This ringing declaration is followed by a statement that sounds odd to modern ears, beginning with a derision of worldly honors and closing with an affirmation of the obligations that Christianity imposes on the different ranks of men: “The World’s Respect,” he says, “is an Empty Ceremony, no Soul or Substance in it. The Christian’s is a solid Thing, whether by Obedience to Superiors, Love to Equals, or Help and Countenance to Inferiors.” Superiors, inferiors, equals—to an age that associates human progress with equality, Christian perfection would seem to have little to do with the duties of inferiors toward superiors or of superiors toward inferiors.

  What this passage tells us is that Penn’s world was not ours. It was a world that, for all its faults, still bore the mark of its Creator. Most of the people who lived in it violated the Creator’s intention in many ways but not in the orderly, hierarchical structure of their societies. That kind of order, for Penn (and for virtually everyone else at the time) was part of the original plan. “Divine Right,” Penn believed, “runs through more Things of the World, and Acts of our Lives, than we are aware of; and Sacrilege may be committed against more than the Church.” It could be committed, one gathers, by ignoring social order as much as by following the empty ceremonies that proffered unfelt or exaggerated honor. “Envy none,” Penn told his children, for “it is God that maketh Rich and Poor, Great and Small, High and Low.”

  In taking up a strange religious belief, Penn seemed to many of his contemporaries to be himself committing a kind of sacrilege against the divine right embedded in the social order: gentlemen ought not to depart from the religion established by law and thus set a bad example for lesser folk. When his Quakerism got him in trouble again on a visit to Ireland in 1670, an Irish friend, Lord O’Brien, thought it sheer stubbornness for Penn to persevere in so strange a religious belief when it would have been perfectly easy for him to stick to the standard Anglican one. Penn, he said, was rejecting “not what you cant but what you wont believe,…it is certainly possible for you to believe our faith, for it is reasonable.” Nevertheless, Lord O’Brien and Penn’s other noble friends in Ireland were clear that queer and stubborn religious beliefs were not sufficient in themselves to deprive a gentleman of his rank. His friends intervened for him against the mayor of Cork, because as one of them said, wrong religious opinions “certainly cannot make any man degenerate from being a Gentleman who was borne so.”

  Penn’s priorities differed from his friends’. If religion and social position were at odds, religion had to prevail. But Penn saw no good reason why they should be at odds. Although he thought religion demanded of gentlemen a standard of virtue that few attained or even attempted, it did not follow that a man’s religious beliefs, whether strict or loose, should affect his place or power in society. That his friends should pull rank to help one of their own kind was perfectly proper, and he in turn used his own rank and influence to help himself and his Quaker friends in their encounters with authority.

  Penn’s knowledge of the law, gained during his brief period of studies at Lincoln’s Inn, may have been superficial, but he had learned enough to be a troublesome defendant. When brought before the courts, he assumed not merely the defiant stance of the self-righteous but also the assurance of the cultivated gentleman in dealing with officials whom he evidently regarded as not quite his equals either socially or intellectually. When arrested for preaching at a Quaker meeting in 1670, he lectured the judges on the law and taunted them into statements that left the jury totally committed to him. He demanded to know what law he had broken, and when he was told it was the common law, he asked what that was, as if he didn’t know. There then followed this exchange:

  COURT: You must not think that I am able to run up so many Years, and over so many adjudged Cases, which we call Common-Law to answer your Curiosity.

  PENN: This answer I am sure is very short of my Question; for if it be Common, it should not be so hard to produce.

  This evoked an apoplectic response and more exchanges, in which Penn seemed to be interrogating the court instead of vice versa. When the judge told him, “If I should suffer you to ask Questions till to Morrow-Morning, you would be never the wiser,” Penn could not resist the opening thus given him, and replied that whether he was wiser or not would depend on the answers he got.

  The jury, in spite of browbeating by the bench, refused to convict this Quaker who talked back to his judges with such aplomb. A few months later the constables caught Penn preaching again and hailed him before the court, this time for violating the so-called five-mile act, which required no jury trial. Even without a jury to play up to, Penn maintained his posture of superiority and contempt. Asked at the outset of the hearing if his name was Penn, he answered, “Dost thou not know me? Hast thou forgotten me?” to which the judge replied, “I don’t know you, I don’t desire to know such as you are.”

  “If not,” said Penn, “why dost thou send for me hither?”

  “Is that your Name Sir?”

  “Yes, yes, my Name is Penn, thou knowst it is, I am not ashamed of my name.”

  After he had reduced the court to fury with a number of diatribes, the judges called for a corporal with musketeers to escort him to Newgate Prison, to which Penn ga
ve his final sneer: “No, no send thy Lacky, I know the Way to Newgate.”

  Although he served his terms in Newgate and the Tower of London, as other gentlemen had done before, Penn was able to retain or recover the place at the king’s court that his father had won for him, and he was able to do it without sacrificing his religious convictions. In 1681 he got the king to give him Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers, presumably in payment of a debt owed his father. After the Duke of York came to the throne as James II in 1685, Penn enjoyed even greater opportunities for influence, and he took them. His father, on his deathbed, had adjured the duke to help young Penn out of the difficulties that his religion would surely get him into, and the duke honored the request as king. From 1685 until revolution ousted James from the throne in 1688, Penn was in daily and effective attendance at Whitehall, pulling strings for better treatment of Quakers and of other religious dissenters.