I think there ran be no doubt that this adventure had the double object of affording an exile's refuge to Calvert's co-religionists, as well as of promoting the welfare of his family. It was designed for land-holders and laborers. It was a manorial, planting colony. Its territory was watered by two bays, several large rivers, and innumerable streams. Its fertile lands and thick forests, invited husbandmen, while its capacious coasts tempted the hardy fisherman. And so it is, that in the Arms which were prepared for the Proprietary government, the baronial shield of the Calvert family, dropped, in America, its two supporting leopards, and received in their stead, on either side, a Fisherman and a Farmer. "Crescite et Multiplicamini,"—its motto,—was a watchword of provident thrift.
Forty-nine years after the charter was granted to Lord Baltimore, King Charles II issued a patent, for a magnificent patrimony in America, to William Penn.
But what a change, in that half century, had passed over the world! A catalogue of the events that took place, in Great Britain alone, is a history of the growth of Opinion and of the People.
Charles's efforts to overthrow the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, and to enforce Episcopacy, brought on the war with the stern enthusiasts of that country. Laud, in the Church, and the Earl of Strafford, in the Cabinet, kept the King in a constant passion of royal and ecclesiastical power. Strafford fell, and the civil war broke out. Cromwell towered up suddenly, on the bloody field, and was victorious over the royalists. The King perished on the scaffold. Cromwell became Lord Protector. Anon, the commonwealth fell; the Stuarts were restored, and Charles II ascended the throne;—but amid all these perilous acts of political and religious fury, the world of thought had been stirred by the speeches and writings, of Taylor, Algernon Sydney, Hampden, and Milton. As the people gradually felt their power they learned to know their rights, and, although they went back from Republicanism to Royalty, they did so, perhaps, only to save themselves from the anarchy that ever threatens a nation while freeing itself from feudal traditions.
Besides these political and literary phases of the time, there had been added to the Catholic, Episcopal, and Puritan sects, a new element of religious power, which was destined to produce a slow but safe revolution among men.
An humble shoemaker, named George Fox, arose and taught that "every man was complete in himself; he stood in need of no alien help; the light was free of all control,—above all authority external to itself. Each human being, man or woman, was supreme." The christian denomination called Quakers, or more descriptively—"Friends,"—- thus obtained a hearing and a standing among all serious persons who thought Religion a thing of life as well as of death.
Quakerism, with such fundamental principles of equality in constant practice, became a social polity. If the Quaker was a Democrat, he was so because the "inner light" of his christianity made him one, and he dared not disobey his christianity. He recognized no superiors, for his conscience taught him to deny any privileges to claimed superiority. But the Quaker added to his system, an element which, hitherto, was unknown in the history of sects;—he was a Man of Peace. It is not to be supposed that any royal or ecclesiastical government would allow such radical doctrines to pass unnoticed, in the midst of a society which was ever greedy for new teachings. The Quaker, therefore, soon participated in the persecutions which prelacy thought due to liberal christianity. But persecution of the Friend, was the Friend's best publication, for he answered persecution, not by recantation, but by peaceful endurance. Combative resistance, in religious differences, always gives the victor a right, or at least, an excuse, to slay. But Quakerism, a system of personal and religious independence and peace,—became slowly successful by the vis inertiæ of passive resistance. All other sects were, more or less, combative;—Quakerism was an obstinate rock, which stood, in rooted firmness, amid a sea of strife:—the billows of faction raged around it and broke on its granite surface, but they wasted themselves—not the rock! And this is a most important fact in the history of Religion in its development of society. All other sects lost caste, power or material, either by aggression or by fighting. But the Quaker said to the Prelate, the Puritan, and the Catholic, you may annoy us by public trials, by denial of justice, by misrepresentation, by imprisonment, by persecution, by the stake,—yet we shall stand immovable on two principles, which deny that God is glorified by warfare—especially for opinion. Our principles are, equality and peace—in the church and in the world. Equality is to make us humble and good citizens. Peace is to convert this den of human tigers into a fold, wherein by simply performing our duties to each other and to God, we may prepare ourselves for the world of spirits. You can persecute—we can suffer. Who shall tire first? We will be victorious by the firmness that bears your persecutions; and those very persecutions, while they publish your shame, shall proclaim our principles as well as our endurance. They knew, from the history of Charles 1st, that the worst thing to be done with a bad king was to kill him; for, if the axe metamorphosed that personage into a martyr, the prison could never extinguish the light of truth in the doctrines of Quakerism![14]