less, while it would be hardly just to charge upon Andros all the brutality of his myrmidons, the whole affair helps us to understand the intense hatred which he inspired in people at a later period. In his eagerness to serve his master, we see him carrying out orders with needless violence and even behaving most reprehensibly, as in his attempt to overawe the jurymen. Our old comparison recurs to us as we feel that such was not the way in which Nicolls would have given effect to the duke's orders.

The duke re

The people of East Jersey submitted to the appointment of sundry officers by Andros, but their assembly refused to adopt the Duke's Laws. News of all these proceedings was sent by the deposed governor to Lady Carteret, widow of Sir George, who had lately died. These were people of great influence at court, and accordingly the duke deemed it best not to take to himself too much responsibility for the acts of his agent. He told Lady Carteret that he "doth wholly disown and declare that Sir Edmund Andros had never any such order or authority from him for the doing thereof," characteristic specimen of Stuart veracity. Presently James executed a paper relinquishing his claim upon East Jersey, and confirming it in the proprietorship of young Sir George Carteret, grandson and heir of the original grantee; and so the quarrel ended in the discomfiture of Andros.

linquishes to the Car

East Jersey

terets

a

Questions of ownership and jurisdiction had been coming up in West Jersey likewise, which ended in this same year 1680 in the duke's relin

VOL. II.

and West Jersey to

his friends.

quishing all his claims in favour of Friend Byllinge and other Quakers. But I must Byllinge and reserve this story for a while until it can fall into its proper place in the line of causation which led to the founding of Pennsylvania. We must bid adieu for a season to the pleasant country between the North and South rivers of New Netherland. We have to view the career of a man of extraordinary and varied powers, uniting after a fashion all his own the wisdom of the serpent with the purity of the dove,1 who was able at once to be a leader of one of the most iconoclastic and unpopular of Christian sects, and to retain the admiring friendship of one of the most bigoted kings that ever sat upon a throne. We must make the acquaintance of William Penn, who, take him for all in all, was by far the greatest among the founders of American commonwealths.

1 I leave this sentence as I first wrote it in 1882. I was not then aware that Benjamin Franklin had alluded to Penn as uniting "the subtlety of the serpent with the innocence of the dove." (See his Works, ed. Sparks, iii. 123.) Franklin's phrase, however, is intended for a sneer, as his context shows, while mine is meant to convey accurate but unstinted praise.

CHAPTER XII.

PENN'S HOLY EXPERIMENT.

Religious

liberty in

Pennsyl

Delaware.

AT the time of our Declaration of Independence the only states in which all Christian sects stood socially and politically on an equal footing were Pennsylvania and Delaware, the two states which had originally constituted the palatinate or proprietary domain of William Penn. Rhode Island, indeed, had been founded vania and upon equally liberal principles, but during the strong wave of anti-Catholic feeling that passed over the country in the time of James II., a clause depriving Papists of the franchise found its way into the statute book, and it was not repealed until 1783. If Roger Williams had lived a few years longer, it is not likely that this one stain upon the noble record of Rhode Island would have been permitted. As for Pennsylvania, if there was anything which she stood for in the eyes of the world, it was liberty of conscience. Her fame had gone abroad over the continent of Europe. In Voltaire's writings Pennsylvania more than once receives admiring mention as the one favoured country in the world where men can be devoutly religious and still refrain from tearing one another to pieces.

There was something more than satire in the

Identity of civil and religious life

ages.

suggested antithesis; as with most of Voltaire's keen-edged remarks, there was deep and earnest meaning behind it. Until quite modern times toleration was found only in union with indifference. In religious matters the Gallio, who "cared for none of those things," might refuse to play the part of a persecutor, but the most devout and disinterested zeal for religion was apt to be combined with more or less fanatical intolerance. Various causes from time to time contributed to this, but the deepest and most abiding cause was the imperfect separation between religion in primitive and politics. If we carry our thoughts back to primeval ages, we see that there was no such separation; religious life and civil life were identical. The earliest glimpses we can get of the human race show us nowhere anything like a nation, but everywhere small tribes perpetually encroaching upon one another and perpetually fighting to escape annihilation. The state of things among the American Indians of the seventeenth century may serve to illustrate what had been going on over a large part of the earth's surface for at least 300,000 or 400,000 years. From the Australian stage of human existence up to the Iroquois stage there was in many respects an enormous advance toward civilization, but the omnipresence of exterminating warfare continued, and enables us to understand that feature of primeval

Need for

times. In such a stage of society almost conformity. every act of tribal life is invested with religious significance, and absolute conformity to tribal rules and observances is enforced with piti

less rigour. The slightest neglect of an omen, for example, might offend some tutelar deity and thus bring on defeat; it is therefore unhesitatingly punished with death. It is an important part of the duties of medicine-men to take cognizance of the slightest offences and lapses. In early society the enforced conformity relates chiefly to matters of ritual and ceremony; questions of dogma arise at a later stage, after a considerable development in human thinking. But to whatever matter the enforcement of conformity relates, there can be no doubt as to the absolute necessity of it in early society. No liberty of divergence can be allowed to the individual without endangering the community.

As a kind of help toward the illustration of this point, let me cite a familiar instance of persecution in modern times and in a highly civilized community, where some of the conditions of primitive society had been temporarily reproduced. In 1636 there were about 5000 Englishmen in New England, distributed in more than twenty villages, mostly on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, but some as remote as the Connecticut River. Such a concerted Indian assault upon them as was actually made forty years later, in King Philip's war, might have overwhelmed them. Such an assault was contemplated by the Pequots and dreaded throughout the settlements, and the train-bands were making ready for war, when a certain number of Boston men refused to There were a few persons of influence in Boston, called Antinomians, of whom the one best

serve.

The Anti

nomians and

the Pequot

war.