Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/153

 

1661—1688.

name of is one of the most eminent in American colonial history, and well deserves the esteem and respect with which it has been, and is, regarded by philanthropists and patriots. This remarkable man was the only son of Admiral Penn, distinguished during the protectorate of Cromwell by the conquest of the Island of Jamaica, and afterwards by his conduct and courage during the war with Holland, in the reign of Charles II., with whom and his brother, the Duke of York, he was a great favorite. Young Penn was entered as a gentleman commoner at Oxford at the period when the Quakers, in the midst of dislike and opposition from all sects and parties, persisted in the propagation of their offensive tenets. Through the earnestness of one of their itinerant preachers, the son of the admiral became converted to the doctrines of the new sect, and entering upon an enthusiastic advocacy of his new views, he was fined and expelled from the University. The exasperated old admiral, his father, at first beat him and turned him out of doors, but afterwards sent him to make the tour of Europe, in the hope that mingling more freely with the great world might effect the cure of his eccentric enthusiasm. His travels undoubtedly tended both to enlarge his mind and to give additional suavity to his manners.

On his return to London for the purpose of studying the law at Lincoln's Inn, he was considered quite "a modish fine gentleman." "The glory of the world," he says, "overtook me, and I was even ready to give up myself unto it;" but his deep sense of the vanity of the world, and the "irreligiousness of its religions," which the preaching of the itinerant Quaker had produced, was aroused from temporary slumber by his providential encounter with the same individual, on the occasion of a journey to Ireland, and he determined to cast in his lot with these advocates of brotherly love and impartial toleration. "God in his everlasting kindness," thus he declares, 