ey said, to those
blessed centuries when the teaching of the Apostles was remembered, and
the fellowship of the Apostles was faithfully kept,--when Justin Martyr
and Irenaeus and Ignatius and the other holy fathers lived. And let us
listen to the inner voice; let us live in the illumination of the light
which lighteth every man, and attend to the counsels of that Holy Spirit
whose ministrations did not cease with the departure of the last
Apostle. God, they believed, spoke to them directly, and told them what
to do.

George Fox, in 1656, had brought this teaching to Oxford; and among the
company of Quakers which had thus been gathered under the eaves of the
university, Thomas Loe had become a "public Friend," or, as would
commonly be said, a minister. When William Penn entered Christ Church
College, Loe was probably in the town jail. It is at least certain that
he was imprisoned there, with forty other Quakers, sometime in 1660.

To Loe's preaching many of the students listened with attention. It is
easy to see how his doctrines would appeal to young manhood. The fact
that they were forbidden would attract some, and that the man who
preached thus had suffered for his faith would attract others. Their
emphasis upon entire sincerity and consistency in word and deed would
commend them to honest souls, while the exaltation of the inward light
would move then, as in all ages, the idealists, the poets, the
enthusiasts among them. William Penn knew what the inward light was. He
had seen it shining so that it filled all the room where he was sitting.
Accordingly, he not only went to hear Loe speak but was profoundly
impressed by what he heard.

If Penn was naturally a religious person,--by inheritance, perhaps, from
his mother,--he was also naturally of a political mind, by inheritance
from his father. What Loe said touched both sides of this inheritance.
For the Quakers had already begun to dream of a colony across the sea.
The Churchmen had such a colony in Virginia; the Puritans had one in
Massachusetts; somewhere else in that untilled continent there must be a
place for those who in England could expect no peace from either
Puritan or Churchman. Not only had they planned to have sometime a
country of their own, but they had already located it. They had chosen
the lands which lay behind the Jerseys. While Loe was preaching and Penn
was listening, Fox was writing to Josiah Cole, a Quaker who was then in
America, asking him