to confer with the chiefs of the Susquehanna
Indians. This plan Loe revealed to his student congregation. It appealed
to Penn. He had an instinctive appreciation of large ideas, and an
imagination and confidence which made him eager to undertake their
execution. It was in his blood. It was the spirit which had carried his
father from a lieutenancy in the navy to the position of an honored and
influential member of the court. "I had an opening of joy as to these
parts," he says, meaning Pennsylvania, "in 1661, at Oxford."

This meeting with Loe was therefore a crisis in Penn's life. William
Penn will always be remembered as a leader among the early Quakers, and
as the founder of a commonwealth. He first became acquainted with the
Quakers, and first conceived the idea of founding at Oxford, or
assisting to found, a commonwealth, by the preaching of Thomas Loe.

It is a curious fact that the spirit of protest will often pass by
serious offenses and fasten upon some apparently slight occasion which
has rather a symbolical than an actual importance. William Penn, so far
as we know, endured the disorders of anti-Puritan Oxford without
protest. He entered so far into the life of the place as to contribute,
with other students, to a series of Latin elegies upon the death of the
Duke of Gloucester; and he "delighted," Anthony Wood tells us, "in manly
sports at times of recreation." It is true that he may have written to
his father to take him away, for Mr. Pepys records in his journal, under
date of Jan. 25, 1662, "Sir W. Pen came to me, and did break a business
to me about removing his son from Oxford to Cambridge, to some private
college." But nothing came of it. William is said, indeed, to have
absented himself rather often from the college prayers, and to have
joined with other students whom the Quaker preaching had affected in
holding prayer-meetings in their own rooms. But all went fairly well
until an order was issued requiring the students, according to the
ancient custom, to wear surplices in chapel. Then the young Puritan
arose, and assisted in a ritual rebellion. He and his friends "fell upon
those students who appeared in surplices, and he and they together tore
them everywhere over their heads." Not content with thus seizing and
rending the obnoxious vestments, they proceeded further to thrust the
white gowns into the nearest cesspool, into whose depths they poked them
with long sticks.

This incident ended Willi